In the news

I love using my AirPods with my iPhone.  They weigh nothing, you don’t have any cords to worry about, and it is nice to wear just one of them if you are half-listening to music or a podcast while you also want to hear what is going on in the outside world.  But some people prefer a soft rubber tip versus the hard tip of each AirPod, and even I will admit that I miss having buttons on a cord to play/pause, FF, RW, etc.  If those issues are more important to you than the advantages of AirPods, I’ve heard great things about Apple’s BeatsX headphones.  Just this week, a friend was raving about them to me.  If you are in the market for Bluetooth headphones and you are looking at the AirPods, you should also consider whether BeatsX is a better choice for you.  To help you make that decision, this week Susie Ochs of Macworld reviews Apple’s BeatsX headphones, and she really likes them compared to the AirPods.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• California attorney David Sparks discusses the new APFS file system in iOS 10.3.
• Joan Feldman of Attorney at Work discusses app updates and other tech news announced at ABA TECHSHOW earlier this month.
• FlightTrack Pro used to be one of my favorite travel apps.  It would tell me when my airport gate had changed before anyone else knew about it, and was a great source of information on flights.  Alas, the app is no more, but David Pogue of Yahoo discusses other apps that do something similar, and found some good options.
• Bryan Wolfe of AppAdvice reviews the Griffin iTrip Clip, a device that turns any traditional headphones into Bluetooth headphones.
• Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reports that Google Calendar for iOS was updated this week to support the iPad.
• Jason Snell describes 25 cool things that you can do with Workflow, an automation app that Apple recently acquired.  There are some neat tips in here, many of which I use frequently.
• Snell also discusses the new iPad, and what it might tell us about other future Apple products, in an article for Macworld.
• Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports on what at first sounds like good news — President Trump is no longer tweeting from his Android phone.  But that’s only because he switched to an iPhone.
• Greg Barbosa reports that iOS 10.3, which was released this week, includes over 300 security fixes.
• Zac Hall of 9to5Mac explains how to save an email from the iOS Mail app to Notes as a PDF.
• Rene Ritchie of iMore explains many of the features of the Apple Clips app which will be released in April.
• And finally, Apple released three new iPad Pro ads this week, more in its line of finding real tweets on Twitter and turning them into an ad (using an actor instead of the original tweeter).  The new ones are Light and Powerful, the almost-but-not-quite-racy All Your School Stuff, and All Day Battery.  Here is the All Day Battery one: