MacRumors

Google announced yesterday that it has begun rolling out new high-definition satellite imagery of Earth to its Google Earth and Google Maps apps.

The company said it was introducing a new cloud-free mosaic of the Earth's surface made up of high-resolution images taken by Landsat 8, a satellite deployed by the USGS and NASA in 2013.

To produce this new imagery, we used the same publicly available Earth Engine APIs that scientists use to do things like track global tree cover, loss, and gain; predict Malaria outbreaks; and map global surface water over a 30 year period.

Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery—that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels—to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.

Some users are reportedly still seeing old images in the app, and Google hasn't offered a specific timeline for completion of the update, which began on Monday. Users can check the blog post for more images and information on the satellite's history.

Google Maps is a free download from the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]

Google Earth is available to download for the Mac here.

South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating "some matters" relating to Apple's business practices in the country, according to a Reuters report this morning.

The comment was made Tuesday by the FTC chairman Jeong Jae-chan during a parliamentary hearing, but he declined to elaborate when asked to do so by a South Korean lawmaker.

Last week, the Korea Times cited sources tying an upcoming FTC investigation to the terms of Apple's marketing contracts with local mobile carriers. Sources said Apple was suspected of pressing carriers into buying a minimum volume of promotional iPhones and sharing the burden of repair costs.

"The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating mobile carriers over the exact terms of their contracts with Apple, and Apple Korea will also be looked into soon," said the source.

Apple has faced criticism over its business practices in the country before. In April, the FTC ordered the company to change unfair provisions in its contracts with certified repair service partners which stipulated that the firms could not file lawsuits against Apple within a year after any dispute.

The repair service partners were seen to have little choice but to agree with the terms, due to the market power of Apple's iPhones. Apple complied with the FTC order and changed the contracts.

In 2015, the FTC also ordered Apple to allow customers refunds for repair services.

Sources speculate that the latest investigation may result in the FTC fining the company and urging it to revise its contracts with mobile carriers if similar unfair terms are discovered.

South Korea has three major mobile carriers competing for subscribers, but offer few subsidies for contracts that include iPhone handsets. Contracts for Android-based handsets on the other hand offer a range of subsidies to customers.

"As Apple does not allow mobile carriers to offer subsidies for iPhones, they may have been forced to pay for Apple Korea's marketing activities," said another source speaking to Korea Times.

Facebook is shifting the movie-making Slideshow feature from its Moments app to its flagship iOS app in an attempt to counter Apple's Photos update in iOS 10.

For those unfamiliar with Apple's big addition to its Photos app coming in iOS 10, a new feature called Memories uses facial- and object-recognition to automatically cluster photos based on people, scenes, dates, and locations, and intelligently creates mini-movies of occasions like vacations, birthdays, and weddings.

Similarly, Facebook's Slideshow feature, which originally appeared in August as part of its photo-centric Moments app, combines user photos and videos into a short clip that can be customized with transitions, themes, and music soundtracks.

In its new manifestation in Facebook's flagship app, the feature will now do this automatically whenever users take at least five photos or videos in the last 24 hours. And if users come upon a slideshow in the News Feed, they can tap a "try it" option to make their own. Images can be edited to add or remove images, and themes include Nostalgic, Playful, Night Out, Birthday, Epic, Thankful, Tropical, Bollywood, and Amped.

Earlier this month, Facebook attracted the ire of users by forcing account holders to download its Moments app if they wanted to keep synced photo albums uploaded from their mobile devices.

Users were informed by email and via app notifications that these albums will cease to exist on July 7, and that they should either download the albums, or install the company's photo-centric Moments app to keep them in the cloud.

Facebook is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]

Apple Pay has expanded to an additional trio of parking services and one hotel booking service over the past week.

Parking Panda, an app that allows you to find and reserve parking in advance, was updated last week to allow customers to use Apple Pay.

Parking Panda is offering customers a 10 percent discount off purchases made with Apple Pay between now and September 1. The discount is automatically applied after choosing Apple Pay at checkout. Apple Pay customers will also be eligible to win a free month or a free year of parking along with other prizes.

Parking Panda is available at thousands of parking garages, lots, and valets in 40 U.S. cities, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The app can also be used in Toronto, the most populous city in Canada.

Parking Panda is free on the App Store [Direct Link] for iPhone and iPad.

Likewise, PayByPhone has updated its app with Apple Pay support along with location aware imagery, personal reminders, and smart notices.

PayByPhone is also offering U.S. customers that pay with Apple Pay a chance to automatically win a free month of parking until September 1.

PayByPhone Parking is free on the App Store [Direct Link] for iPhone.

Meanwhile, parking reservation app SpotHero now enables drivers to use Apple Pay to find and pay for parking without creating a SpotHero account. The app can be used at more than 2,500 garages, lots, and valets in 13 major U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.

SpotHero is free on the App Store [Direct Link] for iPhone.

Last, last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight has also been updated to let customers find and book a hotel room using Apple Pay without creating a HotelTonight account. HotelTonight can be used to book hotel rooms up to a week in advance at more than 15,000 hotels in over 500 destinations worldwide.

HotelTonight is offering first-time customers that use Apple Pay $25 off their first $135+ reservation using promo code APPLEPAY25 until September 1. All customers can also redeem promo code TRAVELTUESDAY on any Tuesday through August 30 to get $20, $40 or $100 off bookings of $150+ when using Apple Pay.

HotelTonight is free on the App Store [Direct Link] for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

When making in-app purchases, Apple Pay is compatible with the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone SE, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, iPad mini 4, and both the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Facebook today announced plans to add human curation to its Facebook Events feature on iOS devices, with designated curators set to highlight notable events in a select number of cities.

Facebook Events, for those unfamiliar, is the Facebook feature that allows users to create dedicated Facebook event pages for parties, festivals, and more, and sign up to attend those events. Event pages are a useful way to share event details with a large number of people, including time, location, and information on others who are attending.

According to TechCrunch, iOS users in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. will see a new "Featured Events" option on the Events section of the app. Some users, described as "highly engaged," will also receive push notifications for interesting events.

Facebook's curators will cull through each city's top art, entertainment, family, festival, fitness, food & drink, learning, community, music, and sports events, and select a few with the capacity to accept some extra foot traffic.

"You can think about it like a weekend or weekly digest of cool stuff that you can do in your city" Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal tells [TechCrunch].

Curated Featured Events will join existing event suggestions Facebook users receive, which have included events based on interest, past attendance, and friend attendance. Facebook's goal with Featured Events is to surface events early enough to give people time to plan to attend.

Facebook is also enhancing its Events section with new event categories that include things like "Music," "Food," "The Weekend," and more. While Facebook's new Curated Events feature is only available in a limited number of cities, Facebook may consider expanding it in the future should it prove popular.

Interscope Records has announced that rising Chicago rapper and songwriter Dreezy's debut full-length album "No Hard Feelings" will be available exclusively on Apple Music in the United States on July 15 before becoming widely available one week later.

"No Hard Feelings" will feature 19 tracks, including singles "Body" ft. Jeremih, which has nearly 13.8 million Apple Music streams, "We Gon Ride" ft. Gucci Mane, and "Close To You" ft. T-Pain. The album is available for pre-order today at iTunes.com/Dreezy.

Apple Music and Beats 1 have had several exclusives since launching last year. Drake's new album "Views" had a similar one-week exclusivity period with Apple Music in April, while Dreezy's single "Close To You" had its "World First" premiere last week on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 radio show. Apple Music was also first to stream Taylor Swift's "1989" album, although without any exclusivity agreement, while Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" has been an Apple Music exclusive since 2015.

Following in the footsteps of a few changes and additions to its social networking features, Twitter today announced that a new photo-enhancing suite of stickers will be coming to iOS and Android users "over the next few weeks." The update will let users place Twitter's custom "rotating sets of stickers" onto any photo -- along with the hundreds of emojis offered on iOS and Android -- to personalize a picture before posting it on Twitter.

In addition, stickers will be searchable "in a new, visual spin on the hashtag," letting you click on a sticker in any Tweet and see similar trending pictures related to your photo. To do this, the company said that tapping on any sticker in a picture will reveal a new timeline, "where you can see how people all over the world use that sticker in different ways."

One of Apple's newest apps revealed at WWDC this month was a meditation-enabling Apple Watch app called Breathe that will encourage users to take a break every day to focus on the rhythm of their breathing patterns. In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, Jay Blahnik, discussed the benefits of "mindfulness" apps like Breathe, and the research done by Apple to find the timing sweet spot that a user should spend on meditation each day.

Structured like the stand goals, and upcoming roll goals, on Apple Watch, Breathe will tap users using haptic feedback with a notification to step back from what they're doing and take a few deep breaths. Blahnik said that both beginner and experienced meditators will benefit from the app's coaching, thanks to the ease with which the Apple Watch integrates into a daily schedule.

“Just doing some deep breathing can have some great benefits for a lot of people,” whether they’re taking a break from a busy work day or winding down for the day, Jay Blahnik, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, told BuzzFeed News. And with an app like Breathe, “it wouldn’t be hard for them to do it, regardless if they were a beginner or were very experienced with having more mindfulness in their day.”

Meditation has become a popular outlet for many people within Silicon Valley, with companies like Google even offering internal courses, like "Search Inside Yourself," to teach workers how to handle stressful emotions, hopefully resulting in more efficient workflow. Apple's new app is poised to provide a simpler version of these mindfulness-focused trends for any Apple Watch wearer.

Like most Apple products and services, Breathe went through a period of thorough testing before it was revealed at WWDC. Blahnik confirmed that the company tested the app with "hundreds" of employees, along with a council of psychology and mindfulness experts, before nailing down what will be arriving in watchOS 3 this fall.

The easy-to-access, low-commitment nature of the feature also turned out to be key. At work, especially, Blahnik said, the prospect of taking “a minute between meetings, to push away from their desks, quiet their mind, relax their bodies, [and] just take deep breaths, seemed to be appealing to a lot of people.”

However, according to a few studies of similar apps that promote tranquility through breathing prompts, there is "little evidence" on the efficacy and reliability of these apps at developing a habit of mindfulness. Because of the potential for Breathe to fail at its goal for some people, psychiatrist Dr. John Torous believes that Apple's biggest hurdle might be those individuals who become frustrated with the app and think they're "not going to benefit from behavioral treatment," and give up on finding other solutions beyond Breathe that might be more effective for them.

You can read the rest of BuzzFeed's report on Breathe, and its potential for impact in the mindfulness app market, right here.

Apple helped celebrate equality at the LGBT Pride festival in San Francisco yesterday and thanked employees who registered to take part in the event by gifting them a limited edition rainbow Apple Watch band.

Participating staff received the bands with a card from the company explaining the idea behind the Apple Watch accessory. Reddit user 'Sakusuhon' shared the above image of the band and card, which reads:

Apple's first Diversity Network Association, Pride, turns 30 this year and we're thrilled to celebrate this tremendous milestone with you! As recognition for everyone who registered to participate in the Pride event this year we created something special.



This limited-edition band is a symbol of our commitment to equality and we hope you'll wear it with pride.

Apple staff including CEO Tim Cook joined the annual parade on Sunday as a mark of the company's continuing support for equality and diversity, with many employees taking to social media to show off the colorful bands.

Proud to be representing #applepride #sfpride #applewatch #nylonband

A photo posted by @rikiri on Jun 26, 2016 at 1:27pm PDT

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Some iOS and Mac users are currently unable to access the App Store, Mac App Store, and iTunes Store, according to reports from MacRumors readers and Twitter users.

When attempting to load the App Store on some devices, the Featured and Top Charts section are blank, and some users are reporting receiving "Cannot Connect to iTunes" messages when attempting to use the iTunes Store. App Store updates appear to be functional for some users despite the connectivity issues.

Apple's system status page has not yet been updated to reflect any kind of outage and it is not clear how many users are affected.