Instagram’s ‘Save Draft’ feature is now available for everyone
Unlike Snapchat’s unpolished zaniness, Instagram’s tools and tone skewed users to share more curated photos. But since it didn’t save your photos midway through adding the right filters or effects, folks must either entirely edit and share a photo or lose all their changes. No longer. Six years after it launched and a month after testing it with select users, Instagram just gave everyone the “save draft” feature. It’s now live on Android and iOS without requiring a new update.
Trying to create a post that’s just right? With the latest update, you can save as a draft & come back to it later. https://t.co/7lZ0eyNtBC
— Instagram (@instagram) September 20, 2016
As its new help section explains, all you have to do is add an effect, filter, caption or location to a photo, then go back to the edit step and hit the back arrow to prompt the “Save Draft” function. Any indecisive Instagrammer will find it useful, but the biggest benefit might go to social media managers that can now queue up plenty of posts in drafts. If it isn’t live on your device just yet, give it time: Like the feature’s test phase in August, Instagram is likely rolling out to groups of users at a time.
Source: Instagram
WatchESPN’s live and on-demand streaming arrives on PS4
Rejoice, sports and console gaming fans: ESPN’s self-titled streaming app WatchESPN is now available on the PlayStation 4. According to the network, subscribers can now access ESPN’s live and on-demand content on every major streaming device, and non-subscribers can use the app to browse short-form clips and highlights. So now you can switch between a heated game of Call of Duty and the drone racing championships without putting down your DualShock 4.
“Gaming consoles have historically attracted significant engagement in minutes consumed for WatchESPN,” ESPN/Disney Senio VP Sean Breen said in a statement, “and with today’s launch, the app increases its distribution footprint to reach fans on the most widely adopted platforms.”
Unfortunately for cord-cutters, users will still need a cable subscription to access the majority of ESPN’s streaming content, but those with an authenticated subscription will have access to all of ESPN’s subsidiaries including ESPNEWS, ESPN Deportes, SEC Network, ESPN Goal Line and more.
While WatchESPN is also available for computers, smartphones and tablets, users on older PlayStaion consoles will have to wait a bit longer for a PS3 version of the app. That said, ESPN promises it will arrive “in time for the remainder of the college football season.”
Source: ESPN
Google brings natural language search to Drive
Starting today, Google Drive features Natural Language Processing to make it even easier to find that buried spreadsheet or long-lost docs. Taking a page from its Google Assistant playbook, the search box in Drive now allows for easy, human-oriented search queries like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.”
In typical Google style, the search bar will translate the query to a more robot-like string (as in: “budget Type:Spreadsheet” in that first example) and present you with autocomplete suggestions before presenting the results. According to Google Drive Product Manager Josh Smith, the natural language processing in Drive will get smarter the more you search.
Finally, the Drive team added a couple more often-requested features to the product today, including: autocorrect for misspelled search terms, the ability to split documents into multiple columns and an auto-save feature that creates a copy whenever importing and converting non-Google formats.
The new features are live now, although they will be rolling out gradually to all users.
Source: Google Blog
Lenovo’s sketch-ready Yoga Book ships on October 17th
When we first got our hands on Lenovo’s Yoga Book tablet, we found it to be more than just a Microsoft Surface imitator. The freeform touch field might make typing a bit to get used to, but it’s the ease of drawing on stylus or pen that makes it unique. As pre-orders open today for all models to ship out on October 17th, it remains unclear whether the novelty will be enough for the device to distinguish itself in a tanking tablet market.
The Yoga Book certainly has things going for it: At $500 for its Android version and $550 for Windows, it’s cheaper than the baseline iPad Pro and the Surface 3. Having a scribing tablet directly integrated will likely appeal to an artistic demographic more comfortable drawing on a Wacom-style pad than directly on the screen with an Apple Pencil. It even records your stylus sketches when the tablet is asleep, which should boost battery life at the expense of, well, not seeing what you’re writing or drawing.
But at the end of the day, the Yoga Book doesn’t have a keyboard. Despite haptic feedback in the pad and autocorrect in the Android version, our reviewer struggled to type accurately, and doubted Lenovo’s claim that it would take about two hours to adapt. If a user’s work depends on quickly and accurately getting words on a page, this might not be the tablet for them. Lenovo is betting big that the physical process of pen-to-pad has secretly been what many tablet users have secretly been missing. We’ll see whether it’s enough to carve market share away from Apple and Microsoft.
Source: 9to5 Google
Dark Sky’s hyperlocal weather app is now available on the web
Four-year-old mobile weather app Dark Sky is mostly known for two things: its beautifully rendered radar maps and startlingly accurate hyperlocal weather predictions. The latter was Dark Sky’s killer feature by far, and used your smartphone’s GPS to let you know exactly when and how long you’d get rained on. With notifications like “Heavy rain starting in 12 min.” it can be a lifesaver in rainy regions or places prone to sudden thunderstorms. Now those same features, along with a suite of new maps and visualizations, are available on your desktop via DarkSky.net.
Dark Sky’s co-Founder Adam Grossman admits to Wired that the new site is a bit of a promotional effort for Dark Sky’s mobile app, which will set you back $4 on iOS or $3 per year on Android. But the web version adds some powerful new extra features you won’t find in the mobile app, like an optimized layout and the ability to zoom in and explore Dark Sky’s trademark map and globe visualizations in even finer detail. An experimental new feature even allows users to explore microclimate effects so you can check the weather at altitude in the Himalayas or the temperature different at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Naturally, everything is embeddable and there’s an API for third-party developers to play around with.
Because the site itself is supported by app sales, it is also blissfully free of advertisements and sensational WEATHER-MAGEDDON headlines. A trip to the homepage presents you with all the current weather data front and center, plus an eight-day forecast that drills down into hour-by-hour temperature and precipitation data.
Finally, the web launch follows an updated version of the Dark Sky app for iOS 10, which brings even richer notifications, a lock screen widget and new Apple Watch improvements.
Via: Wired
Source: DarkSky.net
Paid streaming services provide a big boost to the music industry
Streaming continues to play a bigger role in music industry revenue and now it’s starting to provide some real help offsetting declining album sales in the US. In its mid-year report, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports that the industry saw its biggest growth in the first half of 2016 since the 1990s, up 8.1 percent year-over-year to $3.4 billion. In terms of music streaming as a whole, revenue from those services was up 57 percent during the first half of the year and it now makes up 47 percent of the music industry’s total revenue. That’s up from 32 percent of the total revenue this time last year.
Streaming was already the biggest money maker for the music industry in the US and now it’s starting to make a real difference in offsetting the decline of album sales. First half revenue from streaming subscriptions hit $1 billion for the first time, showing 112 percent growth. Both physical and digital downloads continue to slide (down 17 percent and 14 percent, respectively), so the streaming boon will need to continue to add customers to make up the difference.
RIAA chairman and CEO Cary Sherman took to Medium to explain that while the music industry saw some growth for the first time in more than a decade, the compensation rates from streaming services are still lower than they should be. “Despite the massive consumer demand for music, the damning reality remains that music is fundamentally undervalued,” Sherman said. “Many services rake in billions of dollars for themselves on the backs of music’s popularity but pay only relative pennies for artists and labels.”
Sherman also called on Google to do a better job taking down unauthorized material that’s posted to YouTube. The RIAA CEO said that with all or the things that have been achieved in Mountain View, surely the company can do a better job of policing unlicensed songs. Sherman noted that Congressional reform won’t be the only answer to make up the revenue gap. He explained that cooperation between the industry and the companies running streaming services could go a long way to ensure everyone is fairly compensated. The music industry needs to make the most it can out of streaming as album sales continue their decline, so fair compensation will be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.
Via: Bloomberg
Source: RIAA (PDF), RIAA (Medium)
Hillary Clinton email operator may have asked Reddit for help
When you’re involved with a highly sensitive (and possibly illegal) IT operation, it’s generally a bad idea to post on social networks about it… and one man is learning that the hard way. Reddit users on a pro-Donald Trump subreddit have discovered evidence suggesting that Paul Combetta, a Platte River staffer involved in managing Hillary Clinton’s private email server, might have asked Reddit for help with sanitizing and deleting older messages. The connections are circumstantial, as US News says, but there are too many to simply dismiss out of hand.
To start, a user named Stonetear (a nickname linked to Combetta online) asked Reddit how to strip out a “very VIP” person’s email address from archived messages on July 24th, 2014 in a bid to prevent them from being “exposed to anyone.” Conveniently, that’s the day after a House committee on Benghazi reached a deal with the State Department on handing over records (as documented in the FBI’s report on Clinton’s server). On December 10th of that year, Stonetear asked about a customer who wanted a standard 60-day data retention policy for some email users — around the same time as Clinton aide Cheryl Mills asked for a 60-day window, defying government retention rules. Given that Combetta is known to have belatedly followed such an order in March 2015, when news of the server broke, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow.
Stonetear hasn’t helped allay suspicions, either. The user deleted the Reddit posts in question just hours after the alleged Clinton connections surfaced, and they’re surviving only thanks to quick-thinking online archivists.
A Republican heading the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith, is calling for interviews with Combetta and fellow Platte River employee Bill Thornton in the wake of the discoveries. He’s concerned that the FBI didn’t know about these facts before declaring that Clinton hadn’t violated the law, and has threatened to subpoena the staffers if there isn’t a scheduled interview by the 23rd.
Whether or not Smith and Reddit’s Trump supporters get what they want is another matter. Combetta has already invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination while testifying, and the US Attorney General has already said her office won’t bring charges against Clinton. Even if there’s smoking gun evidence linking Combetta to shady email server activity, it may be a case of too little, too late for those hoping to bring Clinton to trial.
Via: US News, The Hill
Source: Reddit, Archive.is (1), (2)
Firefox adds a ‘Narrate’ mode to take your eyes off the screen
Mozilla’s latest Firefox adds a couple new and refined features intended to improve the time you spend reading online. While Firefox released an ad-stripping, layout-simplifying Reader Mode way back in 2012, the newest release brings a new “Narrate” feature and additional tweaks for a better reading (or listening) experience.
Mozilla might be a little late to the game compared to Apple’s robotic VoiceOver, but Firefox’s new text-to-speech feature helpfully narrates articles so you can step away from the screen or swap to another tab and listen at your leisure. Reader mode is also getting some additional customization options that allow users to tweak the text, font size or reader voice, as well as new light and dark themes for daylight or nighttime reading that’s easier on the eyes.
If you’re on an Android device, Firefox now helpfully stores some previously viewed pages and data so you can interact with pages you’ve already visited, even if you hop on a plane or your data connection drops out. Finally, the latest update also brings better multiprocess support, which should translate to a much more responsive and much less crash-y web experience. Mozilla says it has improved overall responsiveness by a whopping 400% for users who forego browser add-ons, and the plan is to add support for compatible add-ons by 2017. At that point, Firefox will also flip the switch on Flash, which should do wonders for browser responsiveness.
macOS Sierra: Save Disk Space With the New ‘Optimize Storage’ Option
macOS Sierra, available today, includes a built-in storage optimization feature that’s designed to free up storage space on a Mac by storing rarely used files in iCloud, regularly emptying the trash, removing unnecessary files, and more.
It’s a handy feature that can give you a good amount of additional storage space with a set of tools that you normally had to download a third-party storage optimization app to use. Here’s how to take advantage of Sierra’s Optimize Storage feature:
Click on the Apple logo at the top of the menubar and select “About This Mac” from the list of options.
Choose the “Storage” tab at the top to see an overview of how much storage you’re using on your Mac.
Click on “Manage” to open up the optimization options.
When you open up Optimize Storage, there’s a breakdown of where your files are stored and a list of recommended actions you can take to free up space, all of which is new.
File storage on the Mac is broken down into the following categories: Applications, Documents, GarageBand, iBooks, iCloud Drive, iOS Files, iTunes, Mail, Photos, and Trash. Files can be organized by date, size, and type, so it’s easy to see what’s taking up a lot of space. Clicking on any file in a list will let you open the folder it’s located in on the Mac, so it can be deleted.
In the “Recommendations” section of the Optimize Storage feature, there are a list of actions Apple thinks you should take to preserve space. For me, these recommendations suggested storing my files in iCloud, optimizing photo sizes, keeping only recent email attachments and removing iTunes movies and shows I’ve watched, emptying the trash automatically, and reducing clutter by finding files that don’t need to be stored on my Mac. Depending on your usage habits, recommendations may vary.
The “Store in iCloud” feature is linked to another new macOS Sierra function, which makes all documents stored on the desktop or in the Documents folder available across all devices. This can take up a lot of iCloud storage space (more than 50GB in my case) so it should be used with caution.
“Optimize Storage” offers preferences for automatically removing watched iTunes movies and TV shows (they’re still available via iCloud) and downloading only recent attachments in Mail, features Apple said would save me a few hundred megabytes of space.
“Reduce Clutter” is a review of all documents on the Mac sorted by size, while “Empty Trash Automatically” is self-explanatory. An unmentioned feature makes sure there’s space for all documents stored in iCloud Drive before downloading them onto a Mac. If there’s not, older files will be kept in iCloud, while only the most recent files will be stored on the Mac itself.
A quick run through all of the storage optimization features netted me more than 40GB of space, but your mileage may vary based on how often you delete older files and empty the trash. It’s fast, easy to use, and has some good storage saving tips that weren’t previously available, so it’s definitely worth checking out Optimize Storage after you install Sierra.
Related Roundup: macOS Sierra
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Safari 10 Now Available for OS X El Capitan and OS X Yosemite
Apple released macOS Sierra today with Safari 10 preinstalled, but Mac users still running the latest versions of OS X El Capitan or OS X Yosemite can now download the all-new version of the web browser too from the Mac App Store.
Safari 10 for OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan does not include all of the new features available in macOS Sierra, like Apple Pay on the web and picture-in-picture support for videos, but the update includes the following new functions:
- Safari Extensions such as 1Password, Save to Pocket, and DuckDuckGo
- New Bookmarks sidebar, including double-click to focus in on a folder
- Redesigned Bookmarks and History views
- Site-specific zoom: Safari remembers and re-applies your zoom level to websites
- Improved AutoFill from Contacts card
- Reader improvements, including in-line sub-headlines, bylines, and publish dates
- Legacy plug-ins are turned off by default in favor of HTML5 versions of websites
- Allow reopening of recently closed tabs through the History menu, holding the “+” button in the tab bar, and using Shift-Command-T
- When a link opens in a new tab, it is now possible to hit the back button or swipe to close it and go back to the original tab
- Improved ranking of Frequently Visited Sites
- Web Inspector Timelines Tab
- Debugging using Web Inspector
Safari 10 also includes a number of security updates, including fixes for six WebKit vulnerabilities and issues related to Reader and Tabs.
Related Roundup: OS X El Capitan
Tag: Safari
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