Google’s search app now has shortcuts to its popular tools

The Google app is handy for finding all sorts of information you’re hunting for quickly on both Android and iOS devices. Today, the company is adding a quicker way to browse information on entertainment, sports scores, nearby ATMs and more. Google is calling the new feature “tappable shortcuts” and it will be available on both apps and via its mobile website.

A few of these tools will appear under the main search box on the app’s home screen for quick access, but the full list is just another tap away. However, there are some options that are only available to Android users. That version of the app will tack on translate, nearby attractions, flights, hotels, internet speed test, currency converter and games like tic-tac-toe, roll a die, solitaire and other fun selections. Right now, Google says the so-called tappable shortcuts are available to users in the US and it didn’t elaborate on when they might be available elsewhere.

Via: The Verge

Source: Google

Facebook comments may soon look more like Messenger chats

In order to keep people coming back, Facebook regularly debuts new features for small sets of users. Newsfeed posts, videos and Messenger have all regularly been experimented on, but the humble comments section has largely stayed the same over the past decade. That could be set to change, however, after BuzzFeed News confirmed that the social network is testing a new mobile layout that styles comments to look more like text messages.

According to Facebook, the new bubble interface is designed to make posts more conversational. A company spokesperson told BuzzFeed: “We are always working to make Facebook a more visual and engaging place to have conversations. So we’re testing multiple design updates in News Feed, including a more conversational way to comment on posts.”

Other subtle design tweaks include the introduction of pop-ups that load individual posts in a new window and a visual indicator that alerts you when other people are currently writing a comment on a post. Basically, Facebook is taking features that Messenger users have become accustomed to and incorporating them inside the Newsfeed.

The new layout is a lot easier on the eye, but the messaging bubbles do take up more of the screen. This might suggest Facebook wants people to spend more time in the app or that it wants comment sections to be reserved for real comments. Maybe it’ll put an end to the endless threads of name tag comments inside popular Newsfeed posts and viral videos.

Although some users will see the new features inside their app, Facebook typically limits the number of people involved in its trials. Should the message bubbles receive positive feedback, however, they could roll out to everyone in the near future.

Source: BuzzFeed News

Logitech Debuts Education-Focused ‘Rugged Combo’ Case for New 9.7-Inch iPad

Logitech today announced a new series of accessories made for schools using the just-announced 9.7-inch iPad, or any iPad with a similar form factor. The “Rugged Combo” includes both a case for the iPad as well as a detachable keyboard, and when both are connected Logitech said they combine to become “the ultimate classroom solution” for taking notes, tests, going on field trips, and studying.

The Rugged Combo protects the iPad from drops as high as six feet and includes a kickstand with mechanical hinges that ensure the device remains sturdy at any angle. Logitech is specifically targeting grade school classrooms that use iPads in their curriculum, with advantages including a transparent window on the back of the case that provides an easy glance for asset tagging to scan and mark the school-owned property before and after students use the iPad.

“iPad is changing the way teachers teach and students learn, and the Logitech Rugged Combo for the new 9.7-inch iPad is built from the ground up with personalized-learning in mind,” said Michele Hermann, vice president of mobility at Logitech. “We worked with Apple to design the Rugged Combo to be incredibly durable and protect iPad while bringing a secure keyboard connection that’s approved for testing, so teachers and students can focus on expanding what’s possible inside the classroom and beyond.”

According to Logitech, the detachable keyboard has “laptop like typing” and provides a secure data entry point if teachers decide to submit tests to students on the iPad. The secure connection between the keyboard and case is provided through Logitech’s proprietary secure connector, which functions similarly to Apple’s Smart Connector.

Logitech will sell the Rugged Combo, which includes the case and keyboard, as well as just the Rugged Case for schools not interested in the keyboard. Additionally, the Add-On Keyboard for Rugged Case will be up for purchase. Schools and school districts in the United States and Canada will be able to buy Logitech’s new iPad accessories from Apple’s education store later this week.

Tag: Logitech
Discuss this article in our forums

Apple introduces new 9.7in iPad, drops the Air moniker

Apple has quietly introduced a new iPad model to its online store, alongside a new (Product)RED iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The new iPad, simply called iPad, replaces the Air 2 and retains the 9.7-inch screen.

• Apple iPad Air 2 review: Lighter, faster, thinner, better

But rather than just change the name, Apple has made some updates under the hood, namely replacing the A8X processor of the Air 2 with a new 64-bit A9 chip. The new chip means the new iPad is capable of delivering faster processing speeds and increased graphics performance over its Air 2 predecessor.

The Retina display is claimed to have had a bump in brightness, too, and it will come preinstalled with iOS 10. Elsewhere it’s business as usual, Touch ID, 8-megapixel rear camera, 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, slim aluminium body in Space Grey, Gold and Silver finishes and up to 10 hour battery life.

It’s essentially the same tablet as before, with a few minor upgrades, but that’s no bad thing when the iPad Air 2 was one of the best tablets on the market, even when it was approaching three years old.

But the good news is, even with those updates, Apple has brought the price of the iPad down by £40 to a rather reasonable £339 for the 32GB Wi-Fi only model and £469 for the Wi-Fi and 4G LTE model. The only other storage option is 128GB and that can be yours for £429 or £559 depending on your connectivity choice.

• Apple iPad Pro 9.7 review: The tablet to beat all tablets
• Apple iPad Pro 10.5 tipped for early 2017, could have A10X processor

There’s no sign of a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro model just yet, but rumours are still suggesting we’ll see this new model sometime in the next few months. The same analysts have correctly predicted an affordable 9.7-inch iPad, so our fingers are crossed the iPad Pro rumour is true as well.

You’ll be able to order the new iPad from 3pm on the 24 March.

iPhone SE updated with 32GB and 128GB models, same prices

Apple has updated its popular, entry-level 4-inch iPhone with larger capacities for the same prices.

The new iPhone SE models will be available from Friday 24 March priced from £379 when bought SIM-free.

They look the same as the existing models – like the original iPhone 5, but in gold, rose gold, silver and space grey colours. The extra capacity will come in handy for photos, apps and other storage-hungry features, however.

The current 16GB and 64GB models are being completely phased out.

Apple’s announcement came as something of a surprise, alongside a new iPad model and bright red versions of its iPhone 7 and 7 Plus smartphones to help raise money for the (Product)RED charity.

• Apple iPhone SE review: Great things can come in small packages

The iPhone SE comes with a 4-inch Retina display (1136 x 640 pixels) and A9 processing chip. There is an M9 coprocessor too, for intensive graphics duties.

A 12-megapixel camera can be found on the rear and the phone is capable of recording video at up to 4K in 30fps. The front FaceTime HD camera has 1.2-megapixels and can record 720p video.

Like the iPhone 7, the SE has a fingerprint sensor in the home button and is compatible with Apple Pay so can be used to pay for purchases in many shops around the UK and abroad.

ICYMI: CT scanning mummies and drones that land like birds

Today on In Case You Missed It: Researchers from The Field Museum are using CT scanners to look inside mummies from Peru and Egypt to see what lies behind the casket and ancient gauze. The images have uncovered information about the gender and approximate age the of deceased when they took their last breath. It also gives museum-goers the opportunity to peel away the layers of a mummy and check out 3D models of what the dead might have looked like before they met their untimely end.

We also checked out research for fixed-wing drones that land like birds. Typically these type of tiny aircraft need a runway just like a full-size plane. But the folks at BMT Defence Services are developing a drone that flies and lands like our feather friends thanks to AI, deformable wing and moveable tail. The goal is to get the flying machines to swoop up at the last minute and fall a few inches to the ground just like the your neighborhood sparrows.

As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Apple doubles the storage of the iPhone SE and iPad Mini 4

The new, limited-edition red iPhone 7/7 Plus and upgraded 9.7-inch iPad aren’t the only things Apple has to share today. The company is also increasing the storage across all iPhone SE and iPad Mini 4 configurations. The lowest-capacity 4-inch iPhone SE is now 32GB, up from 16GB, and the 64GB model has been scrapped in favor of a 128GB version. Basically, Apple has doubled the storage and finally killed off the last 16GB iPhone, but good news: The prices haven’t changed. The new 32GB iPhone SE costs $399/£379 (the same price as the old 16GB device), while the 128GB model comes in at $499/£479. Both will go on sale this Friday, March 24th.

For the iPad Mini 4, Apple has simply done away with the 32GB and 64GB models, introducing a new, lone 128GB config. You’re getting an even better deal here, since you’re only expected to pay as much as the 32GB was worth for quadruple the storage — though it makes sense customers should get more bang for their buck since the internals of the Mini 4 are lagging behind Apple’s other iPads. The 128GB tablet goes on sale today for $399/£419 for the WiFi-only model, and $529/£549 if you add LTE connectivity.

Source: Apple (1), (2)

There’s now a GameBoy emulator for the Apple Watch

The last place you’d probably want to play a video game is on an Apple Watch. The wearable has a tiny screen, almost no buttons and can only be operated with one hand. It’s a completely impractical gaming device, but developer Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan made a Game Boy emulator for it anyway.

Named after Pokémon’s Giovanni, the wrist-worn Game Boy emulator crams Nintendo’s original gaming portable into an Apple Watch Series 2. It doesn’t quite play games at full speed, but it is fully functional. On-screen buttons underneath the game display let users tap in start, select and B button inputs, and swiping up, down, left or right emulates the d-pad inputs. Want to press the A button? Just tap on the right side of the watch’s face.

The project is a fork of Gambatte, an existing Game Boy emulator — but O’Flaherty-Chan says it wasn’t an easy port. Apple’s WatchOS didn’t use any of the graphics standards the original emulator relied on, and was never really meant to play complex games. Still, the project is a neat proof of concept, albeit one that will never see full support on the App Store. Still, if you want to check it out for yourself, hit up the GitHub link at source link below. Giovanni is open-source, after all.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: GitHub

The life-changing magic of tidying up (your computer)

Someone once told me that consumerism is the process whereby our happiness is ripped from us so that it can be sold back to us at a profit. It’s the sort of thing you don’t think about when you’re a kid, but gradually hits you as an adult. After all, three decades of constant consumption, retail therapy and 24-hour supermarkets takes its toll. I’ve reached a place where I’m being slowly suffocated by my possessions, both real and imaginary, and it’s time to make a change.

Read the lifestyle pages or watch any of the Hoarders-style TV shows and minimalism documentaries and you’ll see what’s happening. It seems as if the Western world has decided, as one, to collectively fetishize asceticism as a refreshing alternative to consumerism. Marie Kondo’s category-defining book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has sold more than 5 million copies. Everyone is shedding their unwanted possessions in the hope of recapturing some lost joy and freeing up space in the home.

What interests me is how all of this translates to the digital space, where physical constraints aren’t something you have to worry about. After all, if you start to run out of storage capacity on a computer, it’s easy to run to the store and pick up a far bigger hard drive for not much cash. Right now, for instance, you can grab a 3TB HDD for just $90 on Amazon — enough for thousands of high-def movies. In this manner, you could theoretically store almost everything you ever wanted without fear of ever having to think about clearing out. In the real world, you’ve gotta hire a storage locker, and that costs a hell of a lot more than $30 a terabyte.

Cheaper than a storage locker and far more capacious.

Hoarding isn’t simply about the act of not throwing something away; it’s about forming a deep psychological bond to your stuff. To the point where you would rather suffer gross inconvenience than deal with the anxiety of disposal. Which is the sort of itchy, restless feeling I get whenever I start to think about tidying the old files on my computer.

The consequence is that I have several hard drives full of disorganized electronic junk that I have no interest in exploring, but am incapable of wiping. I’ve formed that unreasonable attachment to such digital ephemera that I simply need to get over if I’m ever going to live a simpler, happier, better life. So, armed with a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

Many books on decluttering talk about organizing elements of your life in isolation, but Marie Kondo differs from the norm. She believes that you should declutter your life in one intensive, prolonged act that can take up to six months (if done properly). For instance, you should gather together every item of clothing that you possess and dump them all on your living room floor. It’s only then, when you can appreciate everything that you own, that you can make judgments about what you should keep.

The second plank of her system is to assume that everything should be thrown away, so you have to justify keeping everything. The rule of thumb is that you should retain only things that bring you some form of joy. Now, if you struggle to find joy in your socks, then Kondo says that you should reappraise your relationship with the footwear. That may sound like nonsense, because it is, but you have to admit, you probably find joy in having something between your foot skin and the inside of your shoes.

All of this is easier in the real world than in a computer, since there’s no virtual living-room floor across which I can scatter my files. The best that I can hope for is that sorting files by type in my computer’s master list of files will be sufficient. Unfortunately, that’s not entirely useful for making decisions, because it takes so much time to go into each one to examine its contents.

“That may sound like nonsense, because it is.”

The Kondo system works as an inverted pyramid, starting with all the things it should be easy to get rid of. The book explains that you do clothes first, then books, papers, general miscellany and finish with your sentimental items. Adapting this slightly, I thought I’d start with desktop apps and bookmarks, before moving on to documents, videos and finishing up with my photos.

Marie Kondo (left), leading the charge for us to be minimal.

Apps, as it turns out, was a ridiculously easy place to begin, and I was able to cull plenty of inessential files in around 10 minutes. Bookmarks, on the other hand, took the better part of an extraordinarily painful day. The list of stories that I agonized over included an AV Club article about the real KFC recipe, two different reports on the original series plan for Babylon 5 and 55 links about kitchen design.

The conundrum was that while none of these things particularly sparked joy, I owed something, surely, to Past Dan. After all, he had felt it worthwhile to bookmark those pieces with the intention of revisiting them later. It felt like a betrayal simply to wipe something that he’d felt was important — almost like I’d thrown out someone else’s stuff without his permission.

In my panic, I consulted Josh Becker, founder and editor of Becoming Minimalist and author of The More of Less. He sympathized with my plight and was able to explain why, talking about a story that he’d heard from another minimalist, David Bruno. “Bruno wrote a book called The 100 Thing Challenge where he got down to owning just 100 physical things,” Becker said. “The hardest thing for him to get rid of was the woodworking tools in his garage,” not because he’d used them, but because he hadn’t.

Becker went on to say that the hardest things for people to get rid of are those “that signify the death of a dream.” It’s not that Bruno was sad about losing his woodworking tools; it was the realization that he would now probably never even attempt to become a woodworker. My reluctance to delete that KFC recipe wasn’t because I was worried about Past Dan; it was because it represented the death of an ambition. Not that KFC is that nice anyway, but you know what I mean.

It’s not about what these files, bookmarks, apps and photos are so much as what they represent to you. The meaning that you give to them is an order of magnitude more important than what they do on their own. “Decluttering forces questions of value and purpose onto you,” Becker said later. “What do I want to accomplish? How can I best serve others, and how can I move society forward?” It left me thinking what, exactly, was it that I wanted to do, not only with my stuff but also with my life.

So, now, I’m going to start again, looking at each file and folder and bookmark not within the context of joy, but purpose. Specifically, if having this bulleted list of dinner ideas from 2013 will somehow help me become a better person in 2017. Or if I’ll ever have another reason to use a picture of Spike Lee taking a picture with an iPad in portrait mode. Not to mention a 2GB pitch video for a product I wound up not covering because it was too silly. My hunch is that I can probably get rid of them all without a moment’s thought.

Check out all of Engadget’s “Adult Week” coverage right here.

Answers edited for clarity.

Image Credits: Getty (Hard Drives), Joanne Rath / Boston Globe via Getty (Marie Kondo)

Devon police will establish the UK’s first 24/7 drone squad

The Devon and Cornwall Police force is to become the first in the UK with a permanent, 24-hour drone assistance unit. The flying fuzz will be on hand to search for missing persons, seek out suspects and generally provide an eye in the sky whenever needed, gathering intel at crime scenes and responding to road accidents. The dedicated unit, which will also help out police in neighbouring Dorset, is set to launch this summer after a new “drone manager” is hired to oversee the nine sites the coppercopters will operate out of.

Drones are being trialled by police forces across the UK, and London rozzers have previously said they could make high-speed pursuits safer, particularly where motorbikes are involved. Devon and Cornwall Police is the first constabulary to commit to a permanent unit after testing DJI Inspire 1 drones in the field for the past two years.

Via: Gizmodo, The Mirror

Source: Devon and Cornwall Police