Former Apple engineer David Shayer joins us again this week to share Apple’s approach to privacy, contrast it to another tech company, and explain why he trusts the COVID-19 exposure notification proposal from Apple and Google. If you’ve ever wanted to display your Apple TV on your Mac’s screen, Josh Centers tells you how to do it, along with what won’t work. In conference news, Apple announced that WWDC will start—virtually—on June 22nd, and a free prequel to the ACES Conference has expanded to serve small business owners beyond IT consultants. Finally, if you’d like a trip down memory lane, TidBITS publisher Adam Engst made the rounds of numerous podcasts recently to celebrate the 30th anniversary of TidBITS—listen in for great stories from the early days of the Mac. Notable Mac app releases this week include HandBrake 1.3.2, Retrospect 17.0.1, Bookends 13.4.1, Piezo 1.6.5, 1Password 7.5, and PopChar X 8.10.
Apple’s virtual WWDC will kick off on 22 June 2020. We should be glad that Apple is even attempting to pull it off, given the cancellation of other major tech conferences.
If you’re a small business owner—in any industry—check out ACES Conference: The Prequel, a free virtual event aimed at helping small businesses survive COVID-19. It takes place on May 19th and 20th.
A number of podcasts helped us celebrate the 30th anniversary of TidBITS by inviting publisher Adam Engst on as a guest, and the resulting conversations are well worth listening to if you enjoy reminiscing about the early days of the Macintosh world.
Need to display your Apple TV on your Mac for screenshots or a presentation? It’s easy and the necessary software is included with macOS.
David Shayer, who has worked as a software engineer at Apple and other companies, explains Apple’s internal approach to privacy and contrasts it with other companies, all with an eye toward showing why we should trust the current draft of the COVID-19 exposure notification proposal from Apple and Google.
Watchlist
Brings improvements and bug fixes to the open-source video conversion program. (Free, 20.2 MB)
Improves Disaster Recovery support for macOS 10.15 Catalina and 10.14 Mojave and fixes bugs. ($49 for Solo and $119 for Desktop new, free update, upgrade pricing available, 151 MB)
Maintenance update to the reference management tool. ($59.99 new, free update, 71.1 MB)
Updates the Audio Capture Engine and adds support for Facebook's Messenger app and Cisco's Webex and Webex Teams apps as VoIP audio sources. ($19 new, free update, 9.8 MB)
Enables you to share links to items with other people in your 1Password account. ($64.99 new, free update, 54.5 MB)
Maintenance release with a couple of improvements for the character discovery utility. (€29.99 new, free update, 4.8 MB)
