Some Photography Related Thoughts on Yesterday's Apple Event
While yesterday's Apple event didn't contain a huge amount of announcements, there are a couple of things that were announced or released that may be of interest to photographers. There's the obvious introduction of the iPhone SE and the new smaller iPad Pro, but there are a also few updates in the just released El Capitan update that are also important.
iPhone SE
The iPhone SE brings a modern set of innards to the older 4" iPhone 5 form factor. What's particularly of interest here for photographers, is that the new iPhone SE contains the same 12mp camera and processing power as the iPhone 6. If you wanted an iPhone with good camera capabilities but still wanted the smaller form factor, you now have a solution.
iPad Pro 9.7"
The new iPad pro is a welcome addition to the line up. I really liked the idea of the iPad pro, but had previously been put off by the larger form factor. I also like the fact that it now comes in a 256gb option, which is important if you intend to use it for imaging. However, the thing that interests me the most is the idea of the "TrueTone" display that Apple announced.
The new display uses 4 ambient light sensors to measure not just the brightness of the surrounding light, but also the colour and it adjusts the display accordingly. This solves an issue that I've long complained about with the iPads. In certain lighting conditions, the colour of the screen looks awful, especially on a white iPad. Because your eyes automatically adjust for different temperatures of light, but screens don't, you can notice the change in lighting on a screen.
If you have a white iPad this is particularly noticeable, because you have that nice white bezel to act as a source for your eyes to set as white. This new system will detect the ambient light temperature and set the colour temperature of the screen to match. I'm really curious to see this in person. One of the things that the iPad is lacking for professional photographers or designers is the lack of calibration options. It will be interesting to see how well this automatic calibration works.
New Camera Connection Kit
Apple also released the new UB 3 camera connection kit, which supports powered usb connections, and USB 3 speeds on the iPad Pro (only the larger one apparently). It's interesting because it allows you to connect usb hubs, powered microphones and so on. It also should support most card readers at faster speeds.
El Capitan Update
The update to 10.11.4 contains a few updates, that while not directly applicable to photographers, may be of importance to you if you have a photography website or are active on social media.
First of all, it fixes the long standing bug that prevented Twitter t.co links from opening properly. This has been an absolute pain, and I can't help but wonder how this was affecting traffic to my website.
The second important feature, is that the new version of Safari fixes a bug with Squarespace. If you were a Squarespace user, you've undoubtedly been getting the warnings if you've been trying to edit your site in Safari about a bug in the last version. This had been causing crashes with the Squarespace back end for some time now. I had to resort to using Chrome for the past few months in order to post properly. Luckily that bug seems to have been fixed now, so you can go back to using Safari if that is your preferred choice.
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