Google promised software for wearables computers, and it didn't disappoint.
Today Google announced Android Wear, its platform for smartwatch and wearable technology development. While Google has not yet released the full software development kit (SDK) for Android wearables, we can get a good sense of what Android smartwatches will be capable of by digging into the principles in the developer preview.
Pick A Card
Android Wear user interface will be based on cards. Cards are applets (smaller versions of full smartphone or tablet apps) that deliver only the most relevant information for that app. Different app cards will be stacked on top of each other on an Android Wear device and users navigate between them by swiping up and down on the watch.
To navigate to actionable items within a card app, users will swipe horizontally. For instance, if I am taking an American Airlines flight from Boston to San Francisco, the card may pop up telling me that my flight is ready for check-in. To perform the check-in, I will swipe right on the Android Wear device and tap check-in.
Cards will have images in the background to differentiate between which applets are in use and what actions are being performed. So, if I get a message from my boss about a meeting in one card, I can have an image associated with messaging in that card. If I swipe down to my calendar, I can have a time related image in that card. If I swipe right within that calendar, I can confirm the meeting and so forth.
Contextual, Ambient & On Demand
Android Wear devices will be completely aware of its users surroundings and be able to deliver two types of notifications through apps: contextual and on demand. Google calls these “Suggest” cards.
Contextual apps use an Android wearable's sensors combined with those of a smartphone to deliver information based on what the user is doing. This is totally congruent with Google Now, the Google service that attempts to anticipate what a user is doing, wants to do or intends to search for in the near future.
For instance, today I went to a meeting and I looked up the address for it before I left the house. On my Android smartphone, Google knew that I searched for the address and already had a Google Now card queued up with directions and navigation to the meeting.
The contextual stream in Android Wear will be able to perform a lot of these same types of functions by reading the user's location and state and delivering information that just shows up on the watch without necessarily creating a vibrating notification. The information is just there ready to be glanced at on the watch.
Demand cards are the opposite of contextual cards. These cards are present on the device, but have to -- For more information read the original article here.
Why, yes, Sony's new virtual reality headset does bear a striking resemblance to the Oculus Rift, that scrappy upstart turned king of the virtual reality hill you've been hearing so much about.
After its fast ascension powered by a healthy run on Kickstarter, the Rift is currently synonymous with virtual reality (VR) gaming, even though the system isn't publicly available (though that may change soon now that the company has announced its second developer kit). By all accounts, virtual reality is set to revolutionize immersive virtual experiences in a way that the faltering promise of 3D gaming could never quite deliver.
With the PlayStation 4 setting the pace for next-gen consoles, Sony's newly-announced Project Morpheus could do the same thing for commercial VR. Microsoft ships every Xbox One ships with a Kinect (these days, little more than a glorified Siri for your living room), but Sony might just have the jump on the next big thing.
Learning From Last Gen
Interestingly, Sony's actually been tinkering around with a VR headset since as early as 2011, when it unveiled a buzzy but not very functional dual-OLED prototype at CES. An iteration of that “personal 3D viewer,” the HMZ-T1, actually went on sale abroad (and apparently you can still buy it on Amazon for a meager $758.88!)
Four years ago, interactive peripherals like Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's own PlayStation Move began paving the way for VR, acclimating gamers to immersive oddities like motion-tracking and gesture controls. But back then, Microsoft's 3D sensor was a smash hit while the Playstation Move floundered. The disparity in that department is now clearer than ever: The Kinect is bundled with every new Xbox One and Sony has since admitted the PlayStation Move was a mistake.
For all its quirks, the Kinect spearheaded motion-based gameplay, effortlessly stealing the wind from Nintendo's sails and making Sony's awkward glowing bauble look downright foolish. But it's Opposite Day for this latest generation of console gaming. Now the Xbox One wants to be the casual-friendly living room entertainment option (at a $100 premium, no less), while the PS4 is, in some ways, a return to Sony's roots of wooing core gamers with an open set of policies and indie-friendly platform, leaving unwanted peripherals out of the box.
Project Morpheus Vs. The Oculus Rift
Console wars aside, could a proprietary VR peripheral compete against the Oculus Rift's grassrootsy success? The answer is "most definitely"—especially if the games are there.
The two VR headsets face opposite challenges. Oculus built a hardware wonder with the Rift, but now the nascent, still-not-commercially-available platform needs software that makes it shine. Oculus admits that convincing AAA title makers to gamble on an entirely new, mind-bending medium has been a challenge.
In Sony's corner, the corporate behemoth has no trouble drumming up quality titles—after all, it's owned as many as 16 game development studios tasked with crafting in-house PlayStation hits like "Uncharted" and -- For more information read the original article here.
At this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, virtual reality wunderkind Oculus unveiled the second-generation of its much-buzzed-about hardware, the Oculus Rift. The second edition of the Oculus Rift VR headset, known as the DK2, is still very much a development kit and not yet ready for a wide consumer release.
The very first Oculus Rift took the gaming world by storm, but with low resolution and dizzying motion blur issues, the headset had obvious room for improvement. The DK2 takes the baton from the "Crystal Cove" prototype that Oculus showed off earlier this year, which addresses many of those core complaints.
So what's new with the DK2? Oculus has upped the resolution to 960 x 1080 for each of the Rift's two visual fields, for starters. The new DK2 also includes a custom-built camera that faces the player to track motion depth and makes efforts to minimize those pesky wires. Now only one 10' cable extends from the Rift, which splits into an HDMI and a USB cable to provide video and power, respectively.
As for the Oculus Rift's dizziness problem, the DK2 employs low-persistence OLED to reduce motion blur and judder, which Oculus pinpoints as the two main causes for so-called "simulator sickness," which we definitely experienced in our time trying out the Rift. Beyond those major improvements, the DK2 ships with a built-in latency tester and an SDK with engine integrations for the Unreal Development Kit, Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 4.
According to the Oculus blog announcement:
"DK2 isn't identical to the consumer Rift, but the fundamental building blocks for great VR are there. All the content developed using DK2 will work with the consumer Rift. And while the overall experience still needs to improve before it's consumer-ready, we're getting closer everyday—DK2 is not the Holodeck yet, but it's a major step in the right direction."
There's still no word on a release date for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, but it's still very much in active development. The company may accelerate its efforts now that Sony has officially announced its own VR headset to compete with the Rift, called "Project Morpheus," but like Oculus, Sony has no further price or release details since that system is similarly in its early stages.
In the meantime, developers interested in exploring the vast, weird world of VR can pre-order the DK2, said to ship in July, for $350.
Twitter is rolling out a new feature that makes it easier to view videos shared on the service, the New York Times reports. Like photos, in-line videos will begin to automatically preview in the timeline, and you can view them in fullscreen by clicking on the play button overlaid on the video.
Short videos shared using Twitter's Vine service already had these features. Significantly, these new videos appear to be designed to run directly on Twitter, hosted on the social network. Twitter had previously only hosted users' photos on its site, relying on third-party services like YouTube or Vimeo for videos.
The National Basketball Association was one of the first to use the tool. During Wednesday's evening games, the NBA posted videos taken directly from the live games and encouraged those who clicked on the video to “watch live now.” A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the company is starting this test with Twitter Amplify partners, including the NBA, and all users can see the new video previews on mobile apps and twitter.com.
The new feature could appeal to advertisers and TV partners Twitter has worked to bolster relationships with. The company is putting an increased focus on visual content, including adding inline image previews last fall. The goal appears to be to capitalize on the “second screen” experience, where people use Twitter on smartphones or tablets while watching television shows.
Update: An earlier version of this story indicated that the links to original videos still appeared in the code of Twitter's website, thus were viewed in a wrapper designed to keep the user on Twitter rather than NBA.com, however the company told The New York Times it was hosted on-site. We've reached out to Twitter for clarification.
In case you were wondering if Google Glass is ready for prime time, here's the final word on that, straight from the horse's mouth: It's not.
The Glass team took to Google Plus (where else?) to defend its smart facewear gadget against a whole host of accusations … er, “myths” … that have been circulating about the device. Nestled in among them was Myth 4, an item that speaks to its relative lack of polish and bugs.
Myth 4—Glass is ready for prime time
Glass is a prototype, and our Explorers and the broader public are playing a critical role in how it's developed. In the last 11 months, we've had nine software updates and three hardware updates based, in part, on feedback from people like you. Ultimately, we hope even more feedback gets baked into a polished consumer product ahead of being released. And, in the future, today's prototype may look as funny to us as that mobile phone from the mid 80s.
The company's position should come as no surprise. Google has always been clear that the current model of Glass is an early version—it even dubbed it Project Glass and made it only available as a developer release. The only thing missing was a neon sign slapped on it blinking “prototype!”
But rounding up this laundry list of issues and adding point-by-point responses is an odd tack to take, especially from a big tech player with a penchant for unleashing beta products and services. It even posted an etiquette guide last month, in the hopes of minimizing any "glasshole" behavior of its users. All that suggests the company's getting a little tired of the barbs pitched at its pet project.
The litany of “myths” covers some common critiques, from Glass' $1,500 priceyness and presumably well-heeled target audience to distraction and privacy. Especially privacy. Out of the 10 myths rebutted by Google, no fewer than five touch on privacy and surveillance concerns:
Myth 2: Glass is always on and recording everything
Myth 5: Glass does facial recognition (and other dodgy things)
Myth 7: Glass is the perfect surveillance device
Myth 9: Glass is banned... EVERYWHERE
Myth 10: Glass marks the end of privacy
Hey, Google—defensive much?
The Google+ post likens Glass to smartphones, the reigning and ubiquitous mobile devices with integrated cameras. What it fails to address is that phones aren't always poised and ready to shoot photos or video, or that someone holding their phone up in your general direction is usually a pretty good tip off he or she is about to immortalize your likeness. If someone is wearing Glass, it's pointing wherever they're looking—and the device still has no LED to alert others when it's recording. (Its screen may light up, but that's not remotely the same thing.)
Here's hoping the Glass crew can put as much effort into actually resolving these issues as it did defending itself against them.
Image by -- For more information read the original article here.
What do popular projects like Docker, Heroku's Force.com and Cloud Foundry's (Go)Router all have in common? They're all written in Go (a.k.a. "golang"), Google's five-year-old programming language.
While languages like Java continue to dominate programming, new models have emerged that are better suited to modern computing, particularly in the cloud. Go, written expressly for the cloud, has been growing in popularity because of its mastery of concurrent operations and the beauty of its construction.
Cool With The Cool Kids
Google's mascot for its Go programming language.
By some measures, Google's Go programming language is a non-factor in development. Google Trends, which measures general interest in a search term, hardly registers a blip for Go compared to more established programming languages like Java, C++ and JavaScript.
But this doesn't tell the whole story. While it's basically impossible to figure out the number of jobs requiring Go skills, due to its generic name, there are a number of sources (see here, here and here) that suggest Go is gaining momentum as an important programming language for employers.
The best leading indicator of Go adoption, however, is its rise in open source development.
According to Redmonk analyst Donnie Berkholz's analysis of Ohloh, which tracks 600,000 open source projects, Go adoption is real and growing:
While nearly 1% of Ohloh-tracked projects may seem small, Berkholz puts it in context:
Go is rapidly closing in on 1% of total commits and half a percent of projects and contributors. While the trend is obviously interesting, at first glance numbers well under one percent look inconsequential relative to overall adoption. To provide some context, however, each of the most popular languages on Ohloh (C, C++, Java, JavaScript) only constitutes ~10% of commits and ~5% of projects and contributors. That means Go, a seemingly very minor player, is already used nearly one tenth as much in FOSS [free and open-source software] as the most popular languages in existence.
This means, of course, that Go is becoming a really big deal, especially if we consider the outsized importance of some of its most visible projects on GitHub, like Docker.
Why Go For Go?
Google's Go language is, not surprisingly, particularly well-suited to cloud development. But according to Rob Pike, one of Go's designers, Go's creators were originally trying to improve C++ but found it "too difficult to couple [necessary] concurrent operations with C++'s control structures, and in turn that made it too hard to see the real advantages." Eventually he gave it up because "C++ just made it all seem too cumbersome."
Go succeeds in part because it makes code composition elegant and easy, as Pike continues:
Go isn't all-encompassing. You don't get everything built in. You don't have precise control of every nuance of execution. For instance, you don't have RAII. Instead you get a garbage collector. You don't even get a memory-freeing function.What you're given is a set of powerful -- For more information read the original article here.
The poster writes about the upcoming MacBook Pro line as well as a new 12" notebook that has previously been predicted. A MacRumors reader provides a summary translation of the post:
It's not entirely clear where the 12" Apple notebook will fit in the product line. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo first predicted in October that Apple would be releasing a 12" slim MacBook with a Retina Display this year:
1. MacBook Air updates are coming soon; MacBook Pro updates won't occur until September.
2. He discusses a new 12 inch notebook without fan assembly. It comes with a new trackpad design that doesn't include the mechanical button, as we do on current MacBooks.
3. An Apple watch device does exist but still in prototype stage, so its announcement won't come anytime soon.
We expect the unprecedented 12” model will boast both the portability of the 11” model, and productivity of the 13” model. The high resolution display will also offer the outstanding visual experience of the Retina MacBook Pro. The offering will likely be lighter and slimmer than the existing MacBook Air to further highlight ease of portability in the cloud computing era.The buttonless trackpad design that the author describes may be related to a recent patent application by Apple which describes a buttonless trackpad design using an array of sensors and an actuator to mimic the function and tactile feedback of the current trackpad.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.