Apple

It’s an exciting day for animators and art geeks. The iPadOS-exclusive Procreate illustration app has made some serious waves in the creative community since its 2011 release, so expectations are high for the company’s new animation app.

Procreate Dreams is available now on iPad for $19.99 via the app store. Artist Nikolai Lockertsen has some great demos on YouTube to showcase what it’s capable of.

Sure, Apple, your holiday short film / ad was shot on iPhone and even edited on a MacBook Air. But I watched the behind-the-scenes video closely, and nowhere in there did it show the unending patience you’d need to shoot and stitch together all of the frames to make something that looks this impressive.

Just like a power adapter, you won’t find that in the box with a new phone, but fans of stop-motion animation will be glad someone did.

There are riches at the bottom of this TidBits story — a list of shortcuts that use the Fn key instead of command, option, or control. Some are easier than Apple’s listed alternatives (like using Fn-F versus the hand-contorting Control-Command-F to enter fullscreen.)

This delights me, a person who rages when using any interface that doesn’t support tabbing between text input fields.

Is it the end of the green bubble? Who knows! Probably not. Did Nothing make this happen? LOL, no. We dug into all things RCS and the future of messaging, before talking about Bing, the Windows app, wearable graphs, and whatever the Playstation Portal is. At the end of the day, we’re all just bubbles, you know what I mean?

The EU Court of Justice confirmed that Apple has joined Meta and ByteDance in appealing its designation under the tough new rules. The European Commission labeled three of Apple’s products as “core platform services” in September.

It’s not been officially confirmed which of these Apple is contesting, but last week, Bloomberg reported that its filings would concern the App Store and iMessage.

Apple will support RCS on iPhones in 2024, and the company confirmed to 9to5Mac on Thursday that RCS messages will show up as green bubbles.

Hopefully the huge benefits of RCS over SMS make the blue bubble vs. green bubble debate less of a thing, though.

Following an in-depth report from the Wall Street Journal in September, this update from Bloomberg may further explain why Apple recently extended its deal for Qualcomm modems.

It says Apple already delayed a plan to have the chips ready next year, and now they might not launch in new iPhones until the end of 2025 or in 2026. Issues mentioned include rewriting software it acquired from Intel (one person quoted anonymously said, “Why we thought we could take a failed project from Intel and somehow succeed is a mystery,” and avoiding infringing on Qualcomm’s patents.

Today is the deadline for Apple to argue to EU regulators that iMessage shouldn’t be designated as a core platform service.

It’s therefore extremely likely it revealed the iPhone will support RCS to please regulators, and not as a response to Nothing’s blue-bubble-on-Android news from yesterday. That’s not stopping CEO Carl Pei from taking a victory lap, earned or unearned. Never change, Carl.

According to Bloomberg, he was seated at Xi’s lengthy table alongside the CEOs of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Visa, and quite a few others. Xi hosted the dinner in San Francisco after meeting with President Biden earlier in the day.