This dreaded moment has happened to everyone. You walk out of a store and panic seizes you. “Where did I park my car?” you ask. You’re then subjected to the wander of shame through the parking lot as you desperately try to locate your vehicle.
But thanks to two new Apple patents, this all-too-familar struggle might become a thing of the past. The patents detail how your phone can be used to help you find your car, even if you don’t have good reception. And no, it doesn’t use GPS, either.
With the launch of a health app and data-sharing platform, Apple is betting that tracking your vital signs via smartphone is about to become a booming industry.
The number of apps available for health tracking has grown in the past few years, although adoption of these apps has not grown significantly. Clinicians are, however, starting to explore the benefits of using such apps to keep track of patients’ health indicators and offer advice. If this strategy proves helpful and both doctors and patients are comfortable sharing data, mobile health tracking could indeed become big enough to produce significant revenue for companies like Apple.
A new report today cites “industry sources” saying that Apple is working on a health wearable that it will release next October.
The story, from Nikkei Asian Review, says the new watch-like wearable will run on iOS 8, and will be equipped with a centralized function to manage users’ biometric information via smartphones.
VentureBeat’s own source confirms the story, saying that the new device will likely use a curved organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touchscreen. Our source says the display design is “sleek” and “aerodynamic”, and bests the design of Samsung’s most recent health wearable, the Gear Fit.
Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an image flashed up on the screen behind VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. It was a screen shot from Apple’s new Health app (or a mockup thereof), showing a user’s blood glucose level.
Apple may not have wowed consumers with the latest software offerings at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this year. But it unveiled something that could have a much bigger impact than a new version of its iOS mobile software or even a new iPhone: a new programming language.
Called Swift, it’s meant to offer a faster, easier way to build software for Apple’s products than its existing programming language, Objective-C. And so far, developers like what they see, saying it will be especially helpful for inexperienced coders who may have shied away from developing iPhone apps in the past.
Foxconn’s six manufacturing sites in Vietnam won’t be assembling iPhones and iPads this weekend — or anything else, for that matter.
The Taiwan-based electronics supplier, which manufactures gadgets for Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, and others, is suspending operations in Vietnam for at least three days due to violent anti-China protests, reports the Financial Times.
China’s contentious oil drilling near the Paracel Islands spurred the protests in Vietnam. China controls the chain of islands in the South China Sea, but Vietnam and Taiwan have also claimed them as their own.
Apple’s enormous growth over the past decade is due in large part to the company’s tight monitoring of its global supply chain and a tenacious drive to produce cutting-edge products and content. But could these keys to success also inhibit the company’s evolution?
The iWatch could be a far more advanced health tracker than previously thought.
We’ve been hearing that Apple was developing a health tracking app, dubbed Healthbook, and making health a big focus of its rumored iWatch for months now. But new details on Healthbook published this morning by 9to5Mac give us a much clearer idea of what Apple’s smartwatch could actually offer.
