Dropbox is adding several new and improved productivity tools
The cloud file storage service Dropbox announced a large number of new and upcoming productivity features, including creating Microsoft Office documents on mobile devices, a document scanner and more.
The company offered up some details on these new features in a blog post:
- Scan documents in Dropbox: With document scanning, you can now use the Dropbox mobile app to capture and organize scans from whiteboards, receipts, and sketches, so your ideas are right at your fingertips. Dropbox Business users can even search inside the scans.
- Create Microsoft Office docs on mobile: If your idea is better suited to an Office doc than a napkin, you can click the new plus button to create Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files instantly from your mobile device. They’ll be saved to your Dropbox automatically. “The new plus button in the Dropbox iOS app adds a convenient way to create and save Office documents on the go, helping people work better together, wherever they are,” said Rob Howard, Director of Office Marketing at Microsoft.
- Manage photos from your computer: For Dropbox Basic users who are using their phones to capture memories alongside ideas, we’re also changing the way camera uploads works. You’ll need to connect a computer to your Dropbox account so you can better access, organize, or remove your photos and avoid running out of space.
- Share files and folders from the desktop: We’re cutting steps from sharing and saving you time with our desktop sharing experience. Now when you right-click on a file or folder in your Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, you can share right from the desktop, without redirecting to the web, or copying a link to email.
- Add comments to a specific part of a file: It can be hard to make sense of all the feedback you get within emails, chat, and text. So we’re introducing a feature that’s usually only found in design software: adding comments to a specific part of a file. Give precise feedback by highlighting a piece of text or an image anywhere within a file preview.
- Preview earlier versions: Version history is an easy way to recover old files if accidents happen, or if you just want to revisit an idea. Now you can also preview prior file versions before you restore them, so you know you’ve got the right version.
- Share with more control: Sometimes you just need to work with a select group of collaborators. Our simple, yet powerful new sharing features give you more control. Now you can share a single file with specific people, who will need to log in to see it. And with view-only access for shared folders, now available for all users, you can also let people follow along.
Dropbox adds that this is just the first step in improving its productivity features and “there’s lots more to come” in this area.
Google introduces Android Basics Nanodegree program for those with no experience
Following up on the previous Nanodegree program, Google has introduced an Android Basics Nanodegree program aimed to help complete beginners. There is no experience required for this, and the program will open this fall to all Udacity students. Google will also be offering a chance to win a scholarship for the Career-track Android Nanodegree.
From Google’s announcement:
Upon completing the Android Basics Nanodegree, you also have the opportunity to continue your learning with the Career-track Android Nanodegree (for intermediate developers). The first 50 participants to finish the Android Basics Nanodegree have a chance to win a scholarship for the Career-track Android Nanodegree. You now have a complete learning path to help you become a technology entrepreneur or most importantly, build very cool Android apps, for yourself, your communities, and even the world.
It is great to see Google continuing to help people get started with developing apps and more. Would a program like this interest you? Let us know what you think in the comments.
theScore esports now keeps you up to date with competitive Call of Duty, Starcraft and more
Fans of competitive Call of Duty and Starcraft II will want to check out the latest update to theScore esports. The app now tracks matches from those franchises, along with Blizzard’s Hearthstone digital card game. The app also features a new “spoiler mode” to hides match results and alerts until you’re ready to see them.
Here’s what’s new in theScore esports:
- Call of Duty, Starcraft II, and Hearthstone now have results from the biggest and best competitions!
- Use the new spoiler mode to hide results and push alerts until you’re ready to see them!
- Fixed a bug where hitting “back” after opening the app via an alert closed the app
- Fixed a bug where Twitch links were not opening in the Twitch app
- Design tweaks and performance enhancements.
You can find theScore esports 2.2 on the Google Play Store now.
PS4’s ‘Detroit’ couldn’t have taken place anywhere else
When you set your story in a specific city, it’s a very sensitive thing to do,” said David Cage, director of the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive Detroit: Become Human. “You don’t want to do it if you’re not respectful of the place, of the people living there.” Cage’s next game with studio Quantic Dream deals with a near-future world where androids aren’t a mobile operating system for your phone, they’re “living” among us with hopes and desires of their own. Specifically? Transcending their circuitry and, as the name suggests, being human.
Detroit tells the story of several humanoid robots and is set entirely in the Motor City. Like his games Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy before it, Detroit is a narrative-based choose-your-own-adventure where the decisions you make in the story have huge ripple effects. Ultimately those could lead to main characters dying because of your actions.
As Cage tells it, the game couldn’t have taken place anywhere else. He said that the tale of an industrial titan — Detroit and its automotive manufacturing background — going through difficult times and being reborn was a natural fit for his narrative.
“Where would an android industry go? There would probably be a need for huge factories and a lot of space. I thought that Detroit would be a perfect place for that,” he said.
This isn’t the only time the eponymous city’s been used for a video game setting recently, and for the same reasons. When Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released in 2011, it used Motown as the headquarters for the human augmentation industry. Cage said that this doesn’t affect his vision for Detroit. “I don’t like to look too much at what people do at the same time,” he said.
“You don’t want to make decisions just because someone else did something a little bit like this, and then you need to find something that is not as good just for the sake of being different.”
Cage’s ‘Detroit’ doesn’t just use the city’s name as shorthand for its cultural history.
Unlike Human Revolution, Cage’s Detroit doesn’t just use the city’s name as shorthand for its cultural history. Some of Detroit’s most recognizable landmarks have appeared in trailers for the game so far. The statue of Joe Louis’ fist, downtown’s monorail system, and yes, blighted houses, are but a few examples.
For people who live in Michigan or have spent a lot of time in Detroit, it can be aggravating seeing the media paint the city as nothing more than burned out homes and abandoned buildings. A level in 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare set in Detroit transformed the city into a refugee camp, for instance.
“I can’t believe this is Detroit,” a character in Advanced Warfare quipped at one point. “It hasn’t changed that much,” said another. And that’s four years after attacks on nuclear power plants around the world had thrown Earth into chaos; 2059 in the game’s timeline. The team at Sledgehammer Games used Detroit as a lazy signpost for a destroyed city, when, honestly, a few lines of dialog could’ve been changed and the level could have taken place in an Eastern Bloc country.
Cage doesn’t want that. His team at Quantic Dream spent time in Detroit during production because he hates writing a story about a place he hasn’t been. He traveled around, visiting decrepit churches, meeting the people who are rebuilding the city and came away inspired by the energy he felt. He even made his way through the abandoned Packard Automotive plant that graffiti artists have adopted as a 3.5 million square-foot canvas since its late-’90s closure.
“It’s definitely a surreal place in many ways,” he said. “You could tell just watching the rooms and how beautiful it was one day. You can still feel it and easily imagine how it could become something incredible again.”
If Cage’s game is focused on a decline, it isn’t of Detroit, it’s of a race: humans. He said that the advances we’ve made in artificial intelligence, coupled with our penchant for violence and conflict, were a good jumping off point for his game.
The Packard Automotive plant. Image credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images
Cage believes that high-powered artificial intelligence that can walk among us is an inevitability. But, whether that will be something good or bad is anyone’s guess at the moment. Tesla and SpaceX mastermind Elon Musk, and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, think that our current trajectory could end badly for the human race. Hence their dire warnings and multimillion dollar donations to keep a Skynet-like situation from occurring.
“What I wanted to do with Detroit is take the opposite angle and not necessarily say that technology is going to be our enemy and that [androids] are going to destroy us,” Cage said. “But, rather say, ‘What if we were declining?’ What if the human race, through hate and violence, what if it was the end of a certain era and maybe the beginning of something else?”
The juxtaposition of humanity decaying and technology taking over probably wouldn’t be as effective if the game was set anywhere other than Detroit. It’s the attention to detail and reverence for Motown that Cage and his team have that rings most clear and grounds their vision of a fantastical future in reality.
“If you just come [to a city] and steal what you want to steal for your piece and just leave, that’s one approach,” he said. “But we were sincerely moved by the place, by its history, by the people we met. We wanted to be fair to them and tell a story that would work for them.”
“We love the city, honestly.”
SoundCloud serves up new music based on your listening habits
Nearly every music streaming service has a feature that gives you new music to listen to based on audio habit. Spotify has Discover Weekly, Pandora compiles a custom station and Apple Music is making recommendations a big part of its redesign for iOS 10. SoundCloud is looking to offer a similar tool with its new Suggested Tracks section. The company says the picks come from its “state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm” that keeps tabs on your likes and plays on the web and through the mobile apps. While SoundCloud doesn’t specify how often the list is updated (“frequently”), it did explain that there’s a good chance the some of the new music won’t be found on any other service.
As is usually the case with algorithms, the more you use SoundCloud, the more the recommendation engine learns about your habits. In theory, this means the picks should continue to improve over time. If you want to give the new feature a shot, it’s available through the new “Discover” tab on the web or by hitting the search magnifying glass inside the Android and iOS apps. The company warns that if you’re new to the app or haven’t used it that much, your list might be blank. Don’t worry, just get to listening so the app has a frame of reference before making its selections.
Source: SoundCloud
AIVAnet 