These are the Snapchat Spectacles
Snapchat Spectacles is the first wearable from Snapchat. It basically looks like a regular pair of sunglasses, but comes with a built-in camera lens that lets you record up to 10 second videos and then share on the social media platform. These aren’t the easiest to get your hands on, but we were finally able to do so. Here is our first impressions as we unbox the Snapchat Spectacles!
A lot of people enjoy using Snapchat, and the Spectacles offer a new and fantastic way to share things from your perspective, quite literally. You can record 10 second snaps using the glasses, and the video will then be sent to the app, from where you can either send it to anyone on your Snapchat or share it to your “My Story.”
As mentioned, the Spectacles are really hard to get, given that they are sold via vending machines, called Snapbots, that pop up around your city. The Snapchat Spectacles website features a “Find a Bot” section with a countdown timer, and once the timer hits zero, a random location is mentioned which tells you where you can find the Snapbot. I’ve tried three times to get to the vending machine and have waited in line for hours on end without success, and I was finally lucky enough to get one.
The Spectacles come in a yellow case that also doubles as a charging dock. Once you run out of battery on the glasses, you can put them back in the case, that has connector pins on the corner, to charge them.
In the box is the setup guide, which says that you need to hit the button on the glasses and then open the Snapchat app and connect to it via a code that it generates. It uses Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to connect, and the Spectacles are compatible with both iOS and Android devices. Also included in the package is a cleaning cloth which takes the shape of the Snapchat ghost, as well as a proprietary charging cable.
Once the glasses are paired to the phone, you can start taking 10-second snaps with it by using the button on the top left side. As far as comfort when wearing the glasses is concerned, something to keep in mind is that only one size is available for the Spectacles, so it may end up being a touch small and in my case, I do feel a slight pinching on the sides. There are also black bars on the insides that tend to block your peripheral vision, which isn’t necessarily distracting, but something you definitely do notice.
In the Android app, you will find all the snaps you’ve taken using the glasses in the Memories section. There will be a new section just for the Spectacles, and you will be able to select what snaps to send out to other users or share on My Story.
When you look at the video in the Memories section, you will see a snap that is full screen and traditional looking. However, if you save it to your Gallery or send it to other users, it will put a circular crop on the video, which is a little bit distracting. I would have preferred being able to send the full video without the circular crop. Hopefully this is something that will be included later on, because the camera obviously takes full video, and it is in the app that the circular crop is added.
On the right side of the spectacles is an indicator that tells people when you are recording something, which helps alleviate some privacy concerns, with them not having to worry about being recorded without their knowledge. You get to see a light as well on the left side, so you know when the glasses have stopped recording.
Tapping twice on the side will also tell you how much battery is left. I haven’t been using the Snapchat Spectacles long enough to arrive at a definite conclusion, but from what I’ve seen so far, and from what I’ve heard from other users, the battery life is pretty good.
These are sunglasses, so it isn’t a good idea to wear them when the sun goes down or while indoors, where it will obscure your vision. Of course, there will definitely be situations where you will want to take snaps, so the best idea here will be to just hold up the glasses and take a shot, instead of wearing them.
So there you have it for this first look at Snapchat Spectacles! Stay tuned as we bring you the full review that will be coming up shortly, and until then, you can also follow me on Snapchat over the weekend too see what the snaps from the Snapchat Spectacles look like.
Amazon Prime Video Now Supports HTML5 Playback in Safari
Amazon Prime Video’s HTML5 video player now supports Safari on Mac, as spotted by Reddit user netmute over the weekend.
Amazon Prime Video previously required downloading the Microsoft Silverlight plugin for playback in Safari, or switching to an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which already supported HTML5.
Some users on Reddit reported that, while HTML5 is now supported, AirPlay Mirroring and Picture in Picture functionality is lacking.
Tags: HTML5, Safari, Amazon Prime Video
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Apple Addresses iCloud Calendar Spam With New ‘Report Junk’ Option
Apple has added a “Report Junk” option to iCloud.com to help combat a recent increase in calendar spam, as noticed by a Reddit user over the weekend.
Now, when an iCloud user receives an unsolicited calendar invite from a sender who is not a contact, the event can be double clicked on and reported as junk.
Clicking on “Report Junk” opens a window confirming the invitation has been reported as junk. Junk invitations are automatically deleted from the calendar, and the sender’s details are presumably reported to Apple for further investigation. There is also a “Not Junk” option if users make a mistake.
The option is currently only available on iCloud.com, but a Reddit user claims an Apple Support representative informed him it will be rolling out to the Calendar app on iOS, and presumably Mac, soon—which would make sense.
iCloud calendar spam is nothing new, but there was a major uptick in spam leading up to the Black Friday shopping holiday in November. The spam invites appear to originate mainly from Chinese email addresses, advertising questionable discounts on products such as Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses.
Late last month, an Apple spokesperson apologized and said the company is working to block spam calendar invites.
We are sorry that some of our users are receiving spam calendar invitations. We are actively working to address this issue by identifying and blocking suspicious senders and spam in the invites being sent.
iCloud users should not click on Accept, Decline, or Maybe if they receive a spam calendar invite, as choosing any of these options simply notifies the spammer that the account is active and ready for more unsolicited offers.
Instead, there are two fixes. First, users can navigate to the iCloud.com settings and choose to receive all event invitations as email. Second, users can create a new calendar, name it Spam, move the spam invitation to the Spam calendar, and then delete the calendar entirely. Follow these step-by-step instructions.
Tag: iCloud
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Amazon’s ‘Grand Tour’ is the most pirated show ever
Amazon’s Grand Tour, a reboot of the BBC’s hit show Top Gear, has been an unmitigated success with fans with its first episode alone garnering “millions” of views. It’s also be a hit with pirates who, instead of paying the annual $100 fee for Amazon Prime, have downloaded the first three episodes at unprecedented rates.
According to data from industry analyst Muso, and published by the Daily Mail on Sunday, pirates illicitly downloaded the first episode 9.7 million times, the second episode 6.4 million times and the third 4.6 million times. A lion’s share of the downloads (13.7 percent of the total) originated in Britain. Muso figures that Amazon lost £3.2 million on the first episode alone. “It is the most illegally downloaded program ever,” Chris Elkins, Muso chief commercial officer, told The Guardian. “It is off the scale in terms of volume. It has overtaken every big show, including Game Of Thrones, for the totals across different platforms.”
Interestingly, while Amazon has seen its subscriber base grow by more than 19 million this year — to a total of 63 million worldwide — only 2 million of those people live in the UK. That means nearly five times as many people stole the content (the first episode at least) rather than pay for it. And given that Amazon paid $160 million for the show as a means of boosting its British subscriber base, those numbers are worrisome. Still, it is vastly outperforming the garbage replacement starring Matt LeBlanc and Chris Evans that BBC has been trying to peddle. Top Gear 2.0 saw its ratings nosedive and Evans quit as host just hours after the first season finale.
Via: Guardian
Source: Daily Mail
Apple Maps Now Supports Transit Directions in Salt Lake City
Apple Maps has been updated with comprehensive transit data for Salt Lake City, Utah, enabling iPhone users in the city and certain suburbs to navigate using Utah Transit Authority public transportation, including the TRAX light rail system, FrontRunner commuter train, S-Line streetcar, and buses.
Apple introduced Transit in Maps as part of iOS 9 in select cities around the world, including Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and over 300 cities in China. The feature has its own tab in Apple Maps on iOS 10 when entering directions.
Transit routing is now available in several other cities around the world, including Atlanta, Columbus, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Honolulu, Kansas City, Melbourne, Miami, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Montréal, Pittsburgh, Portland, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, and Seattle.
(Thanks, Bernd!)
Tags: Apple Maps, transit
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Nanotechnology discovery could lead to low-power night vision
Night vision technology is essential on the modern battlefield but is not without its shortcomings. Conventional night vision goggles (NVGs) have been compared to looking “through toilet paper tubes” on account of their drastically diminished peripheral view. Even the top-of-the-line L-3 Ground Panoramic NGVs — the ones used by US special forces during the Osama bin Laden raid — are heavy, cumbersome and require an external power source. However, a breakthrough discovery out of the Australian National University could give us NGVs that are no thicker than a pair of normal sunglasses.
Conventional NGVs rely on a process called cascaded secondary emission. Ambient low-level and near-infrared light are first collected by the goggle’s objective lens. The photons are then converted into electrons and travel down a vacuum-sealed onto a plate studded with millions of tiny holes. As the electrons pass through these holes, they set off a chain reaction that releases hundreds of other electrons — all in the same pattern as the original photon — which then hit a phosphorescent plate to create the familiar green-tinted image. The problem is that this process demands thousands of volts of electricity to generate the number of electrons needed to be effective.
The Australian team’s process instead relies on aluminum gallium arsenide nanostructures that do basically the same thing but without the vacuum tubes. “We managed to fabricate very teeny, tiny structures. Those magic structures are capable [of] changing the intensity of the light, change the shape of the light, and, at the same time, change the color of the light,” Mohsen Rahmani explained in an ANU video. “Our eyes are capable only of seeing light in the visible spectrum. If we can fabricate an area of nanostructures on flat surfaces like glass, at the end of the day we will be able to convert invisible light in the nighttime or dark areas into visible light.”
The new process would still require an external energy supply to work, but would need only a fraction of a conventional NVG’s power. What’s more, it can be produced as a thin film — similar to printed solar cells — which will drastically reduce the bulk and weight of future NVGs. The team has submitted their findings to DARPA for further development.
Source: Defense One
Tim Cook to Attend Donald Trump’s Tech Summit on Wednesday
Apple CEO Tim Cook is among a small group of tech leaders who plan to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s reported tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to Recode.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and President-elect Donald Trump (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Other attendees will allegedly include the CEOs of Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Intel, and Oracle. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was also invited, and he is likely to attend, the report noted.
There could be a few other attendees, as invites reportedly continued to be sent by Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and presidential transition team adviser and tech investor Peter Thiel late into the week.
A handful of tech leaders have reportedly declined the invitation, as the report noted some of the technology companies and executives disagree with Trump on a myriad of key issues, ranging from encryption to immigration reform.
“Look, this is obviously a circus,” said one person close to the situation. “Everyone in tech just wants to be invisible right now when it comes to this administration, but has to participate since we have done it before.”
In addition, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has reportedly sent mixed signals about being invited or not, while SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was called an “obvious invite,” although it is unclear if he will be attending.
Attending
• Apple CEO Tim Cook
• Alphabet CEO Larry Page
• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
• Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
• Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Likely)
Not Attending
• Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
• Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
• Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield
• Dropbox CEO Drew Houston
• HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Mark Cuban
The topics to be discussed at the roundtable meeting were not disclosed, but Trump has previously expressed his desires to reform the corporate tax code, reduce regulation, and negotiate better trade deals with other countries.
Trump previously said he plans to offer Apple a “very large tax cut” alongside “substantial regulation cuts” that will incentivize the iPhone maker to manufacture its products in the United States, rather than in China and other overseas countries.
“We’re going to get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries,” said Trump, while campaigning at Liberty University in Virginia earlier this year.
Apple did reportedly ask its Taiwanese manufacturing partner Foxconn to study the possibility of moving iPhone production to the United States, although Foxconn chairman Terry Gou was said to be less enthusiastic about the idea due to inevitably higher production costs compared to China.
Meanwhile, Trump called for an Apple boycott after the company refused to comply with a court order to unlock the iPhone used by shooter Syed Farook in the San Bernardino attack last December. The FBI later dropped its lawsuit against Apple after reportedly turning to Israeli company Cellebrite to crack the iPhone.
Trump said Cook congratulated him on winning the election, but the Apple chief was personally a Hillary Clinton supporter. Following Trump’s victory, Cook urged Apple employees to “move forward together” despite “uncertainties ahead.”
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Tags: Tim Cook, Donald Trump
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Apple Plans to Release Swift 3.1 in Spring 2017
Apple has announced it plans to release Swift 3.1 in the spring of 2017, corresponding to some point between March and June.
Swift 3.1 is intended to be source compatible with Swift 3.0 and will contain a few enhancements to the core programming language.
Improvements will also be made to the Swift Package Manager, Swift on Linux, compiler, and Standard Library.
Swift 3.1 development should conclude around January 16, 2017 for major changes, at which point Apple’s focus will turn to the development of Swift 4.
Swift is Apple’s open source programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift 3.0 was released in September with major improvements and refinements to the core language and Standard Library, major additions to the Linux port of Swift, and the first official release of the Swift Package Manager.
Tag: Swift
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Unicode Proposes Regional Emoji Flags for Next Year
The Unicode Consortium has announced a proposed update to its emoji documentation that provides support for regional flag emojis.
As noted by Emojipedia, the new functionality and guidelines would allow for Apple and other vendors to implement emojis for regions such as U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, or countries of the United Kingdom.
Flags representing California or Texas, for example, or England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, could be added in a future iOS update.
The Unicode Consortium stopped short of recommending specific flags for vendors to support, and it said there is no requirement that any of the regional flags be supported. In other words, Apple in particular would be free to choose which regional flags to add to its iOS and macOS platforms if any.
Emojipedia said the Emoji 5.0 update is likely to be released in the first half of 2017, although an official date has not been specified. The proposed update is currently available for public review and feedback until January 16, 2017.
Some apps such as WhatsApp have already worked around the existing Unicode standards to support flags for England, Scotland, Wales, and other regions.
Tags: emoji, Unicode Consortium
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Your next heart monitor could be graphene-coated Silly Putty
For a child’s toy, Silly Putty has some downright crazy physical properties. The mixture of boric acid and silicon oil, originally developed as a synthetic replacement for rubber, is a non-Newtonian fluid. Its viscosity isn’t affected by temperature, but rather external force — that is, its rate of flow depends on how hard you push or stretch it. And while its original inventors were content to leave it as a plaything, a team of researchers from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland are about to put it to work in the medical field.
“It’s got these strange properties but it never really found an application,” Trinity College physicist, Jonathan Coleman, told NPR. “So we thought, if we could make it do something, that would be cool.” That something involved coating Silly Putty with graphene — a form of carbon that measures just one atom in thickness. By combining graphene’s electrical conductivity with the putty’s odd fluidity, the team created a material that both conducts a charge and is exceptionally sensitive to pressure. Any amount of force applied to it will modulate the material’s electrical resistance.
It’s so sensitive, in fact, that if you stick a bit of it to your throat, it can monitor not just the pulse of your carotid artery but your blood pressure as well. It’s even reportedly capable of detecting a spider’s footsteps. The material does have to be handled carefully, though, because as any parent can tell you, the second that stuff gets into the carpet, you’re going to need a new carpet.
Via: NPR
Source: Science
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