Brand: MacNews

Apple has updated iTunes for iOS and tvOS to version 12.6, which lets you rent videos once and watch them on multiple screens. However, it requires iOS 10.3 and tvOS 10.2, both of which are in beta testing.

With the “rent once, watch anywhere” capability, you can rent a movie on one device (iPhone, iPad or Apple TV), then finish watching it on another (iPhone, iPad or Apple TV). Prior to iTunes 12.6 you had to finish watching a film on the device from which you first rented it.

Matrox Graphics (www.matrox.com) has previewed an all-new multi-4K capable stand-alone encoding appliance: the Maevex 6150 quad 4K encoder appliance. It affords the full feature set of the Maevex 6100 quad encoder PCI Express card, delivering quad 4K capture plus multiple encodes to stream and/or record at low bit rates.

Offering four or more channels simultaneously, the Maevex 6150 provides an all-in-one, dual density form factor with the additional IO befitting an appliance.

Apple’s Swift Playgrounds for the iPad is now available in five new languages including Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Latin American Spanish.

Playgrounds is designed to teach basic programming concepts like loops and conditionals using an animated character that the budding programmers direct by writing code. The app offers suggestions for code to be used, and Swift Playgrounds also has a special iOS coding keyboard to ease entry of all of those pesky brackets. 

Apple has debuted Clips, a new app that allows iPhone and iPad users to create “expressive videos.” It lets you combine video clips, photos and music into videos to share with friends through the Messages app, or on Instagram, Facebook and other social networks.

Clips also introduces Live Titles, a feature that lets users create animated captions and titles using just their voice. Effects including comic book filters, speech bubbles, shapes and full-screen animated posters.

Apple has updated the 9.7-inch iPad, adding a brighter Retina display and improved performance with prices starting at $329. It’s apparently designed to replace the iPad Air 2.

The tablet features a Retina display with over 3.1 million pixels and is enclosed in a thin aluminum unibody enclosure weighing one pound for great portability and durability. It packs an Apple-designed A9 chip with 64‑bit desktop-class architecture. The front- and back-facing cameras offer exceptional low-light performance and HD video recording. The iPad has support for LTE cellular bands.