Polymail Launches iOS App With Contact Profiles, Email Read Receipts, and More

Desktop email client Polymail recently launched a new iOS version of its app, focusing on simple and intuitive ways to get users through massive email lists with the same connected and social-minded aspects of the desktop app. Polymail allows users to manage their Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, or other IMAP accounts, through the iOS app, which now syncs automatically with the Mac app as well.

One of the standout features of Polymail is its social networking angle, which has each user create a “Contact Profile” detailing their employer, location, and a brief customizable bio section. These cards show every interaction you have had with any particular person, letting you browse among email correspondence and attachments shared between one another, and even detailing when they read an email, and how many times, similar in style to Apple’s Read Receipts.

“Email usage is moving more and more towards mobile but these productivity features have typically only been available on desktop,” says Brandon Foo, co-founder of Polymail. “We want to give users the best set of tools for mobile across any email provider.”

In addition to contact profiles and email tracking, the app also provides features like read later, send later, and follow-up reminders, which the company points out as being mostly browser add-ons in the past, placing Polymail as the first major mobile and desktop app to embrace them. The service even allows users to un-send emails “within several seconds” after they’re sent, making it easy to fix grammar and spelling errors that are recognized in the time window.

Following its debut on the Mac App Store, a few users compared Polymail to Dropbox’s now-defunct Mailbox client, which has generated some positive word-of-mouth leading up to its release on iOS. Still, its email tracking abilities and robust permissions list have raised a few flags for some users. Although not speaking on the topic of security and privacy specifically, Polymail reiterated that its ultimate goal is in making “enterprise workflow as effortless as possible,” aiming to lessen the gap between email clients “and the rest of the business applications companies use.”

Those interested can try out Polymail for themselves by downloading the free app on the App Store today. [Direct Link] The company mentioned that a higher-tier “Polymail Pro” subscription model is gearing up to launch sometime soon, but gave no details on its price point or premium features.

Tag: Polymail
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WhatsApp beta update brings voicemail and a new font

WhatsApp beta has just picked up an update to 2.16.189 with a litany of new features. First off is the ability to send a voicemail in case a voice call does not go through, or if the recipient declines the call. Earlier, you had to go back to the chat window to send a voice message, but that option is now available directly in the after-call menu, which also offers the ability to call the user back.

You can also send messages in plain text by adding the grave accent symbol (`) three times before and after the message. Doing so will remove all formatting from the message. If you’re looking for further formatting options, you can send messages in bold by adding an asterisk (*) before and after the message, italics by adding an underscore (_), and strikethrough with the tilde symbol (~).

There’s also the ability to reply to a specific message in a chat window, which was rolled out in the last update. To do so, you have to do is tap and hold a message, and hit the reply button. The changes are now available in the beta client of WhatsApp, and should be making their way to the stable version shortly.

Tinder wants to help you find new friends and head out in a group

Have you grown tired of using Tinder to find your one true love? If so, the app’s latest feature may be right up your alley. Tinder Social will help you find new friends to meet up and head out in a group. Whether you’re planning to head to a concert, catch that Pikachu down at the local supermarket or hit the clubs for a night out, Tinder’s new feature will let you create a new group and hang out with others who join.

After a group with a few friends has been formed, it’s then possible to swipe either left or right on other groups. Matching with another set of people will then bring up the usual chat experience for planning an event or meet up. As highlighted in Engadget’s report, the new social group feature is available in the U.S., UK and other select countries.

Ready to try out the new group feature? Download Tinder from the Play Store and let us know in the comments how you get on!

Yo-ho-ho and an autonomous boat: Smart watercraft could help the Navy fight pirates

We’ve all heard a lot about autonomous cars and there’s been plenty written about drones taking to the air, but we’ve not seen so much discussion about boats, or autonomous watercraft.

BAE Systems has been working on autonomous naval technologies, in a project that has sprung up surprisingly quickly. The idea is to give naval forces an unmanned capability for a wide range of roles – but dealing with surface vessels, rather than underwater, where remote controlled vechicles have been around for some time. 

One of the things that makes this a quick-development project for BAE Systems, is that it isn’t starting from scratch: it’s designed to be a simple solution to convert existing RIBs – rigid inflatable boats – that are already approved for use with the navy. That means the craft itself doesn’t need to be approved, only the systems that convert it.

BAE Systems

That system is designed as a “black box” that can be fitted into an existing RIB, comprising all the brains, linked to optics, radar and cameras, rather like a self-driving car. That lets the boat see and navigate on the surface, but it retains the pre-existing engines and controls.

The unmanned craft can then be run via remote control from another vessel, like a Destroyer, it can operate as a “mule” driving itself, or it can be manually driven as normal. In the photo above there’s a UAV on it too – although this is an example of what it could be used for, rather it being a permanent fixture.

The advantage of having an unmanned boat, of course, is that you don’t need to put sailors or marines in harm’s way. While you can use aircraft in a similar way, the costs of operating a RIB are much lower, letting you have something in the water to look in places where you might not want to put a person.

There’s a number of scenarios for an autonomous boat. It could be used, for example, to watch the blindside of a ship that you’re about to board, such as in anti-piracy operations. This is currently often done by helicopter, but using an autonomous boat puts eyes on the target at much lower cost.

A second use case would be in reconnaissance, sent out ahead of a ship where conditions favour the enemy, such as in canals or close straits that could be easily mined or a location for land-based ambush. The RIB could see much better than a human thanks to the advanced optics, as well as be equipped with things like mine sweeping or submarine detection equipment.

Sticking to that theme of not putting people in harm’s way, another advantage of an autonomous boat is that you don’t have to recover it if conditions are bad. Where you would want to get souls back on board, you could leave an autonomous craft in the water for several of days if the sea conditions were bad. Once things are calm again, you wake it up and bring it home.

BAE Systems

When it comes to naval applications, none of this happens without human intervention. The idea isn’t to have a remote weaponised platform – and BAE Systems told us that the navy saw no need for weapon systems on this type of craft – but it will become a tool in wider combined operations. That means it’s something for mission commanders to control, in coordination with other operational assets.

Autonomous boats might sound like something of the future, but the capability has already been demonstrated by BAE Systems and there will be testing later in October 2016 with the Royal Navy to see exactly how they fit into the picture.

Best 5 indie games coming to Xbox One you must download

Thanks to the Xbox One’s now inextricable link with Windows 10 the platform is very attractive to independent developers. They can essentially develop for PC and easily translate their games for Xbox One too, or vice versa.

What’s more, the ID@Xbox scheme gives indie studios two free Xbox One dev kits apiece, ensuring that they have all the tools needed to develop for the console. That’s why the Xbox Live store is rapidly being filled with excellent downloadable games for the Xbox One on a weekly basis.

Pocket-lint was invited to try some of those that are coming to the platform soon, which we had extensive hands-on plays with. So here are our tips of the indies and small publisher titles you would be well advised to check out in the near future.

• Xbox One S: Release date, specs and everything you need to know
• How Xbox One backwards compatibility works: The Xbox 360 games list and more
• Xbox One S preview: Thinner, better PS4 beater
• 37 best Xbox One games every gamer should own

Compulsion Games

We Happy Few

Release date: 26 July

We Happy Few was a big hit during E3 2016, with the first gameplay trailer proving very popular and effective. It set the tone for the first-person game by showing its dark side, with a pinata smashing event illustrating the horrific and stark reality that is usually disguised through taking “Joy” pills. Seeing in-game work colleagues hunched over a decaying rat, eating entrails that they think are sweets will live with us forever.

At the ID@Xbox event we got to play the game beyond that initial sequence. Set in an alternative 1960s England, We Happy Few is inspired by mind-bending early thrillers and surreal movies, such as A Clockwork Orange or The Prisoner.

The populace are kept blissfully unaware of their awful surroundings through regular dosing of drugs, but after you decide to abandon your prescription, you soon see what lies outside of the hallucinogenic haze.

We had to escape a decrepit small country village, after playing through the same sequence shown at E3, and while we didn’t manage to succeed in the time we had, we did get to see some of the other gameplay mechanics at work. There is a hefty focus on crafting, for example, with resources abounding throughout the game, but only really useful when combined with others.

We also got hit on the noggin a fair few times by the clown-faced police.

The game itself will be available very soon, so we’re not far from bringing you a full review. Until then though, we have to say that this could be a massive hit. 

Ghost Town Games

Overcooked!

Release date: 3 August

Remember when good multiplayer games had you and several chums hunkered around the same screen and console? Micro Machines, Super Bomberman, Super Mario Kart, Super Smash Brothers, Gauntlet and many other 90s classics used to descend us into fits of giggles thanks to having all the combatants in the same room at the same time.

Overcooked is not a competitive game but it comes from the same stock. It is a local multiplayer co-op title and, from what we’ve played so far, echoes all of the fun and joy we experienced from the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive masterpieces of old.

It puts up to four players in control of cooks in a kitchen. Customers make demands for food and you have to prepare their dishes. It sounds easy and, on early levels, it is. However, there are several tasks to complete, so we found that different players naturally gravitated towards different aspects of food preparation.

For example, during our gameplay session, we had to prepare soup. First the onions or tomatoes needed to be fetched from their individual boxes, then sliced. They then needed to be added to the pot, which would then cook on the stove. Before it burned, it needed to be poured into a bowl and served. The bowl was then returned, needing to be washed up so the process could continue.

Players can adopt any of those tasks, but there are caveats. Some levels have thin corridors, so you can only have one player wandering that space at a time. Some are far more outlandish, such as a travelling truck that splits and rejoins often, so you have to wait to travel from one side to another.

All of the factors prompt co-operation – and hilarity. Much much hilarity. It is a true co-op game in every respect and we cannot wait to play more with our friends and colleagues at home.

Team 17

Worms W.M.D.

Release date: 23 August

Who doesn’t love Worms? As we explained for Overcooked above, we’re big fans of games with local multiplayer play and there are few that offer as satisfying an experience as those in the Worms stable.

Worms W.M.D. continues a fine tradition of adding new features and tweaks to the franchise, making the game bigger, with options for mayhem, yet it retains the same basic formula that has had us in fits for more than 20 years.

Vehicles is one addition, with tanks and helicopters dotted around levels that can be manned by your Worms. There are also new, static weapon placements, such as a sniper rifle position or mortar. that you can take over. And crafting finally comes to the franchise, with many if not all of the armoury able to be moulded into something even more lethal and/or hilarious.

We played a spot of single-player and then had a multiplayer match with all of the games weaponry switched on by default. It gave us an idea of just how many different weapons of mass destruction are on offer. With crafting, you can amass a load-out of up to 81 different weapons, including barbecued sheep – the usual exploding sheep but leaving flames wherever they touch.

Hand-painted backgrounds, rather than the rendered scenery of recent outings, return to the series, but new for this game are buildings you can actually enter, taking fights inside as well as out.

It all makes for a much improved game, we think, than any to have come for a while. We’ll find out for sure towards the end of August.

Bulkhead Interactive

The Turing Test

Release date: August

Bulkhead Interactive had great success with Pheuma: Breath of Life, a first-person puzzle game that also had the honour of being the first Xbox One game to be made in Unreal Engine 4. It is also developing the Kickstarter funded Battalion 1944, a World War II multiplayer shooter to be released in spring next year.

Its next game though is similar in concept to the first, with The Turing Test being a first-person puzzler, albeit with a science fiction setting this time out.

Progression is based on solving sometimes very complex logic puzzles, and as we didn’t have a scooby what to do when we picked up the controller for the first time, nor were treated to a tutorial, it is testament to the game that we very soon got the hang of it.

Players take control of Ava Turing, an engineer exploring a station on Europa, one of the moons of Europa, to look for life signs. The story plays out while you unlock new areas through cunning puzzle completion which, in our case, involved partly picking up junction boxes and placing them in door panels, or sucking the energy out of one location with a gun-like tool, and firing it into another.

There’s a little of Portal in the control method, but we suspect that later in the game the similarities aren’t as distinct. We also didn’t get much of a chance to engage with the plot at this stage, so are looking forward to a proper, uninterrupted play to unravel the game’s mysteries.

Studio MDHR

Cuphead

Release date: August

There has been a lot of hype around Cuphead since we first saw it at E3 2015 and we have to say, based on our session with a more complete build, it is mostly justified.

Cuphead is a hark back to the glory days of 2D platform action games, while adopting a quite simply incredible graphical look. Inspired by the Disney and Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s, the look is amazing. The characters look cell animated and even the colours are slightly offset to give the whole image a retro, reproduced feel.

But where Cuphead will be heralded most is in its gameplay. It is unapologetically fierce. We have had a swathe of difficult 2D platformers in recent times, with Ori and the Blind Forest and Super Meatboy being most memorable, but we have to say, based on our initial playtime, that Cuphead could be the toughest of the lot. And we love it.

We played a few boss battles, a flying section and a platform level and we died. A lot. But most importantly, we wanted to persevere, as it hooks you into that “one more go” cycle and there’s not much higher praise than that.

We can’t wait to play the full game when it arrives, finally, next month.

NASA institute will find ways to protect astronauts’ health

Lengthy deep space missions pose higher risks to spacefaring humans compared to trips to the ISS or to the moon — after all, our bodies evolved for life on Earth. In an effort to find ways to reduce those risks, NASA has joined forces with the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The partners will operate a new institute, slated to begin its operations on October 1st, dedicated to developing ways to protect astronauts’ health for long-duration missions.

Thanks to the astronauts who spend months aboard the ISS, we know how outer space affects the human body. One of the effects of long-term stays in microgravity, for instance, is the deterioration of bone and muscle mass. The increase in intercranial pressure brought about by zero-g also leads to major eyesight problems.

According to the agency, the Translational Research Institute (NTRI) will develop “point-of-care astronaut health and performance applications.” Translational research is a method that takes results from lab experiments involving cells or animals and applying them to human subjects. As such, it has the potential to give rise to real world applications much faster than traditional research can. Since NASA wants to send humans to Mars by 2030, it only makes sense that the agency wants to find ways to ensure the safety of its astronauts as soon as possible.

Source: NASA

Apple and Facebook helped bust the world’s biggest torrent site

When you’re the owner of the world’s biggest torrent-sharing site, the last thing you’d expect to land you in trouble would be a totally legitimate (and legal) purchase via iTunes. But that’s what happened to 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin a.k.a “tirm,” owner and operator of KickassTorrents (KAT), who was yesterday arrested and charged in Poland for criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. He’s been accused of illegally reproducing and distributing hundreds of millions of copies of movies, video games, TV shows and music albums totalling more than $1 billion. The US is now waiting to extradite him.

Founded in 2008, the site has slowly grown to become the biggest torrent-sharing website in the world. It finally took the mantle in 2015 after The Pirate Bay experienced multiple raids, battled lengthy spells of downtime and its three founders were arrested. KAT counts more than 50 million unique monthly visitors and is estimated to be the 68th most frequently visited website on the internet — according to Alexa.

In a 48-page criminal complaint (PDF) filed with the U.S. District Court in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reveals how it was able to track Vaulin. Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a special agent with the US Department of Homeland Security, was tasked with tracking the man behind KAT and it’s his report that attempts to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Vaulin should be brought to justice. This is how it played out.

The fake ad

From November 2015, an undercover IRS Special Agent spoke with a KAT representative about hosting an advertisement that would direct visitors to an undercover site. An agreement was made and the ad, which purportedly advertised a program to study in the United States, would be placed on individual torrent listings for $300 per day. When it finally went live on March 14th 2016, a link appeared underneath the torrent download buttons for five days. It was a short campaign, but it was enough to link KAT to a Latvian bank account, one that received €28 million ($31 million) in deposits — mainly from advertising payments — between August 2015 and March 2016.

This back-and-forth also enabled investigators to identify an important point of contact: the email address pr@kat.cr. Not only was it linked to website enquiries, it was the email associated with KAT’s social media presences such as Facebook. Agents were able to obtain records from Facebook that showed the “official.KAT.fanclub.” page was almost certainly associated with KAT.

Apple’s involvement

Using basic website-tracking services, Der-Yeghiayan was able to uncover (via a reverse DNS search) the hosts of seven apparent KAT website domains: kickasstorrents.com, kat.cr, kickass.to, kat.ph, kastatic.com, thekat.tv and kickass.cr. This dug up two Chicago IP addresses, which were used as KAT name servers for more than four years. Agents were then able to legally gain a copy of the server’s access logs (explaining why it was federal authorities in Chicago that eventually charged Vaulin with his alleged crimes).

Using similar tools, Homeland Security investigators also performed something called a WHOIS lookup on a domain that redirected people to the main KAT site. A WHOIS search can provide the name, address, email and phone number of a website registrant. In the case of kickasstorrents.biz, that was Artem Vaulin from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Der-Yeghiayan was able to link the email address found in the WHOIS lookup to an Apple email address that Vaulin purportedly used to operate KAT. It’s this Apple account that appears to tie all of pieces of Vaulin’s alleged involvement together.

On July 31st 2015, records provided by Apple show that the me.com account was used to purchase something on iTunes. The logs show that the same IP address was used on the same day to access the KAT Facebook page. After KAT began accepting Bitcoin donations in 2012, $72,767 was moved into a Coinbase account in Vaulin’s name. That Bitcoin wallet was registered with the same me.com email address.

What happens now?

Homeland Security has already asked that the seven KAT domains named in the complaint are forfeited for their role in facilitating piracy. Verisign is expected to seize the .com and .tv domains, while Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) requests will be sent to registrars in Costa Rica, Tonga and the Philippines. Homeland Security then expects those sites to be redirected to a server of its choosing.

Right now, KickassTorrents appears to still be up, at least via the numerous proxy services that support it. However, it’s probably only a matter of time until it becomes a lot harder to find. While investigators already had a lot of evidence before they added the iTunes transaction to the mix, the idea that a legal media purchase could be the undoing of a piracy king kinda breaks the irony meter.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Justice.gov, Criminal Complaint (PDF)