Vratislav Holub In this regular column, every day we look at the most interesting news that revolves around the California company Apple. We focus here exclusively on the main events and leave aside all speculations and various leaks. So if you are interested in current events and want to be informed about the apple world, definitely spend a few minutes on the following paragraphs.
Google Meet will be completely free in May
In the current period pandemic people have to stay at home as much as possible, which has led companies to switch to the so-called home office, and in schools they learn in the form of video conference. As for video conferences, the Zoom and Microsoft Teams platforms are currently gaining the most popularity. But Google is fully aware of the importance of their service Meet and thus comes with a great news that he announced today through message on your blog. Until now, this service has only been available to G-Suite account holders, but it will be available to everyone throughout May. The only one condition Of course, you must have an active Google account. In addition, the Meet platform has a perfect advantage. Recently, there have been reports circulating on the Internet about a breach in the security of the Zoom platform. It presented itself as offering end-to-end encryption, which in the end was not entirely true. But according to the latest reports, security should already be strengthened and Zoom should guarantee an encrypted connection to all participants. Google Meet on the other hand encrypts all real-time activity for several years, as well as files stored on Google Drive.
Spotify has passed another milestone in the number of subscribers
We will stay with the coronavirus for a while. Analysts around the world were unable to tell what might happen at the beginning of the pandemic music streaming platforms. However, according to the latest reports, Spotify, as the market leader, has now passed a very important milestone in the number of subscribers. In the first quarter of this year, it was 130 million people, which shows a 31% year-on-year increase. By comparison, Apple Music had "only" 60 million subscribers last June. As it now turns out, mandatory quarantine and the global pandemic also have an effect on taste in music. People on Spotify now listen far more to so-called calmer music, among which we can include acoustic and slower songs that cannot be classically danced to.
macOS reports an error: It can immediately fill up your entire storage
Apple computers are very popular all over the world. In doing so, it primarily benefits from the operating system MacOS, which is characterized by its simplicity and reliability. Unfortunately, nothing in the world is perfect, which has now been shown with this operating system as well. Developers from the company NeoFinder now they've pointed out a pretty major bug that can fill up your entire storage in almost a matter of moments. The error is related to the native application Image transfer, which most users use to import their photos and videos from other devices. But what is this error? If you use this application together with your iPhone or iPad, you may have already encountered this error.
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If in settings Camera on your apple mobile device you have it set High efficiency, which is why your images are saved in HEIC format and you don't keep them at the same time originals photos on your device, but you have selected automatic transfer to Mac or PC, the operating system will then convert all your pictures to JPG format. But the problem is that the macOS operating system automatically adds 1,5 MB during the mentioned conversion empty data to each file. Once the developers examined these images through the Hex-Editor, they discovered that this blank data only represented zeros. Although at first glance this is a small amount of data, with a larger number of images it can be up to gigabytes of extra space. Especially the owners can pay extra for this MacBooks, which usually only have 128GB of storage in the base. Apple has reportedly already been informed about the bug, but of course it is not yet known when this problem will be fixed. For now, you can help yourself with the help of the app Graphics Converter, which can remove empty data from a file.
So is the tabloid headline really necessary? "macOS reports an error: It can immediately fill up your entire storage" is not even remotely true. Even if I were to transfer a 256GB image from an iPhone, my 2TB disk would definitely not fill it up, and not immediately.
I'd say most users use the "Photos" app to transfer pictures from iPhone to Mac (unless they're using iCloud sync). So the problem won't be that important. "Image transfer" is mainly for working with the scanner.