Dennis Sellers

<p>If you’re thinking of implementing a smart home set-up, the $79.95 <a target="_blank" href="http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-white-sk-a19" rel="noopener noreferrer">Philips Hue White E 26 Starter Kit</a> is a good place to start, though there are some glitches to be worked out.</p>

<p>The announcement of the Home app — which is coming in iOS 10 — is a positive step forward for Apple, because there’s finally a central app to manage the IoT devices comprising the HomeKit ecosystem, according to Blake Kozak, principal analyst, smart home, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ihs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">IHS Technology</a>. (HomeKit is a framework that allows control of compatible home automation devices through iOS and Siri.)</p>

<p>There are still rumors that Apple plans to end music purchasing a la iTunes and go with streaming only a la Apple Music. However, in a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/7407889/apples-brain-trust-iovine-reznor-cue-and-kondrk-on" rel="noopener noreferrer">Billboard interview</a>, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, says there’s no “end date” for music sales and the “music iTunes business is doing very well.”</p>

<p>On a regular basis, <em>Apple World Today</em> posts a list of notable new apps or app updates that have been released. They may not necessarily be new, but they're popular and deserve mention. Here are today's picks.</p>

<p>Good news for the Apple Watch: while activity tracker sales continue unabated, the smartwatch is becoming increasingly popular with consumers looking to monitor more advanced activities, according to The NPD Group Connected Intelligence <em>Activity Trackers and Sports Report</em>.</p>

<p>ExoLens is shipping ExoLens with Optics by ZEISS. Together they’ve developed the first aspherical lenses for mobile photographers “that will forever raise the standard of mobile photography and videography,” according to John Fellowes, CEO of Fellowes Brands, which owns ExoLens. It's a series of three lenses (wide angle, telephoto, and macro).</p>

<p>Parallels has announced that June 14-21 it will celebrate 10 years of innovations and industry firsts in Parallels Desktop for Mac. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/" rel="noopener noreferrer">The online celebration</a> will highlight a decade of features that allow you to run any application – on Windows XP, 7, 8 and 10, Chrome, Linux and Android – on a Mac.</p>

<p>August Home, Inc, a provider of smart locks and smart home access products and services, has announced that its <a target="_blank" href="http://august.com/products/august-doorbell/" rel="noopener noreferrer">August Doorbell Cam</a> will support Apple HomeKit via the new Home app in iOS 10. </p>

<p>Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product, so here are today’s patent highlights: </p>

<p>Apple has announced its <a href="https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/">2016 Apple Design Awards</a> for this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The awards honor the most innovative macOS and iOS apps as well as the best and most creative uses of Apple's products — at least as determined by Apple.</p>

<p>At this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced a set of new authentication APIs [application programming interfaces] in iOS and tvOS that enable Single Sign On (SSO) for TV Everywhere (TVE) on Apple devices. </p>

<p>I am very pleased with what I saw in the macOS portion of the WWDC keynote. However, I would have liked to have seen a macOS version of the News app that’s available on iOS devices.</p>

<p>While I’m a huge fan of extreme case protection for the iPhone (my current favorite is the Griffin Survivor), one of the problems is that this extra protection frequently prevents my Apple smartphone from fitting into various docking solutions and cable connectors.  </p>

<p>Here are some final news nuggets from the two-hour keynote that kicked off Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developer Conference:</p>

<p>Apple, which has traditionally kept its artificial intelligence research under wraps, is now allowing developers to build neural networks by <a href="https://developer.apple.com/reference/accelerate/1912851-bnns#overview">calling on the company's simple API</a> [application programming interface]. Such networks, which attempt to imitate the way a human brain works, are particularly particularly effective for predicting events when they have a large database of prior examples to draw on. </p>