Category: Apple

Apple Watch Series 4: An ECG on Your Wrist

Amazing how far the Apple Watch has come since it’s debut in 2015!

From Apple.com:
Electrodes built into the Digital Crown and the back crystal work together with the ECG app to read your heart’s electrical signals. Simply touch the Digital Crown to generate an ECG waveform in just 30 seconds. This data can indicate whether your heart rhythm shows signs of atrial fibrillation — a serious form of irregular heart rhythm — or sinus rhythm, which means your heart is beating in a normal pattern.

Each beat of the heart sends out an electrical impulse. With the ECG app, Apple Watch Series 4 can read and record these impulses by connecting the circuit between your heart and both arms.

Apple-ECG

The resulting ECG waveform, its classification, and any notes you’ve entered on related symptoms are automatically stored in the Health app on your iPhone. You can share them with your doctor and have a better-informed conversation about your health.

ECG information is stored in the Health app on your iPhone.

iPhone Slowdowns Explained

I ran across a good article at Macrumors that does a great job of explaining the reasons behind the recent iOS slowdowns on older hardware. If you’re experiencing slowdowns, this is definitely worth a read. I have high hopes that a battery replacement will breath new life into my aging iPhone 6 Plus. Since upgrading to iOS 11, I have experienced all of the symptoms outlined in Apple’s iPhone and Battery Performance support document:

In cases that require more extreme forms of this power management, the user may notice effects such as:

– Longer app launch times
– Lower frame rates while scrolling
– Backlight dimming (which can be overridden in Control Center)
– Lower speaker volume by up to -3dB
– Gradual frame rate reductions in some apps
– During the most extreme cases, the camera flash will be disabled as visible in the camera UI
– Apps refreshing in background may require reloading upon launch

To get your battery replaced, visit the Contact Apple Support page, click on See Your Products, sign in to your Apple ID account, select which iPhone, and click on Battery, Power, and Charging and then Battery Replacement.

After completing the above steps, you should have options available to you to take your iPhone to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider, mail the device to an Apple Repair Center, or both.

For more details, see the full article at Macrumors.

Mac OS X Sierra: Displaying Thumbnails in Preview by Default

I use thumbnails in Preview on Mac OS to merge PDFs a lot. Dragging thumbs from the sidebar of one PDF to another is a quick and easy way to merge multiple PDFs. It has always annoyed me that there is no longer an easy way to show the sidebar by default in Mac OS X Sierra. After a little Googling, I found an easy way to fix this by editing the plist file for Preview.

  1. Go to: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/
  2. Locate and open the preferences file – com.apple.Preview.plist
  3. Set “PVPDFSuppressSidebarOnOpening” to false
  4. If you don’t see it, simply add the following to com.apple.Preview.plist:
    <key>PVPDFSuppressSidebarOnOpening</key>
    <false/>

UPDATE FOR HIGH SIERRA:
Twitter user @ZiadFazel wrote in with an update for Preview in Mac OS X High Sierra.

  1. Go to: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/
  2. Locate and open the preferences file – com.apple.Preview.plist
  3. Find <key>PVSidebarViewModeForNewDocuments</key><integer>0</integer>
  4. Change <integer>0</integer> to <integer>1</integer>Thanks, Ziad!

Apple Watch Can Detect Abnormal Heart Rhythm with 97% Accuracy

According to the results of a study* conducted by the University of California, San Francisco and the app, Cardiogram, Apple Watch can detect the most common abnormal heart rhythm with 97% accuracy.

From TechCrunch:
The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers then trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch heart rate data.

Each year, more than 100,000 strokes are caused by an abnormal heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation – the most common abnormal heart rhythm responsible for 1 in 4 strokes. It’s pretty amazing to think that soon there will be technology available on our wrists that can identify and warn us of abnormal heart rhythms, including atrial fibrillation.

*I’m proud to have participated in the Heart eHealth study and am currently participating in the mRhythm study, the goal of which is to compare the heart rhythms gathered by the FDA-approved AliveCor monitor against those from the Cardiogram App/Apple Watch to assess its validity and accuracy in detecting arrhythmias.

via TechCrunch

MacOS Sierra Wi-Fi Fix

I ran the betas of macOS Sierra without incident but recently began experiencing random wi-fi drops with the GM. When I was connected to wi-fi the speeds were unusably slow.

I took the usual troubleshooting steps of toggling wi-fi off and on,  restarting the machine, creating a new location in Network Preferences –   even manually configuring DNS to use Google’s public servers. Nothing worked. Then I ran across this article at OSXDaily.com that suggested specifying a lower custom MTU setting of 1453. That seems to have done the trick.

Here are the steps I took that fixed my wi-fi issues (see the full article for additional troubleshooting steps): Continue reading “MacOS Sierra Wi-Fi Fix” →

Working With Steve Jobs

Great article on working with Steve Jobs. By someone who actually worked with him – former Adobe, NeXT, and Apple employee Glenn Reid.

I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on Apple campus, with a lot of whiteboards, talking about what iMovie should be (and should not be). It was as pure as pure gets, in terms of building software. Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we’d go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we’d iterate, again and again and again. That’s how it always went. Iteration. It’s the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it.

I think in many ways Apple still adheres to this philosophy of releasing an MVP and continuously iterating again and again and again until they have a polished, mature product.

Read the full article.