May 2016 – Page 2

What we Published, and Links of Note

Here is a list of articles we published this week. You can keep up to date with Apple Resource by following us on Twitter, Facebook or Signing Up to our weekly update e-mail.

How to know if someone has blocked you on iOS

Has someone suddenly disappeared on you and you have sent iMessages and FaceTime calls with no response? Are you being ignored or, worse yet, are you blocked? This article will help you work out which one it is.

Carl Icahn Sells His Apple Stock

Should you be concerned that one of Apple’s largest private investors has just sold his 0.8% stake in the company citing fears over China’s sentiments towards Apple?

How to Combine Videos on Your Mac Without Additional Software Using

Have you ever needed to quickly combine some video files without wanting to buy or look for additional software beyond the OS? Well you can with QuickTime X.

Moving Forward with Digital Assistants

A nice piece written by David Sparks about his encounters with Amazon’s Echo. Having personally used an Echo and with the recent announcements about ‘Viv’ from the guys that created Siri it is clear that Apple is slipping behind the rest of the market.

How to Combine Videos on Your Mac Without Additional Software Using QuickTime X

If you have followed my writing over at DavidJMoore.com then you will know my passion for Taking the Straight Line – getting from A to B as quickly and as simply as possible. I also have a passion for achieving great results using the base apps on both iOS and OS X. This isn’t always possible, but when combining videos it is.

QuickTime X comes pre-installed on all Macs and makes it very simple to combine a set of video files. To do this all you need to do is open the video you want first in the sequence then select the rest of the files in a finder window and drag them onto the video that’s open in QuickTime X. When you do so, you will notice some yellow film placeholders appear where you can drop the files you are dragging onto. You can then rearrange them as you see fit and once done hit File -> Export and you are done.

Do you have any other tips we should share with the wider community? If so let us know HERE or via Twitter.

Carl Icahn Sells His Apple Stock

Should you be concerned that one of Apple’s largest private investors has just sold his 0.8% stake in the company citing fears over China’s sentiments towards Apple?

Disclaimer: The author is an investor in Apple Stock

Carl Icahn announced on 28th April 2016 that he is selling his 0.8% stake in Apple due to fears over China’s attitude towards Apple and that he would happily by back in if China’s sentiments change. Whilst Icahn has obviously been very successful in the investment world, if what I have read even has a shred of truth it’s more through his aggression, bullying and secondary deals off of his investments than through shrewd value investing like Warren Buffet.

Icahn has been very vocal during his ownership of Apple stock, including his demands for accelerated stock buyback in October 2014.

Here are my thoughts on the sell off:

He left himself an ‘In’ to buy the stock off in his media fuelled sell of his shares. In other words, to me, this stinks of a forced stock price drop through media sensationalist reports where he or entities related to him will then buy large volumes at the drop and pocket the profits when the price stabilises.
No where is there anything raised about the correlation between China’s stand against Apple alongside the whole device encryption debate that is ongoing – centring around Apple. I doubt China likes the thoughts of its citizens being able to hold information from the government. With this respect I think the App Store is only the tip of the iceberg here.
With collapsing industry in westernised countries, for example steel in the UK, it is only a matter of time before China holds all the manufacturing of things like Aluminium, Steel etc. At which point they will control the prices and it will inevitably go up.
Icahn leaving will give the Apple executives a bit of peace and quiet to focus on their product line, which quite frankly is starting to become misaligned and suffer.

China always has been an issue and will continue to be so going forward, for reasons far beyond Apple and closing its App Store. They will soon control the worlds supply of materials and with it the price of all of our goods. We have farmed all of our industries out to the East and will soon reap the seed that we have sown.

This goes far beyond Apple, as such, will I be selling my Apple stock on the back of Icahn’s statement and actions? Not a chance. Now, Apple, refocus your product line and quality and consider your long term strategy of where you will operate. China will only prove to be more difficult over ‘Privacy’, ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Material’ issues moving forward – maybe a return to the west would best serve your future?

As a final note, this article was written the day after, Friday 29th May 2016 that the news broke and is being published on Wednesday 4th May 2016, some six days after the event showing how concerned I am as a share holder.

How to Know if Someone has Blocked you on iOS

UPDATE JULY 2016: It appears Apple may have made a change to how Messages appear when you are blocked. It used to be that they showed as ‘Delivered’, now they don’t show anything. So if you send a message and it returns no status at all you are either blocked, or the persons phone is off.

Have you ever got yourself in a situation where you are wondering why someone isn’t replying to your FaceTime calls or iMessages? How do you know if you have been blocked or if you are just being plain ignored?

There are many articles on the Internet, all stretch the topic out far more than it really needs to be. Here is the simple answer.

How to Know for Certain

To be 100% certain, the person you are trying to contact has to have an iPhone and you need to make a cellular call to their phone on more than one occasion. If the phone goes straight to voicemail you are either blocked, or their phone is off. To confirm this step you need to disable your caller ID and call them back straight away.

Switch Off Caller ID

Tap on ’Settings’
Tap on ‘Phone’
Tap on ‘Show My Caller ID’ and switch it to ‘Off’
Call them straight away.

If the phone now rings you can confirm you were blocked.

What About Messages?

Messages is a cloudy way of telling. It used to be that when you were blocked your messages still showed as ‘Delivered’, this gives no definitive indication. However, per the notice at the top of the post, I’ve noticed that when you are newly blocked the message receives no status. A few days to weeks later. I’ve noticed it then changes back to ‘Delivered’. Remember though, showing no status could also mean the phone is off. So really, two calls is the only real way to know.

What About FaceTime?

FaceTime calls will just ring and ring and then eventually fail, in short they will act as though they are going through but the person is simply not answering.

What Else?

If you were once sharing locations with the person via ‘Find My Friends’ then this will be a massive clue. If you see ‘XXXX XXXX is no longer sharing their location with you’ in your iMessage conversation, where ‘XXXX XXXX’ is the person name, then you have a good indicator they have blocked you. If it says ‘Location Unavailable’ then this IS NOT an indicator of being blocked, merely that they are out of reception, their phone has died or they have turned it off.

So in conclusion, the only sure fire way is via a cell call with an iMessage as a belts and braces check. It should be noted that the user must have iOS7+ to be able to block a caller, so check this as well. The information in this article is valid up to (and most likely beyond) iOS 10.2.

Have you noticed any other behaviour? Reading this long after iOS 10.2 and wondering if this article is still valid? Leave me a comment below or on Twitter.