Apple publishes annual Environmental Progress Report — In 2015, 93% of Apple’s energy came from renewable sources. In Singapore, the company is powering its facilities with a 32-megawatt solar project spread over 800 rooftops. In China, they’re adding 170 megawatts of solar to begin offsetting the energy used to make products. And Apple’s data centers around the world run on 100% clean energy and power billions of iMessages, answers from Siri, and song downloads from iTunes. You can read the report here.
Imagining Apple Car: how hardcore car enthusiasts see Apple’s rumored automobile — Motor Trend just doodled on the proverbial cocktail napkin, and its Apple Car vision is simultaneously sublime and disturbing.
A reminder to download the free MyApple Magazine and app — It may have missed your attention the other day, but there’s a new issue of MyApple Magazine (1/2016) available for your reading pleasure, and of course, it’s free!
Chrominator is useful for sprucing up logos, text in Final Cut Pro X — If you’re a Final Cut Pro X user, Noise Industries’ US$49 Tokyo Chrominator is a useful tool for adding production value to logos and text. You can take any graphic shape or FCP X title and quickly give it a glossy 3D bevelled look complete with animated lighting.
Apple’s Swift programming language grew swiftly in 2015 — Swift, Apple’s programming language, grew swiftly in 2015, according Freelancer.com’s Fast 50 report.
The data comes from 1,429,842 projects “filtered for spam, advertising, self promotion, reposts, or that are otherwise unlikely to be filled,” the published report says. Swift-related jobs grew 566% year-over-year as more developers took notice of the newly open-sourced programming language, according to the report (via Apple World Today).
Test your router’s ability to handle full speeds and avoid buffer bloat — Your router’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings and avoiding a scenario where everything else on your network slows down when one device is using up all of your bandwidth, a condition known as Buffer Bloat. One way to test that is to do a speed test while simultaneously watching a series of pings from the Terminal. Another is to simply use DSLReports’ speed test which does all of this for you.
Using EtreCheck to diagnose Mac problems — If you’ve got a misbehaving Mac, an incredibly awesome tool to have in your arsenal is a program called EtreCheck. It’s free, though Etresoft is currently asking for donations to help improve El Capitan compatibility.
The complete guide to using iTunes with lossless audio — While you might not notice the difference in sound quality [I never do], the lossless format leaves you with an archival file you can convert at any time in the future. You’ll never need to rip those CDs again.
Mac NZ 