Dennis Sellers

<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>

<p>Apple is apparently killing Game Center as of iOS 10. Its not available in the first iOS 10 beta and isn’t available at the Apple App Store (although, interestingly, it’s still mentioned in the Settings app of the iOS 10 beta and <a target="_blank" href="https://developer.apple.com/game-center/" rel="noopener noreferrer">in developer notes</a>).</p>

<p>Apple will include a new file system — the "Apple File System" (APFS) — with the debut of macOS Sierra. The developer documentation describes it as a “new, modern file system for iOS, OS X, tvOS and watchOS.”</p>

<p>At today’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple previewed watchOS 3, promising “significantly” improved performance with the ability to launch favorite apps instantly, enhanced navigation like the new Dock and all-new fitness and health capabilities for Apple Watch. </p>

<p>As expected, Mac OS X has been renamed macOS and has added Siri support. At the Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple previewed macOS Sierra, a major update to the desktop operating system. </p>