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Claris, the Apple subsidiary formerly known as FileMaker, has announced the beta launch of its new Claris Connect platform. According to the company, Claris Connect allows powerful integration with third-party apps and services to help businesses automate workflows. Claris Connect is an integration and workflows service that uses a graphical interface, allowing developers to create workflows of different complexity levels by simply stitching together third-party services. That means there’s no need for custom coding, with Claris Connect automatically handling the back-end configuration across the third-party applications....

Also updated is the Apple TV’s user interface. It is now more streamlined and taking advantage of the full 1080p video resolution. The new interface takes clues from iOS with its shiny new icons and the beautiful Cover Flow view. The new Apple TV has the same low price of just $99 and is available for pre-order today with shipments beginning March 16. In addition to the new Apple TV, Apple has tweaked its pricing matrix for movies and television shows on iTunes to reflect 1080p content....

UPDATE: More details from Apple after the break. Scott Forstall is onstage at the Apple media event right now introducing a new iOS app called “Cards” that allows you to “create and mail beautiful cards right from your iPhone or iPod touch.” It comes with over 21 template designs for greeting cards. Interestingly, Apple will provide you with high quality prints of your greeting cards mailed to you on 100% cotton paper....

As the hours roll around in each timezone, Apple Watch owners are discovering a new easter egg to celebrate the New Year on their wrists. When the clock strikes twelve, the Apple Watch watch face lights up with animated fireworks. Apple Watch does a similar thing for a user’s birthday, overlaying balloons on the watch face when the calendar matches the user’s birthdate. Both the birthday and New Year celebrations have been quietly introduced with watchOS 4, so this is the first opportunity for Apple Watch owners to see the newly-added New Years animation....

The cybersecurity specialists who carry out this work hold the job of an AppSec professional. Proactively managing software risk is a big job and the career opportunities in this growing field are widespread. Virtually any business that makes software or uses it requires the skills of AppSec engineers, managers, analysts, consultants and numerous other role titles. “It used to be that you could draw really clean lines around what an application is,” says Sam King, CEO of Veracode....

Apple is pushing its business-focused Apple Retail salespeople to sell Macs to businesses currently running in Windows environments, according to Apple retail employees briefed on the new initiative. Apple Retail Stores, in their business/professional sections, will now have a 27-inch iMac prepared with the Parallels Virtualization Software and Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. Select Apple Retail employees will also be trained on the Parallels and Windows software, and special Parallels demos have been created for Apple Stores....

Years before Apple bought Beats Electronics, the Beats by Dr. Dre-branded headphones were produced in part by audio and video equipment maker Monster. After Beats decided to let its contract with Monster expire in 2012, however, the cable maker saw Apple’s $3 billion purchase of the company as reason to sue. Now Monster claims, after filing its lawsuit in January, that Apple is pushing it out of the MFi program that allows manufacturers to advertise compatibility with and use the iPhone maker’s licensed technology when producing and selling accessories…...

You may not want to use the large Activity complication on the Infograph Modular on Apple Watch Series 4 if you live in a country where the clocks are about to roll back this weekend. That’s because there hasn’t been a software update since the same Daylight Saving Time bug affected users in Australia earlier this month. The software bug is simple: the large Activity complication on Infograph Modular shows a graph for 24 hours, but any change to DST technically results in a day with 23 or 25 hours....

Tomorrow marks World Emoji Day, and Apple is getting a head start on the festivities by detailing 59 new iOS emoji coming later this year. Apple says the new emoji characters will be available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch this fall. Headlining the new emoji are a variety of new disability-themed options, which Apple says help represent its values and inclusiveness: The “Holding Hands” emoji will also get a major update this year, with Apple touting that users will now be able to select any combination of skin tone and gender, “to personalize the people holding hands, opening up more than 75 possible combinations....

After 17 months of construction and delays, Apple has made it official: the Hannover Germany Store will open this Saturday at 10am local time. The multi-level store will be the 14th Apple retail venue in Germany and will be modelled similar to the Opera Paris Store which opened in 2010. The Bahnhofstrasse 5 location is in a pedestrian zone only few meters from Hannover Central Station and just off the popular shopping promenade “Niki de Saint Phalle“....

According to a report from Fortune, which cited a “major Apple investor,” Apple is apparently preparing to launch the much-rumoured iPad mini with invitations expected to go out Oct. 10: Author of the post, Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, is well connected with AAPL analysts and big traders, and the report noted the invitation rumor is coming from multiple reliable sources. If there is any truth to the rumor, it could line up nicely with an Oct....

Rumors of Apple’s renovation plans for its flagship Fifth Avenue store have been circulating for a while now, but the renovations will soon commence as the company has announced plans to briefly relocate the Fifth Avenue store to a new location during the process… As noted by MacRumors, Apple has posted a sign in front of its iconic Fifth Avenue retail location that says the store will temporarily move locations on January 20th....

Apple’s relationship with China has become trickier than ever this month as it banned an app that was used by protesters in Hong Kong, then allowed it again, only to ban it the next week. Now US lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook criticizing the company of censorship and asking it to put “values above market access.” Reported by Bloomberg, senators and representatives wrote the letter to Cook including Ted Cruz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ron Wyden, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Mike Gallagher, and Tom Malinowski....

Claris, the Apple subsidiary formerly known as FileMaker, has today announced the next-generation of its low-code FileMaker platform. FileMaker 19 will enable developers to build custom applications while integrating with third-party libraries for the first time. Claris touts that the new support for third-party libraries in FileMaker 19 will allow developers to “rapidly build sophisticated custom apps” that leverage integration with JavaScript, AI with Apple’s CoreML, and much more. The company highlights a few examples:...

Apple TV Plus has a fixed price of $4.99 per month, with a 7-day trial open to any newcomers. If you buy an eligible Apple device you’ll get an entire year for free, which is a nice bonus if you were going to upgrade anyway. Those who currently get the Apple Music Student subscription are also set to have Apple TV+ thrown in for free. With Apple Family Sharing, up to six users can access the service using their own device and accounts....

Back in August, Apple announced that long-time senior vice president of worldwide marketing would transition to a new Apple Fellow position, with Greg Joswiak moving into Schiller’s role. This week, Apple has updated its Leadership webpage to acknowledge these changes. In August, Apple gave no timeline on the specifics of executive changes, but the update to the Leadership webpage at least gives the impression that the transition has taken place recently....

To get FDA approval for the ECG feature in the new Apple Watch Series 4, Apple had to provide data from a heart study in which half the participants had AFib and half didn’t. The study provided to the Food and Drug Administration showed that the Watch was more than 98% accurate at detecting atrial fibrillation … For some bizarre reason, a Quartz piece on this was headlined The new heart-monitoring capabilities on the Apple Watch aren’t all that impressive....

Starting February 1, select Apple Stores across the US will celebrate Black History Month with a special lineup of more than 40 Today at Apple sessions. This year’s lineup highlights creators shaping new cultural narratives through visual arts, photography, poetry, dance, film, and other mediums. Today at Apple gives rising artists a platform for their creativity all year long, but Black History Month offers even more opportunities for inspiration. Seven flagship stores in major cities will offer events through February 29....

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team has today issued a new note in which it revealed that Apple has no further plans to provide security updates for QuickTime for Windows. The note follows an earlier report from Trend Micro and comes as two new vulnerabilities have been discovered that could affect QuickTime for Windows users. The two new vulnerabilities are heap-corruption-based remote code execution vulnerabilities, which essentially means that an attacker could gain access to a user’s computer by tricking them in to downloading a file from the web....

You might have thought that the health & fitness labs Apple created to help develop the Apple Watch might have been closed once the product had launched, but a piece in Time reports that they are still operating 12 hours a day, six days a week. ABC gave us a look inside one of the labs in the run-up to the launch of the Watch last year, when we learned that they include climate chambers which allow the company to simulate a wide range of different environments, but this latest report does include a new claim …...