Great list over at Wired showing off some of the improvements coming forward in iOS 12. 

Great article by Sam Byford, with some surprising insights from Vertu creative director Ignacio Germade. Comparing the Apple Watch Edition to luxury travel starts to paint the product in a light which makes more sense.

People fly first-class because of the luxury experience of how it feels to be in first-class. People will buy the Apple Watch Edition for these same reasons.

This is incredible technology. BBC News:

The maglev trains are even faster than Japan's famous bullet trains, which currently travel at about 320km/h (200mph).

The nose of the old bullet trains had to be redesigned to stop sonic booms happening when they exited tunnels. Imagine the design challenges when designing an even faster >300mph train.

Not sure which iPhone 6 to buy? Me neither — although printing this PDF out and holding the cardboard devices in my hand really gave me a feel of the sizes. 

It’s a handy little app:

The ideal Receiptmate user would be an individual just starting out in the paperless world and looking to track expenditures for personal reasons — if your employer requires you to submit expense reports in specific formats or enter receipts into an invoice management system, Receiptmate may not meet your needs. However, for those of us who are just looking to do something with our receipts rather than throwing them out or letting them pile up, Receiptmate's simplicity and focus are compelling.

Enchanting.

I wrote a review of the new relaxation iPhone app Thunderspace for TidBITS. I highly suggest checking this one out, it’s great.

Feature phone sales dropped by over 20%. This is a trend I can’t see reversing, at least for the West.

My favourite part about this beautifully designed website/infographic is the timer at the top of the page, but the most impressive number here has to be the number of YouTube views per second to Google searches. I wouldn’t have expected that.

Then there’s this:

10 years ago Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and Instagram didn't exist.

From an interview by Brad Stone for Bloomberg Businessweek:

One of Google’s convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems?

Gates:

When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.

The iOS version of Downcast is one of my most-used iPhone apps. Now there’s a companion Mac app, I’ll be listening to even more podcasts.

Josh Centers has a great review of the app over at TidBITS, if you’d like to find out more.

My thoughts? If you’re starting with nothing and want to get into the world of podcasting apps, try Instacast. If you’re a Downcast user — like me — and don’t want to migrate between apps, the Mac app is a nice addition, although there are some bugs in the 1.0 release (iCloud playlist syncing isn’t working quite right for me).

Jeffrey Grubb reports for VentureBeat:

The mobile-based future is here, and publisher Electronic Arts is reaping the rewards. EA reported today that it made more money through Apple’s App Store than any other retail distributor. That includes its own Origin digital-download service.

When the consoles die, what comes next? Mobile. Some of the numbers are very impressive:

Real Racing 3 also continues to generate revenue for the publisher. The racing game reached 45 million downloads and averages around 2 million daily active users.

That’s a lot of racers. EA’s chief operating officer Peter Moore comments on the strength of Apple’s App Store:

“Apple was EA’s biggest retail partner as measured by sales. That is a first.”

A first indeed.