Dan Provost wrote on Studio Neat about the iOS 8 time-lapse feature.

This is an efficient way to assemble a time-lapse. When you start recording a time-lapse, the app only captures 2 frames per second. If the recording period extends beyond 10 minutes, the app switches to capturing only 1 frame per second, and deletes every other frame it had captured in the first 10 minutes. When the recording duration doubles (20 minutes), the same thing happens. Now the app is only capturing 1 frame every 2 seconds, and previous frames are dropped to match this tempo. And so forth. The longest video I recorded was 8 hours, but presumably using this method you could record for much longer (Apple’s website casually mentions 30 hours). Because the app is being so efficient with frame capture and storage, you don’t need to worry about your phone capacity filling up.

The result of this method is that anything you shoot will generally end up being between 20 and 40 seconds long, an ideal shareable length. Also worth mentioning, the resulting video is always 30 fps, the standard framerate for video. No surprises there.

It just works.

9to5 Mac reported on the large reservation orders in China for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Yesterday, Chinese iPhone 6 reservations were stated as 2 million in six hours, a rather stunning statistic. Today, an update from the Chinese media press Tencent now says that reservations have topped 4 million. If all these reservations convert into orders, China alone may beat out the iPhone 6’s launch numbers, which — at the time — were considered to be impressive.

As John Gruber pointed out, these figures defies critics who sees only doom and gloom for Apple in China.

“Stocks of the iPhone 6 are way too high right now,” said one wholesaler of smuggled iPhones in Beijing’s northwestern tech hub Zhongguancun.

The smugglers’ experience represents the new reality for Apple in China.

Four years ago, the iPhone 4 was a status symbol, with the black market booming before the product was officially introduced. Today, the iPhone is simply one option among many, as local companies like Xiaomi and Meizu Technology rival Apple in terms of coolness while charging less than half the price.

And the number keeps going up.

Bank Innovation reported on why PayPal isn’t an Apple Pay preferred partner.

But while these talks were going on, PayPal went ahead and partnered with Samsung on the Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner, a move that was reportedly forced onto PayPal by eBay CEO John Donahoe. PayPal’s now-former president David Marcus was purportedly categorically against the Samsung deal, knowing that it would jeopardize PayPal’s relationship with Apple. Donahoe won the day, however.

Apple was said to be absolutely furious that PayPal did the deal with Samsung, which led Apple to cut PayPal out of the Apple Pay process entirely. (One source said: “Apple kicked them out of the door.”) This dust up with Apple was a big reason that David Marcus ended up leaving PayPal for Facebook.

Huge loss for PayPal.

Apple Insider reported on the Samsung Galaxy note 4 being outperformed by the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus despite haveing more cores and RAM.

Samsung’s own even-higher resolution Note 4 (or equally high resolution Galaxy S5 flagship) both turn in benchmarks far lower than Apple’s new 6 Plus—and less than half that of last year’s iPhone 5s. In terms of fps, the latest benchmarks show that Samsung’s new Exynos-powered Note 4 drops down to 10.5 fps—almost half that of iPhone 6 Plus— in the same test.

Looking at the fairly decent, low level theoretical scores of the GPUs Samsung uses (combined with much higher clock rates and more RAM), it appears that the company’s devotion to extremely high resolution numbers is a spec list checkmark (rather than a real feature that benefits users) and is a primary contributing reason for poor real life scores in rendering 3D OpenGL scenes.

In other words, the chips Samsung is choosing to use could theoretically match Apple’s latest iPhones if they were not also driving tons of additional pixels that contribute little to no benefit to users. Think of it as a reasonably powerful engine installed into a monster truck with massive wheels it can barely turn.

Unfortunately, there will always be people who blindly chase specs.

Bloomberg reported on US law enforcement officials seeking to halt smartphone encryption.

“This is a very bad idea,” said Cathy Lanier, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”

There are many other forms of data available for the police even if they are locked out of accessing your mobile phones. And if they really want to, they could brute force and the passcodes. Before making such a fuss about encryption, they should make do something about NSA surveillance, something they seem to be dragging their feet to deal with.

TUAW wrote about Apple Pay.

Remember that merchants in an Apple Pay transaction never have access to user credit card information and, as a result, users never have to worry about their information being compromised in a security breach. Further, security at the device level is effectively impenetrable as tokens, along with the encrypted keys responsible for the cryptogram, are all securely stored in the Secure Element.

And as an extra security precaution, iPhone owners will have the ability to unlink or temporarily suspend a token connected to a stolen device, thereby rendering Apple Pay inoperable until the device is retrieved.

So while the Apple Pay user experience has been set up to be impressively simple, there are a myriad of complex safety measures at work behind the scenes to help ensure that sensitive user data remains free from prying eyes. The use of token-based payments is something the banks have been pushing for and something the credit card networks are similarly excited for.

I have come across ill-informed people trying to scare others about how insecure Apple Pay is, and some have no idea how Apple Pay works and simply claim it isn’t safe because they think it isn’t. It pays to find out more before passing judgement.