Dumb car stereos are about to truly get smart as the automotive solutions from Google and Apple hit the market.

The long wait for the first aftermarket head units that run Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay is finally over. Pioneer is shipping its entry-level AVH-4100NEX unit for around $700.

Every so often something comes along that changes your life and stays with you forever. For Charlie Jane Anders and me, it was Star Blazers.

Charlie Jane Anders’ love letter to Star Blazers is one of my favorite pieces on the Internet this week. I encourage everyone to read it.

I’m in my mid-forties, and I’m squarely in the first Star Wars generation. I was seven when that movie came out, and my friends and I all collected the action figures and played Star Wars in our back yards, pretending we had light sabers. But there was a sci-fi TV series that meant more to me even than Star Wars, and it was Star Blazers.

Anders explains the psychology behind the show — something inferred through characters’ actions throughout the series, but never specifically articulated. Something that’s stuck with me ever since.

Years later, I lived in Japan and learned Japanese, and became pretty familiar with the concepts of “gambaru” (doing your best, no matter what) and “gaman suru” (remaining strong, in spite of all temptation and suffering). The characters on Star Blazers modeled those qualities for me, even with the sometimes awful dubbing — they seemed both stoic and passionate, and ready to beat the odds over and over.

Star Blazers was a syndicated show broadcast every afternoon out of Boston (just like Anders, I grew up in Boston). In the days before cable TV, when we were relegated to whatever channels the rabbit ears on top of the TV could pick up, Star Blazers came in on a high-number UHF channel, more staticky than some of the other stations we watched, but still viewable.

Star Blazers was incredibly gripping: High melodrama in space, humans trying to save the Earth from destruction at the hands of a callous alien foe. But it was also gorgeous to watch, a resurrected World War II-era battleship recycled as a starship complete with Wave Motion Gun, an energy weapon that occupied the entire bow of the vessel.

When I was four I remember watching Speed Racer raptly, running around the living room to the theme song: “Go Speed Racer goooo!” I was also an avid Battle of the Planets fan.

Star Blazers came along at a very formative time in my life. I gradually began to realize that my other most treasured cartoon series were made in Japan. Thus began my life-long love of Japanese animation, or anime, something my wife and I share and that we’ve instilled in our kids.

• $21.99 – Download Star Blazers season 1 on iTunes

Some areas of Google+ are great for immersing yourself in a topic, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed when the signal to noise ratio tips.

Once you gotten yourself settled in to Google+, by which I mean your account has been completed and you’ve either located your current friends or gone out to find some new ones through Google’s recommendations, it’s time to really make the service yours. Google+ has some terrific tools filling your stream with as much or as little information as you choose, and that content can either be narrowed down to specific topics or a firehose of whatever is popular on the service right now. If you so choose, there are even tools to set yourself up as a broadcaster of exciting content. All you need to know is which buttons to push, and how to turn it all off if you’ve made a mistake.

We’re going to explore some of the content-specific portions of Google+ here. Using Communities, exploring What’s Hot, and how to set up and manage a Page.

When you pair an Apple Watch with an iPhone running iOS 8.2, it looks like a new “Activity” app miraculously appears.

We’ve seen a lot about the Apple Watch so far, there are still a few surprises in store. Take the Apple Watch app that appeared after updating to iOS 8.2 — it’s not the only new app there. There’s also an “Activity” app designed to work with an Apple Watch, but it doesn’t appear until after you’ve paired a watch.

The app was uncovered by iOS developer Hamza Sood on Twitter:

So the Fitness app does exist on 8.2, it’s just hidden until you connect an Apple Watch pic.twitter.com/R1BgnKYRHe

— Hamza Sood (@hamzasood) March 12, 2015

Here’s how the Fitness app looks once it’s configured from the Apple Watch: pic.twitter.com/nYnW5X8AxU

— Hamza Sood (@hamzasood) March 13, 2015

It emulates the circular fitness tracking language of the Apple Watch, but offers deeper analysis and data than would be reasonable on the Watch’s smaller display. It also gives us our first look at the achievements that will be attainable in the app, though what exactly the stars and circles and squiggles all mean isn’t clear from Sood’s screenshots.

Apple Watch pre-orders and in-store previews will open up on April 10, with the watch becoming available two weeks later on April 24.

Via: 9to5Mac

Notification Center is a way to collect all your widgets and alerts all in one place.

Since its debut in iOS 5, Apple has included first-party widgets, removed them, then added support for third-party widgets. Apple has added a missed tab and then taken it away. Apple has added predictive widgets — Notification Center can now tell you how long it will take to get to your next likely destination — but they haven’t expanded on the concept. Apple also added Control Center to iOS 7. Instead of bundling toggles sliders, buttons, and shortcuts into the top-down Notification Center, they created a new, separate bottom-up drawer instead.

iOS 8 did a lot of clean up, and added the ‘edit’ mechanism so you could add and manage Today view widgets, but what else would you like to see Apple do with Notification Center in iOS 9?

• Clear all button at the top
• Super-swipe to clear notification with one gesture (like Mail)
• Reliably clear notifications when alerts are viewed in-app.
• Collapse multiple similar notifications into a group that can be expanded
• Double tap notification to pin and highlight
• Tap and hold notification to set Reminder
• Sort by priority (based on system-wide VIP)
• Show recent Siri results
• More predictive widgets
• System-level widget collapse/expand control

The Apple Watch is going to change the way many of us interact with notifications, moving the banners from the pocket to the wrist, but for anything we miss, Notification Center’s dropdown might become even more important.

So, if Apple asked you what you’d like them to put on the bulletin board for Notification Center in iOS 9, what would you say?