By Jason Snell

September 19, 2017 9:15 AM PT

It’s iOS 11 and watchOS 4 day!

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Hello, readers. It’s that day. The day when you finally get your hands on iOS 11 after…

Let’s be real. You’re a Six Colors reader. You probably installed the first developer beta. Or the second. Or maybe you waited until the public beta. But you’ve probably been using iOS 11 all summer.

Even if you have, though, this is the day when our loved ones—the less technologically focused in our lives—will be getting the new operating system. So it still feels like a milestone, even if it’s hard for some of us to even remember what it was like to run iOS 10.

I wrote a review of iOS 11 for Macworld, which just posted this morning, that breaks down the highlights. If you want more, I’ll just wave the Italian flag and tell you to have at it.

The short version is: iPad users should update to iOS 11, because the multitasking changes and addition of drag-and-drop are awesome. iPhone users, well, there’s still great stuff there—Do Not Disturb When Driving is going to make the world safer—but it’s a bit less of a world-shaker. Still, Apple makes it awfully hard not to update your devices, and there are lots of good reasons—compatibility, security, and functionality—to make the move. If you pay for iCloud storage space, for example, you should get your family on iOS 11 so you can share that space and they can stop bugging you about why their iOS backups fail because they’ve run out of Apple’s laughably small 5GB of free iCloud space.

On the Apple Watch side, it’s watchOS 4 today. It’s a relatively subtle update, but there are still some nice features, as Serenity Caldwell details in her review at iMore. You probably haven’t installed this one yet, since Apple limits distribution of watchOS betas since there’s no way to reset the device at home if something goes horribly wrong. I installed the final version last week and while it took forever, it’s been running smoothly ever since.

By Jason Snell

September 18, 2017 1:40 PM PT

Apple Pay cash: Not yet

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

iOS 11 comes out tomorrow, a fact that Apple reminded everyone of today. But nestled in that announcement is a tidbit I don’t think we’ve heard before:

Coming this fall with an update to iOS 11 and watchOS 4, Apple Pay users will be able to send and receive money from friends and family quickly, easily and securely. Pay and get paid right in Messages, or tell Siri to pay someone, using the credit and debit cards they have in Wallet. When users get paid, they receive the money in their new Apple Pay Cash card in Apple Wallet and can use the money instantly.

As with the arrival of Messages in the Cloud, Apple has apparently decided that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to a feature that would have a bunch of ugly consequences if it didn’t roll out in a rock-solid way. I’m not thrilled about waiting to send and receive money via Apple Pay, but I’d rather wait than have it ship broken.

By Dan Moren

September 18, 2017 6:03 AM PT

Teamosa is a smart tea-maker with a Keurig-like plan

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Regular readers of the site will know that Jason and I are both fervent tea drinkers, so unsurprisingly I’d already seen the Kickstarter for Teamosa by the time reader Ben asked about it.

Here are my quick thoughts: First, I love the idea of a smart tea-brewing apparatus. I’ve been delighted with my Breville Tea Maker (which we colloquially refer to as the “tea robot”¹), which handles the whole boiling water/tea brewing process in a single step, keeps the tea warm for up to an hour, and lets you schedule a brewing time in advance. The only other feature I’d like to have, frankly, is the ability to start the process remotely–say, from my phone–rather than at a specific time, but, that’s just icing.

To a certain extent, a rising tide lifts all boats infuses all tea, and having more advanced tea-brewing technology on the market helps push the state of the art forward and inspire competition, which is great.

As for the Teamosa in particular, there are a few things that caught my eye. First is this idea of “ultrasonic extraction,” which the team behind this device says increases antioxidant yield by 20 percent. Antioxidants are, of course, compounds found in tea and other foods and drink that are believed to promote good health, though most studies on that subject have been inconclusive. As to whether ultrasonic extraction is a better way to extract those questionably-beneficial elements, well, I did find a reference in a book called Ultrasound in Food Processing which says it is potentially more efficient, though it primarily references the creation of instant tea, which is, unsurprisingly, about as palatable as instant coffee.²

Long story short: this might increase the amount of possibly beneficial compounds in tea, so certainly don’t go into this expecting magical health benefits.

As far as the tech end of this goes, Teamosa mainly looks like a combination of the Breville tea-maker and a Keurig. You can choose your temperature, brewing time, etc. Teamosa rightfully points out that over-steeping or using water that’s too hot can adversely affect the taste and smell of tea…but any tea drinker worth their oolong probably knows that already. (Hence our careful timers and our little plates for putting our tea infusers on after we remove them.) You can control all of this from a smartphone app, as well; the tea-maker itself has a Wi-Fi chip.

But it’s the Keurig part that makes me raise my eyebrows. Teamosa does support your own tea leaves, but it’s also selling “paper tea capsules” that you pop in and use. Which has its convenience, to be certain–the machine can scan the capsule and automatically detect the correct brewing temperature and time–but it’s also probably more expensive and wasteful than using tea leaves. But, hey, I’m sure it provides the company a source of recurring revenue.

This being a Kickstarter campaign, it comes with the usual degree of risk. The Teamosa is expected to retail for $399, which is $150 more than the already pretty pricey Breville–and it looks smaller, so I doubt it scales to make as much tea as the Breville, either. The early bird backing is offering a machine, some capsules, and a pair of cups for just $239, but it’s not expected to ship for a year, and, of course, you’re buying something sight unseen.

As of this writing, the project has already hit its goal, so my advice would be to wait for it to come to market and see how it actually works. The way you’re making tea right now is the way it’s been done for thousands of years–it’ll hold up for at least one more.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

September 15, 2017 9:00 AM PT

PCalc updated for new Apple hardware and… augmented reality?

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

James Thomson’s venerable calculator app PCalc has been updated today on all its platforms, including iOS and watchOS, MacOS, and yes, tvOS.

My daughter’s doing pre-calculus this year and I have been reminded that I am apparently the go-to math expert in our house due to the year of college calculus I took during the late 1980s. I have forgotten more math than I remember, but wise people like Dr. Drang will tell you that PCalc is the best scientific calculator for Apple platforms.

PCalc has always mixed its massive amount of mathematical functionality with a bit of whimsy. At one point Thomson introduced a feature that would blot out the questionable words you can type using numbers. He’s doggedly figured out ways to create functional calculator interfaces on the Apple Watch and Apple TV, two places you might not expect to need a calculator.

Now there’s PCalc 3.7 on iOS, which features all those great math features you’d expect, plus support for Apple’s latest stuff, including iOS 11 drag and drop (and drag and drop on macOS for the first time too), resizable digits, iPhone X support, and 40 different custom icons.

Then there’s the About screen, which features a complete augmented-reality playground, where you can drop 3D objects into your living room. There’s also a car you can drive around. You heard me. A car.

Keep PCalc weird, I say.