The HTC 10, explained by HTC’s VP of Design

We sat down with the manufacturer’s VP of design to talk about what makes this phone so good.

“The HTC 10 is very recognizable as an HTC phone,” says HTC VP of Design Claude Zellweger, “but it’s also very distinguishable as a new direction for our design language.”

We talked with the design lead about the company’s latest flagship phone — the new HTC 10 — on the evening following the launch, and he wasn’t shy about mentioning Apple or Samsung either. We’ve got the interview on video, so make sure to hit the play button!

Zellweger tells us that HTC wanted to really excel at the basic functions that people frequently use with their phones. One of the areas HTC worked really hard on, in regards to design, is the camera. The HTC 10 packs the camera without a huge bump and is nicely integrated with the rest of the body. He says the chamfered edges and the front glass with 2.5D curved edges are also part of the design to make the phone comfortable to hold with your hands and touch with your fingers.

When asked what was the most challenging aspect of designing the HTC 10, Zellweger claimed it was making the design look effortless. He points out that the camera, audio jack, and USB-C port are symmetrical on the phone, and while most people think that’s simple to do, Zellweger says a lot of work actually goes into that.

Zellwegger said that the HTC 10 is for people who want a choice.

“If you want an iPhone, buy an iPhone. If you want to buy a Samsung, you can buy a Samsung. But this is the true alternative,” he says while holding up the HTC 10. If you want a phone that doesn’t scream out “me too,” then he recommends checking out the HTC 10.

Look out for our full review of the HTC 10 in the very near future. In the meantime, let us know what you think of the HTC exec’s thoughts in the comments!

HTC 10

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GoPro just poached the designer behind Apple’s Bondi Blue iMac

GoPro – a company that had such a poor Q4 2015 that it reduced its own projections for 2016 by hundreds of million of dollars and laid off a chunk of its staff – has managed to steal a longtime designer out from underneath Apple.

His name is Daniel Coster. In an official release, GoPro said Coster will help “influence all aspects of design at GoPro” – and that includes both hardware and software. His departure from Apple is significant not only because GoPro (which hasn’t released a flagship camera since 2014) poached him but also hardly anyone ever strays from Jony Ive’s design studio. It’s basically a close-knit group of industrial designers.

Ive is Apple’s famous design chief who was bumped up from “Senior Vice President of Design” to “Chief Design Officer” in early 2015. It’s a new company position, and it means Ive is now able to hand off all managerial duties for both the industrial and software design units to two new leaders named Richard Howarth (Vice President of Industrial Design) and Alan Dye (Vice President of User Interface Design).

Coster, who came to Apple in 1993, has been with Apple for nearly as long as Ive. According to Walter Isaacson, who wrote the official Steve Jobs biography, Coster was once considered Ive’s top deputy. He and Ive even sketched out the plastic sea-green casing of the futuristic iMac G3. That machine later became known as the Bondi Blue iMac. Coster is on several other Apple design patents.

Wikipedia

During the last 20 years, only one industrial designer – Doug Satzger – has left Ive’s design studio. Satzger went over to Intel to head up that company’s design group. As for Coster, it’s assumed he will help GoPro on its next action camera, thought to be called the Hero 5. GoPro is also working in a 360-degree camera and a quadcopter, so it looks like the ex-Apple designer will have his hands full at his new gig.

Nick Woodman, GoPro’s CEO, has blamed GoPro’s struggles on software and claimed the company is trying to make it easier for users to edit footage both faster and automatically. GoPro even recently acquired two companies behind popular editing apps. With this new strategy in place, and with Coster now on board, it’ll be interesting to see how well GoPro does going forward.

PayPal takes on Visa and Mastercard with PayPal Credit, and interest starts at 0%

Online payment firm PayPal has announced an addition to its services in the form of a credit system that takes on the credit card companies, but with a twist; there will be no interest to pay on online purchases over £150, as long as you pay off the balance in a four month period.

That means you can spread the cost of an expensive item online by paying in instalments, with no interest accrued.

It also applies each and every time you purchase a product online of that value or above.

Items under £150 or balances unpaid after the four month period are subject to the standard variable rate, which is currently 17.9 per cent interest per annum.

In addition, PayPal has partnered will a number of online stores to use PayPal Credit to pay for other items in instalments over an even longer period. The online sites for Blacks, Chain Reaction Cycles, Dyson, Millets, Samsung, Simple Games and Ultimate Outdoors each offer different promotions for PayPal users approved to use the new credit system.

Samsung, for example, offers payment plans to PayPal credit customers who want to pay for an item over 6, 12, 18 and 24 months at a reduced interest rate of 14.9 per cent.

These offers can be chosen at checkout on each of the partnering retailers’ online store pages.

PayPal Credit is available to all existing and new PayPal account holders. Customers need to apply online and, if successful, a credit limit will be added to their regular accounts.

“For consumers, it’s about giving them more choice and convenience when shopping online. For businesses, we are enabling them to grow and offer their customers greater payment flexibility,” said Cameron McLean, managing director of PayPal UK.

“It’s a sign of things to come. As a newly-independent company, we will continue to partner with retailers to find new, improved ways for people to pay.”

You can find out more and apply for PayPal Credit on the dedicated website at PayPal.com.

Vine’s new Watch button lets you playback every Vine on a channel

Vine has introduced the much-welcomed ability to watch all your favourite Viner’s clips without having to scroll back.

Anyone who has used Twitter-owned Vine is likely familiar with the experience of discovering an awesome Vine personality (aka Viner) and then spending hours going back on that channel. Unfortunately, if the Viner has been around since the app exploded in popularity a few years ago, it can take many tedious hours to scroll from clip to clip until you reach the beginning of their content.

Also, the app could crash or your thumbs could get sore, and that means you’d lose your place and have to scroll back all over again. Well, that’s not the case any longer. Vine now lets you kick back and watch an entire channel with one tap. The iOS and Android app has updated with a new “watch” button that appears on every channel. It basically lets you playback every Vine on that channel.

You will see it on individual channels and on Vine’s curated Explore section channels. You can also select which order the Vines will playback, such as chronological order, reverse chronological order, or by popularity. Vine published the following demo (on Vine, of course):

All we can say is: Yaaas!

Facebook shows how you’ll be able to auto-tag friends in videos

On stage at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, the company did a quick demo of an upcoming auto-tagging feature for video. Using the artificial-intelligence-based recognition technology Facebook already uses to identify your friends in photos, the social network will be able to determine who’s in your videos.

It’s unclear so far when this feature will roll out, but so far we know that it can not only find people in a video, but also pinpoint in the video player’s timeline the exact moment that person shows up in the frame. Users will then be able to click on a person’s tag and go directly to where they appear on camera.

From there, Facebook is working to get its AI computer vision implementation to recognize not only people in videos, but also objects, and in real-time. To that end, the company did a quick demonstration in which its technology was able to identify a cat, fireworks and food videos.

Source: Facebook

CDC confirms Zika virus causes severe birth defects

Following a previous study around the dangers of the Zika virus to pregnant women, the CDC has just confirmed that the virus causes serious fetal brain defects. “This study marks a turning point in the Zika outbreak,” said CDC director Tom Frieden in a statement. “It is now clear that the virus causes microcephaly.” He added that the agency will launch studies to see if microcephaly, the condition that leads to children having smaller heads than normal, is just the “tip of the iceberg” for potential health issues.

The CDC considered evidence from several recent studies about Zika’s effects and then confirmed their results to come to its conclusion. Additionally, the agency made it it clear that women infected with Zika aren’t guaranteed to have children with birth defects — they’re just at a far greater risk.

Now that it’s confirmed this causal link, the CDC says it will start looking into other questions around the Zika virus outbreak. At this point, what we don’t know about the virus outweighs the little that we do. The agency still recommends that pregnant women avoid traveling to countries where Zika is present, and if they have to travel they should take care to prevent mosquito bites and sexual transmission of the virus.

Zika has already appeared in more than 40 countries, and CDC officials also say mosquitos carrying the virus have reached 30 states.

Source: CDC

Journalist Matthew Keys gets two years for aiding Anonymous

Convicted journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced to 24 months in prison in federal court room. Keys was found guilty in October 2015 of giving Anonymous login credentials that allowed a member of the group to deface a Los Angeles Times article back in 2013. Keys contends that he was working on an article about Anonymous and did not help the hacktivist collective gain access to the publication’s site.

Keys was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Assistant U.S. Attorney, Matthew Segal had asked the court to sentence Keys to five yeas. Instead, he was sentenced to 24 months in jail which will be followed by two years of supervised release. After the sentencing, Keys tweeted that his lawyers would file a motion to stay the sentence.

2 years. We plan on filing a motion to stay the sentence.

— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) April 13, 2016

At the time of the hack, Keys was working for Tribune Media-owned Fox 40 in Sacramento. He was convicted of sharing the login credentials of the company’s CMS with Anonymous. Hacker “Sharpie” then used the information to deface an article that was live on the LA Times site for 40 minutes before an editor noticed the digital vandalism and fixed the issue.

Via: Buzzfeed

Drop Google Drive files and GIFs into your Yahoo emails

Yahoo’s been busy bulking up its Mail app and its latest feature follows their strategy to play nice with other email and service providers. Now you can include files from Google Drive and even drop in Tumblr GIFs.

Yahoo’s playing catch up with email features, considering Gmail has had Drive integration on Android since 2014 and Dropbox since May 2015. Regular improvements show that Yahoo’s not content with its older experience.

Access to Drive along with a few OS-specific minor improvements is the latest in a chain of feature additions to Mail since Yahoo launched their new version of the app last Fall. Automatically adding your last tweet to the footer of your email is odd, but the other features are solid. Yahoo added Gmail to the slew of email services Mail can manage back in December, opened up customization for the app’s swipe interface in January, added link previews last month, and just last week announced a partnership with Dropbox.

Letting you drop in GIFs is a cute bonus, especially showing which are trending, but it’s becoming a *de rigeur* addition to chat and communication apps. At least it’ll save your fingers some copy/paste action. The Mail update is live on Android and should be landing soon on iOS.

Source: Yahoo

Apple Loses Industrial Design Team Member Daniel Coster to GoPro

Apple’s industrial design team is losing one of its core members, with longtime designer Daniel Coster moving on to join GoPro as the company’s Vice President of Design. GoPro announced the news in a press release this morning, which outlines Coster’s role. He will “influence all aspects of design” at GoPro, ranging from software to surfaces, reporting directly to GoPro founder Nick Woodman.

“Ironically, Danny and I first met in December, 2001, on the beach in Sayulita, Mexico at the very start of the five month surfing trip where I developed and tested the first GoPro prototype,” said Woodman. “His design pedigree speaks for itself, but I will say that we feel energized to have him join GoPro.”

“I’m honored to join the GoPro team,” said Coster. “This extraordinary company is close to the hearts of so many people around the world. Its brand and products inspire us to capture and share our lives’ most important moments. I’m excited to shape the future with the incredible team at GoPro.”

Coster has long been a member of Apple’s secretive industrial design team, working alongside Jony Ive for over 20 years. GoPro’s press release suggests Coster has contributed to a range of Apple products, from the iPhone 4 to the iPad wireless keyboard.

Apple’s industrial design team is known for being a tight-knit group of 19 that has worked together for several years. In a 2015 interview, Ive told the New Yorker that only two designers had left his team over the past 15 years, one because of ill health.

In an interview with New Zealand magazine Stuff Nation, Coster said that he wants explore his new opportunity at GoPro and spend more time with his family and friends.
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A Look at Microsoft’s Upcoming Word Flow Keyboard, Now in Closed Beta Testing

Rumors in January suggested Microsoft was working to bring its Word Flow Windows Phone keyboard to iOS, and now the company’s keyboard project has entered a private beta testing phase. Starting this week, a limited number of testers have been given access to the Word Flow iOS keyboard.

MacRumors reader Ruben has shared some images and information with us, giving us our first look at the design and the features Microsoft plans to implement. According to Ruben, the keyboard is “incredibly reliable for a beta,” with features like sounds, themes, and the much-anticipated one-handed “Arc” mode, accessed with a drag gesture.

In its default mode, the Word Flow keyboard looks a lot like a standard iOS keyboard, but its one-handed mode sets it apart from other offerings. With one-handed mode turned on, the keyboard morphs into a half-moon shape, arranging the letters to one side of the device for easy thumb access. The Word Flow keyboard supports both standard typing and swipe-based typing, as is one on third-party keyboards like Swipe and SwiftKey.

Standard keyboard features like auto correction and word prediction are included, with options to enable or disable a word learning feature that improves word predictions by sending keyboard usage information to Microsoft. Multiple Word Flow themes are included, including light and dark options, and there are also tools for creating custom themes based on images taken from the iPhone’s Photo Library.

Additional information shared by iMore yesterday covers other features like quick access to Contacts through autofill and a free built-in image library that Microsoft plans to add to over time.

Microsoft has not yet publicly announced the Word Flow keyboard or shared details on when it might see a release.

Tag: Microsoft
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