Early Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a Tweet revealing the official name of the first Apple Campus to be ready for employees to move in sometime during the month of April.
Cook also revealed that the circler theater will also be named after Steve Jobs.
A company called HeathTap, a company that lets end users contact a board certified doctor from the comfort of their iPhone or iPad, has announced (via Fox Business) a new service that'll let someone who has an Alexa device obtain medical advice from their vast network of doctors and other related medical fields.
Users of HealthTap will be able to use the app via the command "Alexa, talk to Dr. A.I." Alexa will then walk the user through a series of questions designed to simulate a doctor's visit, and provide medical insights along the way. Doctor A.I. was first introduced in 2013, and is currently supported by both iOS and Android devices.
What makes Dr. A.I. effective is its ability to combine both context and clinical expertise from its network of more than 105,000Â doctors.
The team behind the app wants to bring it to an audience that is probably much more in need of it than regular smartphone users. By integrating with Alexa, the Amazon Echo's voice assistant software, the app can now be used by people with limited mobility, such as the elderly and the disabled.
"We'd been doing text and video before, then expanded into voice and that's exciting in healthcare because we serve many populations that are older, disabled, or frail," says Ron Gutman, founder and CEO of HealthTap.
Gutman adds that the partnership will fulfill a need for "people who have difficulty using their hands or whose eyesight is not that great." The HealthTap app will have an A.I. doctor on hand that will ask questions in natural language using an "intuitive conversational user interface."
The A.I. will analyze the profile of the patient, including their current medical conditions and existing medications. Next, the A.I. will converse with the patient and direct him or her to effective solutions based on a vast repository of medical knowledge. The A.I.'s response will also be based on what other doctors have previously recommended in similar situations.
In the event that the A.I. determines that the situation warrants medical care, it can connect the patient to a doctor for a live consult, or schedule either an in-person appointment with a specialist, or a more urgent visit to the emergency room.
The addition of Alexa functionality to HealthTap's services is certainly great news for people who have limited mobility and want basic medical advice. By using their own voice, they will be able to determine what's wrong with them and seek medical help if needed.
Rumor has it that the next major update of the iPhone will have facial recognition technology.
To further fan those rumors, it is being reported that Apple has acquired a company called RealFace which specializes in said technology.
The company, formed in 2014, appears to have been purchased for $2 million, or several million dollars, according to the Times of Israel or Calcalist respectively. The company previously developed an app to mathematically determine the user's best photos using its in-house facial recognition software.
The RealFace software provides "frictionless face recognition" directly on a relatively low-powered device like an iPhone. According to the company, it aims to "offer customers a smart biometric log-in solution" for mobile deployment.
The company had previously garnered $1 million in start-up funds, and employs somewhere between 5 and 10 people. The RealFace website is down, either by demand or intentional removal by the company or Apple is not yet known.
Recent rumors have claimed that the "iPhone 8" and possible other 2017 iPhone models will come equipped with a practical face scanning utility powered by a laser 3d scanner, not aimed at augmented reality application, at least to start.
The technology has more use than facial recognition. An API release could open up other uses like ultimate use in augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, clothing sizing, accurate distance measurements for home improvement, scanning for 3D printing, appliance and HomeKit integration, and other applications needing precise volumetric scans, or range-finding.
(MacRumors.com): A number of Mac apps failed to launch for users over the weekend because of a change to the way Apple certifies apps that have not been bought directly from the Mac App Store.
Several users of apps including Soulver and PDFPen who had downloaded the apps from the developers' websites all reported immediate crashes on launch. Developers of the apps quickly apologized and said that the issue was down to the apps' code signing certificates reaching their expiration date.
Apple issues developer signing certificates to assure users that an app they have downloaded outside of the Mac App Store is legitimate, comes from a known source, and hasn't been modified since it was last signed. In the past, the expiration of a code signing certificate had no effect on already shipped software, but that changed last year, when Apple began requiring apps to carry something called a provisioning profile.
A provisioning profile tells macOS that the app has been checked by Apple against an online database and is allowed to perform certain system actions or "entitlements". However, the profile is also signed using the developer's code signing certificate, and when the certificate expires, the provisioning profile becomes invalid.
Victims of expired provisioning profiles over the weekend included users of 1Password for Mac who had bought the app from the developer's website. AgileBits explained on Sunday that affected users would need to manually update to the latest version (6.5.5), noting that those who downloaded 1Password from the Mac App Store were unaffected. The developers' surprise was explained in a blog post:
We knew our developer certificate was going to expire on Saturday, but thought nothing of it because we believed those were only necessary when publishing a new version. Apparently that's not the case. In reality it had the unexpected side effect of causing macOS to refuse to launch 1Password properly.
Currently, the common factor among affected apps appears to be those that were issued iCloud entitlements as part of their provisioning profile. Smile, developers of PDFpen and PDFpenPro, told TidBITS that users would need to manually download the latest updates to the apps to fix the problem.
Acqualia, developers of number-crunching app Soulver, also apologized for the problem and asked affected users to download an update to fix the issue.
As the above suggests, the immediate solution for developers with potentially affected apps is to renew their code signing certificates before they expire. AgileBits said the incident had given them "a new understanding of the importance of expiring provisioning profiles and certificates" and would be renewing its current certificate, due to expire in 2022, "far before then".
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