Linked List: March 12, 2014

Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Apple TV 6.1 Update Adds Support for AirPlay Discovery Over Bluetooth ★

Nice find by Derick Okihara, writing for AFP548:

In addition to bonjour negotiation for AirPlay, iOS 7.1 devices will also look for AirPlay sources over bluetooth when doing it’s scan! This means you do NOT need bonjour to AirPlay.

AirPlay is one of the best parts of the modern Apple ecosystem — a complex system neatly wrapped in a simple “it just works” interface.

Improving the State of 4K Display Support Under OS X ★

Anand Lal Shimpi, writing for AnandTech:

In my Mac Pro review I lamented the state of 4K display support under OS X 10.9.0. In my conclusion I wrote: “4K display compatibility under OS X is still a bit like the wild west at this point”. Compatibility was pretty much only guaranteed with the ASUS/Sharp 4K displays if you cared about having a refresh rate higher than 30Hz. Even if you had the right monitor, the only really usable resolution was 3840 × 2160 - which ends up making text and UI elements a bit too small for some users. Absent were the wonderful scaling resolutions that Apple introduced with its MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Well it looks like that won’t be the case for long, last night I got reports (thanks Mike!) that the latest developer build of OS X 10.9.3 includes expanded support for 4K displays, 4K/60Hz support for rMBPs and scaled resolutions below 4K.

Best news I’ve heard all day. (Via Marco Arment.)

Newsweek on the Sad State of U.S. Broadband ★

David Cay Johnston, writing for Newsweek:

After making a big, bold promise to wire every corner of America, the telecom giants are running away from their vow to provide nationwide broadband service by 2020. For almost 20 years, AT&T, Verizon and the other big players have collected hundreds of billions of dollars through rate increases and surcharges to finance that ambitious plan, but after wiring the high-density big cities, they now say it’s too expensive to connect the rest of the country. But they’d like to keep all that money they banked for the project.

This is sanctioned corruption, pure and simple.