MacRumors

A bug has been discovered in Apple's macOS Image Capture app that needlessly eats up potentially gigabytes of storage space when transferring photos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac.

Discovered by the developers of media asset management app NeoFinder and shared in a blog post called "Another macOS bug in Image Capture," the issue occurs when Apple's Mac tool converts HEIF photos taken by iOS to more standard JPG files.

This process happens when users uncheck the "Keep Originals" option in Image Capture's settings, which converts the HEIC files to JPG when copied to Mac. However, the app also inexplicably adds 1.5MBs of empty data to every single file in the process.

"Of course, this is a colossal waste of space," said the NeoFinder team, "especially considering that Apple is seriously still selling new Macs with a ridiculously tiny 128 GB internal SSD. Such a small disk is quickly filled with totally wasted empty data.

"With just 1000 photos, for example, this bug eats 1.5 GB off your precious and very expensive SSD disk space."

NeoFinder's developers say they discovered the bug by "pure chance" when working on improving the metadata capabilities of NeoFinder using a hex editor, and provided an example shot of what the end of individual JPG files look like in hex, post-transfer.

MacRumors was also able to replicate the issue in macOS 10.14.6 and later using an online hex editor. It's worth noting that the bug only occurs when transferring photos from Apple devices, not when importing photos from digital cameras using Image Capture.

• What You Need to Know About HEIF in macOS
• How to Batch Convert Images Using macOS Preview

NeoFinder's team says it has notified Apple of the bug, and the developers suggest anyone plagued by the issue can try using a new beta version of the third-party utility Graphic Converter, which includes an option to remove the unwanted empty data from the JPEG files.

Popular writing app Ulysses received its eighteenth major update today, adding some notable new features and bringing full mouse and trackpad support on iPadOS.

As mentioned, version 19 of Ulysses adds native support for Apple's new iPad mouse and trackpad features, which were announced on March 24 as part of iPadOS 13.4.

What that means in practice is that the round cursor changes shape or shifts out the way as it moves across different interactive elements in the Ulysses interface. The cursor will also turn into an "I-beam" over text for the purpose of editing.

Meanwhile, Ulysses users now have the ability to indicate selected texts or notes as "material," or things they've written or collected in the app that aren't meant to be part of a final text.

Thanks to a visual marker, material "sheets," as they’re called in the Ulysses terminology, are easy to recognize. By default, content marked as material is excluded from export and statistics.

In Ulysses 19, the developers have also improved the compatibility of Ulysses keywords in Markdown files. They can now be written out at the end of a text and marked with a hash. This allows Markdown editors such as Bear Notes or iA Writer to interpret them as keywords as well. Conversely, Ulysses will now recognize keywords in Markdown files and make them usable in the app.

Elsewhere on ‌iPad‌ and iPhone, Ulysses 19 adds the ability to embed external folders from locations in the Files app, such as cloud storage providers or Git clients, and edit the contained files with Ulysses. Users also now have the option to export single backups of their text libraries and import them back into Ulysses.

Other additions and improvements in this version include new search filter criteria such as "has goal," "has note attachment" or "is material," a new editor font called SF Mono, improved initial download performance when syncing with Dropbox, and a new toilet paper group icon.

Coinciding with the release of Ulysses 19, the developers are set to open a beta program for Ulysses 20. “We're working on a few awesome new features that need thorough testing, at best with a large number of participants," said Marcus Fehn, Ulysses' creative head of development.

• How to Use a Bluetooth Mouse or Trackpad With Your iPad

Ulysses can be downloaded for free on the App Store and the Mac App Store, with version 19 rolling out to existing users today. After a 14-day trial period, a subscription is required to unlock the app on all devices. A monthly subscription costs $4.99, while a yearly subscription is $39.99.

Students can use Ulysses at a discounted price of $11.99 per six months. The discount is granted from within the app. Ulysses is also included in Setapp, the subscription-based service for Mac applications created by MacPaw.

Westpac has become the last of Australia's big four banks to announce Apple Pay support for its customers. The country's oldest bank revealed on Tuesday that it had enabled the new service, following similar moves by ANZ, the Commonwealth Bank, and National Australia Bank.

"We are pleased to announce that Westpac customers can now use Apple Pay to make fast and secure payments. This comes at an important time for our customers, who are looking for an alternative to cash," Westpac Group chief executive of consumer David Lindberg said.

"We have seen a significant increase in customers using digital banking in recent weeks as more Australians stay at home. With the introduction of Apple Pay, it will now be even easier for customers to pay for goods and services in stores, via apps or online without the need for a card or wallet."

As noted by ZDNet, Westpac actually announced the adoption of ‌Apple Pay‌ across several of its financial services providers back in December, but regular Westpac customers were told they had to wait until June 2020.

Westpac's ‌Apple Pay‌ support includes compatibility with eftpos (electronic funds transfer at point of sale), the local payments scheme and national debit card system accepted across the country. The technology makes it possible for retailers to directly receive funds from a customer’s bank account via their debit card through a secure Australian payment network.

Westpac was one of several banks that collectively tried to negotiate with Apple to gain access to the NFC chip within Apple's devices to allow their own payments services to work on iOS devices alongside ‌Apple Pay‌.

The banks argued that access to the NFC chip in the iPhone would allow them to offer competing wallets, which would lead to increased competition and consumer choice in digital wallets and increased innovation and investment in digital wallets.

However, Apple does not allow third-party access to the NFC chip because of security concerns, and the company put pressure on the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to deny the banks the right to negotiate a deal, which was the eventual outcome.

The banks involved in the dispute resisted implementing ‌Apple Pay‌ throughout the attempts at collective bargaining, although ‌Apple Pay‌ has been available in Australia for quite some time through partnerships with American Express and ANZ.

Deirdre O'Brien, Apple's vice president of retail and people, today told Apple employees that "many more" Apple Stores are set to start reopening in May.

O'Brien made the comments during a weekly video update shared with staff, according to Bloomberg. "We are continuing to analyze this health situation in every location, and I do expect we will reopen up many more stores in May," O'Brien told staff. Apple did not specify which stores would be reopened, or the regions where the stores would reopen first.

In March, Apple's retail chief Deirdre O'Brien said that Apple planned to begin opening some stores worldwide in the first half of April, and one lone store in South Korea was indeed opened again on April 18 for repairs and purchase pickups. No other stores have reopened at this time, and a separate retail source said told MacRumors that Apple is aiming to open stores in North America by mid-June.

When stores start reopening, Apple will take into account local conditions and recommendations. Some states in the U.S. have already begun relaxing their social distancing guidelines and allowing businesses to reopen, while others have extended shelter-in-place orders.

Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee, for example, are letting stay at home orders expire, while the Bay Area, where Apple is located, has extended its shelter-in-place order through the end of May. Apple will need to follow state restrictions and guidelines as stores begin to reopen.

All Apple Stores outside of Greater China (and the reopened South Korea location) have been closed since March 14. Over the course of the last few weeks, retail employees have been returning to work through training and meetings at home, while others have been handling online and phone support technical requests.

Though it is a budget device with a single-lens camera, the iPhone SE features support for Portrait Mode, enabled through the powerful A13 chip in the smartphone.

It is the first of Apple's smartphones to offer Portrait Mode photos created entirely with software techniques rather than hardware, which prompted the developers behind popular iOS camera app Halide to take a deep dive into how it works.

The ‌iPhone‌ SE is equipped the same camera sensor as the ‌iPhone‌ 8, based on a recent teardown done by iFixit, but its camera can do more because it's using "Single Image Monocular Depth Estimation," aka generating Portrait Mode effects using a 2D image.

As Halide developer Ben Sandofsky points out, the ‌iPhone‌ XR is also a single-lens camera with Portrait Mode support, but the ‌iPhone‌ XR gets depth information through hardware. That's not possible on the ‌iPhone‌ SE because the older camera sensor doesn't support the feature.

Halide has discovered that unlike other iPhones, the ‌iPhone‌ SE can take a picture of another picture to attempt to develop a depth map. The app was even able to take a photo of an old slide film, adding depth effects to a 50 year old photo.

The ‌iPhone‌ SE's Portrait Mode is somewhat limited because it only works with people, which is due to the neural network that powers the feature. When a Portrait Mode image without a person is captured, it fails in various ways because it can't create an accurate estimated depth map.

The ‌iPhone‌ XR also limited Portrait Mode to people alone, and using Portrait Mode with other objects requires upgrading to one of Apple's more expensive phones.

According to Halide, depth maps on the ‌iPhone‌ SE (or any phone with Portrait Mode) can be viewed by using the Halide app and then shooting in Depth mode. Halide's full breakdown of the ‌iPhone‌ SE's Portrait Mode can be read over on the Halide website.

Customers who have purchased the new 2020 iPhone SE have found a surprising missing feature - Haptic Touch does not work with notifications.

On the 2020 ‌iPhone‌ SE, long pressing on a notification in the Notification Center or on the Lock screen does not appear to bring up rich notification options to allow ‌iPhone‌ SE users to interact with incoming content.

There have been complaints about the missing feature on Reddit and the MacRumors forums. From Reddit:

I received my SE yesterday and very quickly realized that Haptic Touch is not supported on notifications. I am not seeing this reported anywhere, haven't seen one review mentioning it, no video I watched mentioned it. Haptic Touch works for peek and pop, and on icons on the home screen but if you are on the lock screen or Notification Center and try to long press an email to archive, or a text to quick reply you are out of luck.

On the 6S-XS 3D Touch was the solution, with the XR and 11 series Haptic Touch was the replacement, but this is the first non 3D Touch phone to be released where all the features of Haptic Touch are not fully baked into the OS

With Haptic Touch-enabled devices like the ‌iPhone‌ 11 and 11 Pro, long pressing on a notification in the Notification Center or the Lock screen brings up interactive options based on the app sending the notification. An Apple News notification, for example, brings up options for reading the full story, sharing a story, or saving for later, while an email app might offer options to reply and delete an incoming message without needing to open the app.

In our testing, we were not able to long press on a notification to view these interactive options, as the long press functionality did not work. We also tried on an ‌iPhone‌ 8, which the ‌iPhone‌ SE is based on, but we were able to get the rich notifications to work on that device, which has 3D Touch.

While ‌iPhone‌ SE users cannot long press on notifications on the Lock screen or in the Notification Center, there does appear to be a ‌Haptic Touch‌ option when pressing on an incoming notification when the ‌iPhone‌ is in use.

A Reddit user called Apple Support and was told there was no software update planned to fix the behavior, but Apple Support can be unreliable when it comes to information about new hardware releases.

Update: According to TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino, the lack of ‌Haptic Touch‌ for notifications on the ‌iPhone‌ SE is not a bug and the feature is working as Apple intended.

Update 2: MacRumors forum members have pointed out that it's possible to slide to the left on a notification and tap on the "View" option as a workaround for the missing ‌Haptic Touch‌ feature.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is moving forward with plans to create an app for tracking coronavirus exposure that does not rely on APIs created by Apple and Google, reports the BBC.

Apple and Google's coronavirus tracking solution is decentralized for privacy purposes, while the UK wants a centralized solution. In the UK's version, the app logs data when people are near one another, using a computer server to determine who to send alerts to when a person is diagnosed with coronavirus.

Apple and Google's coronavirus API, by contrast, does not involve a central computer for routine collection of data and determination of contacts. Instead, only when a person has tested positive for coronavirus and consents to having their data uploaded to servers run by Apple and Google does information leave the user's phone. Once the user identifies his or herself as having tested positive, their anonymized identifiers will be added to the list downloaded by all other users, where any previous contact will be determined on-device.

The decentralized approach prevents government entities or malicious people from using server logs to track individuals and identify social interactions, but the NHS argues that a centralized approach will provide more insight into how COVID-19 spreads and it will allow for more control over who receives notifications.

"One of the advantages is that it's easier to audit the system and adapt it more quickly as scientific evidence accumulates," Prof Christophe Fraser, one of the epidemiologists advising NHSX, told the BBC.

"The principal aim is to give notifications to people who are most at risk of having got infected, and not to people who are much lower risk. It's probably easier to do that with a centralised system."

The UK has been pursuing its own tracking solution since before Apple and Google announced plans to build a coronavirus tracking solution that can be utilized by governments and health agencies worldwide.

Both the Apple/Google tracking APIs and the UK's separately developed app use Bluetooth, but without using the Apple/Google API, the NHS's app has to work around Bluetooth privacy limitations that prevent apps from accessing Bluetooth when running in the background.

According to the NHSX (The NHS's digital innovation unit), its engineers have found a way to make the app work "sufficiently well" on iPhones even when the app is not active on the screen. The solution involves waking the app up in the background each time the iPhone detects another device running the same software, with the app then executing code before returning to a dormant state.

This is more battery intensive than Apple's solution, which allows Bluetooth-based communication to happen in the background without an app needing to activate.

Several other countries were also pursuing contact tracing apps that did not use Apple and Google's technology, but have since agreed to adopt the decentralized tracking APIs. Germany, for example, was creating its own app that would use a centralized server design, but Apple refused to support Germany's plan and it saw heavy criticism from scientists. Along with the UK, France is also pursuing a COVID-19 tracking app that uses a centralized server, and has even asked Apple to ease Bluetooth restrictions.

Australia recently released a COVIDSafe app that does not use Apple's APIs, and issues with Bluetooth and Low Power Mode can prevent it from working. The app has to send push notifications to people to remind them to open it every once in a while, and it can cease to work if there are too many other Bluetooth apps running. It also results in more battery drain than normal, and in some situations, such as on public transport, users are instructed to leave the app open and running.

Apple and Google plan to debut their exposure notification APIs in a beta capacity this week, which will allow public health authorities that have begun developing apps to deploy them. Last week, the two companies announced a number of privacy-focused changes to further protect users and prevent location-based tracking.

iFixit has published its full teardown of the new iPhone SE, confirming that the device has many similar or identical components as the iPhone 8, including the display, battery, cameras, Taptic Engine, SIM tray, and more.

The new iPhone SE appears to have the same 12-megapixel rear camera sensor as the iPhone 8, with the benefit of the A13 chip's improved image signal processor, as Rene Ritchie mentioned earlier this month. iFixit also found that the front-facing camera sensor on the new iPhone SE and the iPhone 8 are interchangeable.

While the new iPhone SE and the iPhone 8 have virtually identical display assemblies, Apple has removed the 3D Touch module from the iPhone SE. iFixit even tested the new iPhone SE with an iPhone 8 display and found that 3D Touch still did not work, suggesting that the feature is disabled at the software level on the device.

The teardown also confirms reports that the new iPhone SE has a 1,821 mAh battery capacity, identical to the iPhone 8.

The new iPhone SE has been available to order on Apple.com since April 17 and began arriving to customers on April 24. Pricing starts at $399 for 64GB of storage, with 128GB and 256GB options available for $449 and $549 respectively.

Apple plans to launch its iPhone 12 lineup this year, but mass production of the devices will be delayed by around a month due to the global health crisis, according to The Wall Street Journal. The report claims that Apple is also slashing the number of iPhones that it plans to make in the second half of this year by as much as 20 percent.

Apple typically unveils new high-end iPhones in September. While a one month delay to production does not sound significant enough to impact that timeframe, rumors suggest that at least one model might not be available to order until October or November.

Apple is planning four 5G-enabled iPhones, including one 5.4-inch model, two 6.1-inch models, and one 6.7-inch model, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and other sources. All four models are expected to feature OLED displays, flatter edges like recent iPad Pro models, and a smaller notch. High-end models are also expected to feature a LiDAR sensor.

Economic Daily News on Monday revived rumors that this year's 5G iPhone will feature under-display fingerprint scanner technology.

According to a machine translation of EDN's Chinese-language report, touch panel maker GIS, OLED display maker BOE and Qualcomm are collaborating on the ultrasonic technology, which could feature in at least one of the high-end models in Apple's ‌5G iPhone‌ lineup.

EDN was a source of rumors last year that one of Apple's 2020 iPhones could have an under-display ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. Those reports claimed that Apple would use Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint sensor technology in at least one iPhone model set to be released in 2020, although the timeframe could be pushed back to 2021.

Those rumors also lined up with reports last year from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Barclays analysts, Bloomberg, and others who said they expect Apple to release an ‌iPhone‌ with both Face ID and under-display fingerprint authentication in 2020 or 2021.

However, rumors and leaks this year have not indicated that the technology will feature in 2020, and well-connected Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman recently said he does not expect under-screen fingerprint technology in an ‌iPhone‌ this year, suggesting Apple may have decided to push back the technology to 2021. The only other recent mention of fingerprint technology was by an anonymous Twitter account with a fairly accurate track record that said Apple is developing a new iPad Air with under-the-screen Touch ID.

There are currently two types of under-display fingerprint sensors, including optical and ultrasonic. Optical variants rely on light from a smartphone's display to create a 2D image of a fingerprint, while ultrasonic variants make use of high-frequency sound to generate a 3D image of a fingerprint.

Qualcomm already supplies ultrasonic fingerprint sensors for some Samsung smartphones, but future iPhones could potentially use an even more advanced version of the technology that works across the entire display.

Apple is expected to offer four iPhones in three different sizes this year: A 5.4-inch ‌‌‌iPhone‌‌‌, a 6.7-inch ‌‌‌iPhone‌‌‌, and two 6.1-inch iPhones. One 6.1-inch model and the 6.7-inch model will be higher-end iPhones, while the other 6.1-inch ‌‌‌iPhone‌‌‌ and the 5.4-inch ‌‌‌iPhone‌‌‌ will be lower-end models and successors to the ‌‌iPhone‌ 11‌. Apple is expected to launch the new models in the fall.

Germany said on Sunday it will use Apple and Google's decentralized contact tracing API, reversing course on its original intention to use its own solution to track the spread of coronavirus.

Last week, the German government said it would use its own home-grown technology for smartphone-based tracing of infections, based on a design that would hold personal data on a central server.

According to Reuters, however, Apple refused to support Germany's original solution, which came in for heavy criticism from scientists, not just for its mass surveillance style but because of issues with the system's methodology.

Germany as recently as Friday backed a centralised standard called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), which would have needed Apple in particular to change the settings on its iPhones.

When Apple refused to budge there was no alternative but to change course, said a senior government source.

In their joint statement, Chancellery Minister Helge Braun and Health Minister Jens Spahn said Germany would now adopt a "strongly decentralised" approach.

Apple and Google on Friday disclosed a series of changes to their upcoming COVID-19 contact tracing initiative, with a focus on even stronger privacy protections and accuracy.

Apple and Google are now referring to "contact tracing" as "exposure notification," a secure system that is intended to notify a person of potential exposure, augmenting broader contact tracing efforts that public health authorities are undertaking.

Other countries that have been at odds with Apple and Google's initiative include France and the United Kingdom, both of which intend to use government-designed apps for contact tracing.

France has gone so far as to ask Apple to remove a Bluetooth limitation in iOS so that its app can work on iPhones, but the limitation is an intentional security feature and Apple is unlikely to compromise its software, especially as it is developing its own solution.

Apple and Google are targeting this week for the release of the seed version of iOS and Android operating system updates, which will support these APIs to enable testing by public health authority developers. The software update will support iOS devices released in the last four years, dating back to the iPhone 6s and ‌iPhone‌ 6s Plus.

Apple and Google revealed plans for its exposure notification initiative on April 10. The joint effort will use Bluetooth to alert users when they have potentially come in close contact with someone who later tests positive for COVID-19, on an opt-in basis.