Apple Store App for iOS Updated Touch ID Support, Two-Step Verification [iOS Blog]
Apple today updated its Apple Store app for iOS to version 3.3, adding additional security and convenience features to the app. There’s now a “Touch ID” option in the Account section of the app that allows users to enable Touch ID for viewing orders, accessing EasyPay receipts, and making reservations at an Apple Store.
Previously, these sections of the app required an Apple ID password to be input whenever they were accessed, but now the app will ask for Touch ID verification in lieu of a password when Touch ID is toggled on. Before the update, Touch ID usage was limited to Apple Pay for making purchases, but with the expanded Touch ID capabilities, accessing various sections of the app to get order information is much quicker.
Accessing features like EasyPay Receipts before update on left, after on right
Today’s update also adds support for two-step verification within the Apple Store app.
What’s New in Version 3.3
– Use Touch ID to view orders, access EasyPay receipts, and make reservations at an Apple Store.
– Support for two-step verification, giving you extra security for your Apple ID.
Apple’s Apple Store app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Google Maps: offensive search results came from ‘online discussions’
Google is constantly scraping the internet to fill out its search results, but apparently using crowdsourced information can have its drawbacks. Over the last couple of days word spread that searching for certain racial slurs (guess) showed the White House as the top result, and now Google is offering an explanation why. Unlike the MapMaker-inserted Android/Apple logo prank, Google says the results popped up “because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place.” Other than blaming the internet, the team is updating its algorithm to fix the issue and is updating its ranking system to address “the majority” of those searches. Marketing Land found a few entries that led to the White House, none of which worked when we tried them today. It looks like certain offensive terms are now being blocked from showing results at all, although creative minds may be able to poke holes in the filter.
Source: Google Maps
Google Maps is getting new traffic alerts just in time for Memorial Day
Memorial Day is one of the most traffic-heavy days of the year in the United States, and odds are, many folks will be traveling from out of town to visit their friends and family. Just in time for everyone to hit the road this Monday, Google has pushed out an update to Google Maps that brings better traffic alerts and new route suggestions.
Once you input your destination, Maps will give you a quick explanation of upcoming traffic conditions that you might experience on your way. And if there happens to be some congestion on the road, Maps will also let you know how long you’ll be stuck in the jam. Just like in the previous version, Maps will still notify you if there’s an alternate route you should take. But now the app will tell you why the new route is recommended – whether it’s the fastest route available or avoids an accident.
The update is rolling out within the next few days, so you should have access to the new version before Monday rolls around.
Adobe says goodbye to its Photoshop Touch app, hello to Project Rigel
Adobe’s been keen on new mobile apps as of late, but today it announced the end of the road for one of its more popular pieces of software. As of next week, Photoshop Touch will no longer be available in iTunes, Google Play and other app libraries and the creative software company will not push new updates. Photoshop Touch was a bit of a tough sell at $10, especially when the new round of apps began rolling out for free. The last major update to Touch came in late 2012, and and in the time since, Adobe announced Photoshop Mix alongside its Ink and Slide drawing accessories. And there’s a mobile version of Lightroom now, too. With its big mobile push, the company has focused on a stable of apps dedicated to specific tasks, rather than an all-in-one solution like Photoshop Touch.
The eulogy for the aforementioned app was accompanied by a look at what’s next for editing photos on the go. Codenamed Project Rigel, Adobe’s plans for image retouching on a mobile device extends to massive 50-megapixel images. I’d surmise those stills would be accessed from a Creative Cloud library, but details are scarce at the moment. In the demo above, edits look quite smooth, but we’ll have to wait until we can put the final version through its paces before offering more detailed observations. While many of the new apps still aren’t available for Android, Adobe says its developing for that mobile OS, so here’s to hoping tools available to iOS users will see a wider rollout soon.
Filed under: Software
Source: Adobe
‘Ballistic Wallpaper’ bombproofs US combat shelters
At a recent DoD Lab Day, the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) unveiled a unique defensive product. Dubbed “ballistic wallpaper,” this amalgamation of kevlar fiber threading and flexible polymer film is designed to protect American soldiers when they take shelter in an urban warzone.
See, the problem is that when buildings and structures are hit with a tank round or guided munition, their walls will fragment as they implode, spraying anyone sheltering inside with debris. But this ballistic wallpaper stops that from occurring by preventing the wall from fragmenting in the first place. The product is still in its early testing phase though the ERDC has reportedly already bombed more that a few sheds to ensure the wallpaper’s functional integrity. There’s no word yet on when the material will actually make it to the front lines.
[Image Credit: US Army ERDC]
Filed under: Science
Via: Kitup
Source: US Army
Google prepping a lightweight Android OS called Brillo for the Internet of Things
Engadget reports via The Information that Google is working on Brillo, an Android-based OS designed to work on low-powered devices (think household appliances), also known as the Internet of Things.
Apparently, Brillo will only require 32 or 64 MB of RAM. As Engadget says, Lollipop requires much more at 512 MB.
The main benefit of this OS is that it would free OEMs from the burden of making their own IoT communication systems.
The post Google prepping a lightweight Android OS called Brillo for the Internet of Things appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Activité Pop Review: Hands-On With Withings’ Simple and Stylish $149 Activity Tracker [iOS Blog]
The Apple Watch is fantastic because it lets you receive notifications, communicate with friends, access apps from your iPhone, and record a wealth of activity-related data, but it’s also a device that requires a heavy amount of interaction.
It demands that you look at your wrist when you receive a notification, it taps you on the arm when you’re not standing up every hour, and it often reminds you about your fitness goals. It needs to be charged every night and it has to be taken off with every shower, so in short, it’s not a device you can slap on your wrist and forget about.
For that reason alone, not even taking cost into account, the Apple Watch is not a device that’s suitable for everyone. There are many people who may prefer smart devices and activity trackers that require far less interaction and our Withings Activité Pop review is aimed at those people.
The Activité Pop is almost the exact opposite of the Apple Watch. Where the Apple Watch commands your attention, the Pop unobtrusively integrates itself into your life — you don’t need to charge it, it’s waterproof so it can be worn at all times and never removed, and you only need to glance at it when you want to know the time or your progress towards your daily movement goal.
Design
The Activité Pop has a gender neutral design that harkens back to the simple plastic analog Swatch watches that were popular in the 80s and 90s. It’s a modern take on a classic watch with clean lines and colors that fit a range of tastes: Bright Azure, Shark Grey, and Wild Sand. The Pop is monochrome — watch faces match watch bands.
With the blue watch, for example, the face and band are both blue, giving it an understated look that’s not going to draw attention to your wrist. The available colors are benign enough to match most outfits, and the tasteful design doesn’t stick out at the gym or at the office.
I have a small wrist (137mm or about 5.4 inches) and the Pop fit well (if a bit loose) on the second-to-last wrist band hole. The watch face did not look overly large on my wrist, nor did it look too small on someone with a larger wrist. I found it to be similar in size (33mm) to the 38mm Apple Watch, but slightly wider and shorter due to the round face.
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New 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro Lives Up to Apple’s Claims, Reaches SSD Throughput Speeds of 2GB/s
Apple’s new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, unveiled on Tuesday, didn’t include a processor upgrade due to Broadwell delays, but it did get a Force Touch trackpad and one other major improvement — new PCIe-based flash storage that Apple says is 2.5 times faster than the flash storage in previous-generation machines, with throughput up to 2GB/s.
In benchmark testing conducted by French site MacGeneration [Google Translate], the entry-level 2.2GHz 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage lived up to Apple’s claims, demonstrating impressive read/write speeds that topped out at 2GB/s and 1.25GB/s, respectively, in QuickBench 4.0.
Those read/write speeds far exceed the read/write speeds achieved by the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Air, which also received faster flash storage that doubles the speeds available in previous-generation 13-inch MacBook Air machines. The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro’s performance is similar to the 13-inch MacBook Air.
At speeds that reach 2GB/s throughput, the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has the fastest storage of any of Apple’s notebooks. It took 14 seconds to transfer an 8.76GB file to the machine, compared to 32 seconds for the slower Retina MacBook. With small files, read/write speeds exceed a gigabyte per second.
Like the 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and 13-inch MacBook Air, the revamped 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro uses a solid state drive manufactured by Samsung. As noted by MacGeneration, it does not use the faster NVM Express SSD protocol that the 13-inch model was updated to, suggesting future machines could see even greater performance improvements with a swap to the next-generation protocol and with continued leaps in SSD technology.
Apple’s 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro is available from the online Apple Store at prices that start at $1,999. The notebooks continue to use Haswell processors, but should see performance boosts due to the faster solid state drives.
It’s now easier to buy stuff from YouTube video ads, huzzah?
A good 99.999 percent of the time, the adverts that run before your dogs sitting on cats video are irrelevant. But every once in a while, an ad hits and you want to know more. Beginning today, Google is making that discovery process way easier. According to the official AdWords blog, the new system is called TrueView. It allows users to not only find out more about pre-roll products but also purchase them directly through the ad. And you thought drunk-buying stuff over the internet was easy enough already.
As the post explains,
Thanks to the first-ever integration of the Google Merchant Center (GMC) into video ads, advertisers need only connect their campaign with a Merchant Center feed to dynamically add products to their in-stream videos, customized for each user through contextual and audience signals like geography and demographic info.
Basically that means advertisers will be able to serve up better, more relevant ads to users based on where they live and what they’re into. The new service is built upon the same-named TrueView cards that Google rolled out last month. However, this new version allows advertisers to link directly to the product information/purchase pages for each ad. What’s more, retailers can also upload their product offerings to the GMC and have the system link out to pages automatically based on the “contextual signals” described above. The program launched today and will slowly be rolling out to advertisers over the next few months.
Source: Google Adwords
Apple Watch support is coming to IBM’s enterprise apps
For the past year or so, Apple and IBM have collaborated on the MobileFirst for iOS project, a series of 22 enterprise-specific apps for iOS. These apps are designed to help service professionals better perform their duties but for some, constantly fishing out a phone or tablet to access those apps actually hindered their efforts. That’s why Apple announced through its website today that three of these apps — Hospital RN, Field Connect and Incident Aware — will now work on the Apple Watch.
Essentially, this new functionality transfers the app’s push notifications from the user’s mobile device to the Apple watch. In the case of Hospital RN, for example, those notifications “will alert nurses to review new display patient requests, changes in lab status, safety alerts, and prioritized task lists for immediate action disposition,” according to the Apple website. And for Field Connect, which allows field technicians to better coordinate their efforts, these pushes can provide “late-breaking news on severe weather, outages, hazards, and crew member information.” The same goes for the law enforcement-focused Incident Aware app. Of course, these are the same notifications delivered the phone or tablet-based versions…just pushed to Apple Watch. More MobileFirst apps are likely to follow suit in the coming months.
Via: 9 to 5 Mac
Source: Apple
AIVAnet 