Month: May 2024

Apple TV+’s animated adventure series ‘WondLa’ premieres June 28th, 2024

Apple Inc May 4, 2024 0

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="660"] Via: Apple TV+[/caption]

Last Tuesday, Apple TV+ announced the premiere date for first installment of its highly anticipated animated adventure trilogy “WondLa,” hailing from Skydance Animation and based on the bestselling book series “The Search for WondLa” by Tony DiTerlizzi.

Showrun and executive produced by Bobs Gannaway and featuring a star-studded voice cast, the seven-episode first season of “WondLa” will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on Friday, June 28th.

“WondLa” centers around Eva, voiced by Jeanine Mason (“Roswell, New Mexico”), a curious, enthusiastic and spirited teenager being raised in a state-of-the-art underground bunker by Muthr, a robot caretaker, voiced by Emmy Award nominee Teri Hatcher (“Desperate Housewives”). On her 16th birthday, an attack on Eva’s bunker forces her onto the Earth’s surface, which is now inhabited by aliens and covered with otherworldly fauna, and there are no other humans to be found. In fact, it’s no longer called Earth, but Orbona. Otto, a lovable giant waterbear with whom Eva shares telepathic powers, voiced by Emmy Award winner Brad Garrett (“Everybody Loves Raymond”), and Rovender, a cantankerous alien with a troubled past, voiced by Gary Anthony Williams (“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows”), join Eva as she leads the team on a dangerous quest to find humans, her home and her true destiny.

Also lending their voices to the cast are Chiké Okonkwo (“The Birth of a Nation,” “La Brea”) as Besteel, the greatest hunter in all of Orbona; D.C. Douglas (“Sharknado 2: The Second One,” “Black Ops”) as Omnipod, Dynasty Corporation’s sentient hand-held device, issued to every human at the age of six; and Emmy Award nominee Alan Tudyk (“Resident Alien”) as Cadmus Pryde, founder of Dynastes Corporation.

The epic trilogy premieres with an adventure-packed seven-episode season and is executive produced by DiTerlizzi and Gannaway alongside Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Jeremy Bell, Julie Kane-Ritsch, and Skydance Animation’s John Lasseter, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg. The series is also produced by Tony Cosanella.

Apple and Skydance Animation previously partnered to release the Apple Original Films animated feature film “Luck.” The award-winning slate of original series and films for kids and families on Apple TV+ also includes the celebrated live-action animated hybrid special, “The Velveteen Rabbit”; the Academy Award and BAFTA Award-winning animated short film “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”; and BAFTA Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated animated film “Wolfwalkers.”

Apple TV+’s all-age offerings now streaming globally on Apple TV+ include the BAFTA Award and Humanitas Prize-winning “El Deafo,” BAFTA Award-winning “Lovely Little Farm,” “Duck & Goose,” “Get Rolling With Otis,” Spin Master Entertainment’s “Sago Mini Friends,” GLAAD Media Award-nominated “Pinecone & Pony,” “Frog and Toad,” The Jim Henson Company’s Emmy Award-winning “Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock,” “Harriet the Spy” and “Slumberkins,” Sesame Workshop’s “Helpsters,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt, HITRECORD and Bento Box Entertainment’s “Wolfboy and the Everything Factory,” Jack McBrayer and Angela C. Santomero’s Emmy Award-nominated “Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show,” Peanuts and WildBrain’s Emmy Award-nominated “Snoopy in Space,” “The Snoopy Show,” Scholastic’s “Eva the Owlet” and Peabody and Emmy Award-winning series “Stillwater.” Live-action offerings include Bonnie Hunt’s DGA and WGA Award-nominated “Amber Brown,” DGA Award-winning “Best Foot Forward,” “Surfside Girls,” WGA Award-winning “Life by Ella,” Sesame Workshop and Sinking Ship’s Emmy Award-winning “Ghostwriter,” Emmy Award and Environmental Media Association Award winning “Jane,” and Scholastic’s “Puppy Place.”

Also included are “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” the Emmy Award-winning television event based on the New York Times bestselling book and TIME Best Book of the Year by Oliver Jeffers, and specials from Peanuts and WildBrain including Emmy Award-nominated “Snoopy Presents: It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown,” “Snoopy Presents: Lucy’s School,” Humanitas and Emmy Award-nominated “Snoopy Presents: To Mom (and Dad), With Love,” “Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie,” “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,” Emmy Award-winning “Snoopy Presents: Who Are You, Charlie Brown?” and “Snoopy Presents: For Auld Lang Syne.”

Apple TV+ offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 488 wins and 2,143 award nominations and counting, including multi-Emmy Award-winning comedy “Ted Lasso” and historic Oscar Best Picture winner “CODA.”

Apple buys itself some time as it scrambles to catch up in AI

CompuScoop Staff May 3, 2024 1

Apple’s board of directors on Thursday announced the authorization of an additional program to buyback up to $110 billion of the company’s common stock. The stock price surged in pre-market trading.

It is the largest boost ever since the world’s second-most-valuable public company first began repurchasing its stock a little over a decade ago. That, along with a 4% lift to its dividend, accompanied a less-than-impressive report for the company’s fiscal second quarter, during which Apple saw its biggest year-over-year decline in iPhone revenue in nearly four years…

[A] lot is riding on the next iPhone cycle. And that device also could mark Apple’s entry into the race over generative artificial intelligence that has consumed its big tech peers. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Google-parent Alphabet have been launching gen AI-based services and pouring billions more into capital expenditures to build up the networks to support them. The revenue generated by those services is still relatively small, but the payoff from investors has been significant. Those four stocks have averaged a gain of 63% over the past 12 months. Apple’s shares have risen less than 3% in that time.

A product event next week is expected to feature new iPads, and the company already seems to have high hopes for that line. Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said Thursday that iPad revenue is expected to grow by double digits in the current quarter following five straight periods of declines. And AI-focused announcements at next month’s conference could still cheer investors, especially given the stock’s recently weakened valuation.

Via: The Wall Street Journal

How to Check an Apple Pencil’s Battery Percentage

Dan Uff May 3, 2024 1

The Apple Pencil is a great tool for artists and users who just need to write something down on an iPad. But it would also be helpful to know how much battery it has left.

You can quickly find that out by adding a battery percentage widget to the iPad's Home Screen.

Here's how:

Unlock your iPad.
Decide where you'd like the widget to appear.
Tap and hold on an empty space until you see the app icons wiggling.
On the top-left corner of the screen, tap the "+" icon.
This will pop open a list of available widgets.
Scroll down until you see the "Batteries" widget.
Tap on it and select any one of the three styles.
Once you've made your selection, tap on "Add Widget."
The widget appears on the Home Screen.
That's it.

Microsoft is changing the way you login to your account

CompuScoop Staff May 2, 2024 2

As passwords slowly go extinct, Microsoft is introducing another way to log in to your consumer account.

The company said Thursday that users logging in to Microsoft 365 workplace software, Copilot, Xbox and Skype can now use “passkeys” rather than traditional passwords or an authenticator app. That means whatever biometric authentication (such as a thumbprint or face ID) you use to open your phone or computer will be all you need to access your Microsoft account. Passkeys are available on desktop and mobile browsers starting Thursday, with support for mobile apps in the coming weeks, the company said.

Cybersecurity professionals and organizations such as the FIDO Alliance, an industry group that includes Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, have been pushing consumer tech companies to retire “shared secret” passwords for the past decade. These passwords aren’t so secret — because people have so many to remember, they constantly lose or forget passwords, which leads to lost time and money for consumers and companies alike. Hackers, meanwhile, steal passwords in data breaches. Last year there were more than 3,000 breaches in the United States alone, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Microsoft says its identity systems detect around 4,000 password attacks each second.

Passkeys, on the other hand, can’t be stolen or forgotten. They’re strings of letters and numbers that are unique to your account, stored on your device or in a safe cloud environment. You don’t need to memorize them — they’ll automatically unlock your accounts when you go to log in.

Microsoft has been working on passkeys since FIDO introduced the technology two years ago, said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft security. The company wanted to wait to release passkeys until they could function across consumer accounts, Jakkal added.

Many sites have adopted passkeys, including Uber, TikTok, Amazon, PayPal and Nintendo. Here’s how to set them up for your Microsoft accounts.

To learn how to setup a passkey, click here.