[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]
With Yosemite and iOS 8, Apple unifies its ecosystem:
Tech giant Apple took the wraps off its latest versions of desktop and mobile operation systems at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week. The desktop OS, named Yosemite, has undergone a massive visual makeover a la iOS last year. The new features, also available on iOS 8, include improvements to Safari, Spotlight Search, Notification Center (support for third-party widgets), markup support in Mail (only on Yosemite), and iCloud Drive, a file-system for storing data on the cloud. iOS 8 finally gets the much needed interactive notifications, audio and video chat in messages, inter-app communication through extensions that allow easier sharing, new predictive keyboard and third-party keyboard support and many many more (Yay! DuckDuckGo support is here!). You can check them out here and here.
Apple announces iOS 8 at WWDC (Credit: Apple)
But the emphasis was clearly on the whole ecosystem working together in sync seamlessly, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac connected like never before with features like Continuity, Handoff, Family Sharing and the ability to place and receive calls and messages across all your devices (refer to the above links for more details on these features). Apple also took to stage to unveil HealthKit, a Passbook-like app that gathers your health and fitness related data from various third-party apps in one place, and HomeKit, a new feature that allows iPhones to control smart devices, such as garage door openers, lights, and security cameras. If you are a little upset about Control Center being left out, Apple has decided to make the toggles and the app shortcuts customisable as well in a future update. Now if it would only make attachment handling better on the Mail app!
Apple all set to accessorise you with Beats and smartwatches :
Apple has finally confirmed it's buying Beats Music and Beats Electronics for US$3 billion. The largest ever acquisition by the company, though chicken feed in comparison to its enormous cash pile, is all about music, music and music, with Apple SVP Eddie Cue going to the extent of saying Beats Music was the first subscription music done right. The truth of the matter however is that Apple missed the boat completely when it came to music streaming by letting Spotify, Rdio and others take sizeable lead. Beats headphones on the other hand do make for a nice fashion statement and command the same premium as an iPhone or the iPad.
Furthermore, according to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Cupertino is also said to be working on its own health-focussed smartwatch with a rollout planned for October this year. The wearable gear will likely use a curved organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touchscreen and collect health-related data, such as calorie consumption, sleep activity, blood glucose and blood oxygen levels. It will also allow users to read messages sent by smartphones, the report adds. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also jumped into the wearables market with plans for a cross-platform smartwatch. Things are getting rather interesting, aren't they?
LG G3, the latest super-smartphone from LG:
We have already seen the likes of Sony Xperia Z2, HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5 so far this year. They are feature-rich and spec-heavy, but let's face the fact that we are long past those revolutionary times. With technological improvements almost hitting a ceiling, it's tough to whip up a really interesting and a wow-worthy handset these days. However this is not necessarily a bad thing. As Mat Honan of the Wired puts in his Galaxy S5 review, there's a consensus that's been kicking around the tech press for a couple of years now that says smartphones have become kind of boring. I've bought into that. I think it's both true, and also not necessarily a bad thing. Your TV is boring, and you probably love your TV... phones are getting a little bit better with every iteration and that's about it. That's particularly true of flagship models, and it trickles down to the lower-end ones as well. The LG G3 is no exception. Boasting of an almost edge-to-edge 5.5-inch Quad HD display and all the cutting-edge specs you can think of, the smartphone is a veritable phablet. Not to mention, it's much better designed than its predecessor G2.
Microsoft announces new Surface Pro 3 tablet:
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet, in one word, is perhaps the best Windows tablet out there in the market right now. With PC sales plummeting left, right and centre and OEMs diversifying into Google Chromebooks, the company's latest offering is a 12-inch tablet. A tablet set out to make PCs a thing of the past and a gadget that tries to offer the best of both the two worlds - tablets and laptops. But for all money and the impressive hardware inside the hood, I just wish it didn't sell the keyboard as a separate accessory.
Facebook's creepy quotient continues to flip-flop in both direction:
Social network Facebook has had a complicated relationship with users over its ever-changing privacy settings, which can befuddle and stump even its seasoned users. However after facing a lot of flak for its privacy breaches from users, privacy advocates and regulators alike, it seems to be on a corrective path. Announcing a new privacy checkup, it stated that 1.28 billion users of the site will have their privacy settings default to "Friends," instead of "Public," which had been the case for adults for the past several years. And while we are on the subject of privacy, the social network upped its creepy quotient a bit when it unveiled a new Shazam-like audio recognition feature that lets the Facebook app installed on your phone to automatically identify music tracks and TV shows via the microphone.
Chrome Web Store now filters apps by Android availability:
Apple is going big on ecosystem. So is Microsoft with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. And so is Google with Chrome OS and Android. Although the search behemoth has time and again remained dismissive of a possible unification of its disparate mobile and Chromebook operating system platforms, the signs are getting clearer and clearer with each passing day. Its latest move aims at tying its two app stores - Chrome Web Store and Google Play - together, for the Web Store now features a new filtering option for narrowing down apps and extensions, based on which ones have an Android alternative. The app page will then offer you a link to the same app's Google Play Store page. Is Project Hera finally happening? Google I/O, can't wait you to begin. The suspense is killing me!
Samsung's first step to wean itself from Android materializes as Galaxy Z:
The Samsung Galaxy Z will be the South Korean electronics giant's first Tizen based smartphone, the company has announced, adding the phone will go on sale in the third quarter this year in Russia. For Samsung, already the largest and the most profitable Android handset maker, the move marks its first solid step towards relying less on Google software and establishing its own ecosystem. Given how Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5 have had a duplicate in-house app for every core app that Google offered - two app stores, two music players, two browsers, two photo gallery apps, two voice assistants and three messaging apps (Messaging, ChatON and Hangouts) - this is isn't the slightest bit surprising. The only question was when!
As for the phone itself, it comes with a 4.9-inch HD Super AMOLED display and a 2.3 GHz quad-core processor and fully supports 2D and 3D graphics. It also sports an 8MP rear-facing camera and a 2.1MP front-facing camera and includes a fingerprint sensor and the ultra power saving mode that first appeared in the Galaxy S5. "Samsung is committed to enhancing the mobile experience of consumers with innovation that is both personal and unique to their needs," DJ Lee, president of global sales and marketing for Samsung noted in a blog post.
Circa and Yahoo! News Digest, the best way to catch news on mobile:
I am a news addict. Constantly on the lookout for the latest breaking news and updates. And on a constant lookout for the latest news apps for my phone. To be honest, I have tried many of them - Google Reader, Flipboard, Google Currents, Zite, Feedly, Pulse (now LinkedIn Pulse), News 360, Umano, Rockmelt (now defunct), Wibbitz, Digg, Inside, Newsify, Newsbeat, Pipes, Reverb, and Pocket and Instapaper, if you want to throw in the read it later apps too. But surprisingly none of them find a place in my phone's home screen (nor do I use them) at present. Instead it's Circa and Yahoo! News Digest, the two apps that have turned out to be my go-to destination for news.
Granted none of them are perfect. Circa still largely caters to an American audience and it doesn't have a search feature which I really would like to have. Yahoo! News Digest, on the other hand, serves news summaries only twice a day (Patience is a virtue, it says!) and unlike Circa, its news is curated by Yahoo!'s algorithms (or Summly's, the app it acquired last year), making it more prone to grammatical errors (which I've seen quite a few) in the process. Yet, these two apps are great examples of news done right for mobile, providing users with bite-sized news and a compelling way to keep abreast of the latest developments.
Over time, newsreading apps can come to feel exhausting, or even depressing — vast caches of content you will never get around to reading, and couldn't finish even if you tried. Haven't you all felt the same? I saw it actually happening with Pocket. The idea of saving articles for later reading is well-intentioned no doubt, but it comes at the risk of not even reading them in the first place. At the time of deleting my Pocket account, I had close to 700 articles, out of which I had barely touched a one-fourth. With the app now gone, I make it a point to read the article then and there before moving on to the next. And in extreme cases, I put it on my Safari Reading List.
Google takes on read it later services with Stars:
Bookmarking is so passé; at least that's what Google seems to be conveying with its glorified bookmarking solution Stars. After an early version of the Chrome extension briefly appeared on the Web Store before it was quickly taken down, Android Police, which managed to give it a spin, says the extension is still in testing phase. Stars not only does let you organise your bookmarks in multiple folders (the folders can be shared with others too!), it also allows you to save articles and images for reading and viewing later. Is this a shot against Pocket and Pinterest? With Pocket now turning freemium recently, will this sway users to Stars once it's publicly available? Whatever be the case, I have been waiting for a Safari-like Reading List in Chrome like for ages (one of the reasons that prompted me to sign-up for Pocket in the first place), and I fervently hope this turns into a reality soon (at the Google I/O perhaps?).
Springpad notes app to shut down on June 25:
Springpad, a popular note-taking app, is shutting down on June 25. "At that point Springpad.com will no longer be available, all online and sync features of the mobile apps will stop working, and your personal data will no longer be stored on our servers," says the blog post announcing the move. While the Springpad team is readying an export tool to migrate your stuff to other rival services (Evernote, OneNote etc.), it goes on to show how excessive reliance on one single app can come back to bite you later. The most valuable takeaway in all such cases is to make sure the service (free or paid) you are signing up for has a proper export solution that allows for easy import into an alternative offering, to ensure you take periodical backups of the data you store, and to have a replacement app ready at hand. This makes the transition hassle-free, your productivity doesn't suffer and most importantly saves the time you spend scrambling for a substitute at the last minute.
CIA joins Facebook, Twitter!
Central Intelligence Agency, one of the world's top secret organisations, opened up on Friday following its social media debut on Facebook and Twitter. Its first tweet was both cryptic and humorous, saying it could neither confirm nor deny it was the CIA's first tweet. But if you think they are going to dish out classified information, sorry you've to look somewhere else:
Thank you for the @Twitter welcome! We look forward to sharing great #unclassified content with you.
— CIA (@CIA) June 7, 2014
Unfortunately for CIA, whistleblower website Wikileaks didn't seem to share the same sentiment:
.@CIA We look forward to sharing great classified info about you http://t.co/QcdVxJfU4X https://t.co/kcEwpcitHo More https://t.co/PEeUpPAt7F
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 7, 2014
And not by Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan Ambassador to the US, either:
The CIA has followed people for years. Now tweeple have a chance to follow @CIA
— Husain Haqqani (@husainhaqqani) June 6, 2014
In other news:
Telecom service provider Vodafone turns whistleblower; reveals that numerous government agencies have direct and open access to the conversations of its 381 million customers across the globe.
Death toll from Ebola virus infection continues to rise in West Africa, reports WHO.
First near-complete mapping of human proteome uncovers 193 new proteins.
China bulldozing mountains for creating human settlements; scientists warn of extensive environmental problems.
Plant and animal species becoming extinct at a rate of 1,000 times faster than before humans arrived on the scene, a new study reports.
Humans evolved weak muscles to feed brain's growth, according a new metabolic study.
Google flooded with more than 41,000 right to forget requests in the European Union following recent court ruling.
Online marketplace Ebay suffers a massive hack attack; advises users to reset their passwords immediately.
Psy's Gangnam Style becomes the first video to cross 2 billion views on YouTube.
Amazon's rumoured 3D smartphone to launch on June 18.
Chipmaker Intel unveils Broadwell, its most energy efficient next-gen processor yet; no longer requires a fan to keep your PCs cool.
Files, Microsoft Windows Phone 8's official file manager app, now available on Windows Phone Store.
Google debuts end-to-end encryption extension for Chrome; to be available on the Web Store once it's ready for primetime.
Samsung working with Facebook-owned Oculus on a media focussed virtual reality headgear.
Twitter undergoes a typography refresh; changes font from Helvetica Neue to Gotham.
Google outs Android 4.4.3 with redesigned dialler and other bug fixes; Motorola set to roll out the latest version to Moto E, G and X (wow!).
Instant messaging app WhatsApp returns to Windows Phone Store after it was pulled weeks earlier due to crashes and other technical glitches.
Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 to land in China after the nation lifts 14-year ban on sales of video game consoles.
Google unveils a new prototype of self-driving car that doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals; plans to deploy at least 100 of them this year. General Motors' executive terms it could be a competitive threat to auto industry.
YouTube access restored in Turkey after 67-day government ban.
Indian e-tailer Flipkart acquires online fashion portal Myntra for an estimated US$300 million as Amazon juggernaut gains momentum.