filtered

for control

Tim Cook drops the biggest “but” to the Irish Independent when asked about their electric car plans.

“I don’t have anything to announce about our plans,” he says. “But I think there’s some significant changes in the automobile industry over the next several years with electrification and autonomous driving. And there’s a need for a focus on user interface. And so I think there’s a lot of changes that will go on there.”

Instagram sunsets part of its API, somehow without using a 2x2 grid.

“Today we are announcing several platform changes to improve people’s control over their content and set up a more sustainable environment built around authentic experiences on the platform.”

Authentic is the new consistent.

Google is now searching app content and streaming slices of app experiences to Android. This feels like a very big deal to me, and is something I’ve been mildly obsessed about for the past couple of years. This piece of the story blew my mind, even if it is essentially VNC for Android:

“The app loads in a virtual machine on Google’s cloud platform, and the client — the Google app that runs on your phone — sends up the touch interactions to the cloud machine. And that cloud machine executes those touch interactions, renders the app and sends the pixels back down to the client.”

Question: are they also doing the indexing via virtualization? Have to imagine that’s the case: it’s a bounded space of apps, so why not run all of them in the cloud and point the GoogleBot at them?