Lincoln ‘invents’ Uber, but for rich people

If you’re the sort of person who’s used to driving around in a Lincoln, then a regular Uber probably feels like a step down. That’s why the luxury motor company has launched its own twist on the “have other people drive you around” business model. According to Autoblog, Lincoln Chauffeur will let Lincoln owners rent a driver for short periods of time, turning up to your home and then driving you around in your own car. So, you know, it’s Dryver.

When you arrive at your destination, the driver can drop you off and take your ride back home for you, picking up gas or groceries on the way. Then, when you’re done having a great time, you can order a driver to go pick up your car and come use it to pick you up. On the upside, you’ll save on parking charges, on the downside, hiring a person for hours at a time to drive you around probably costs more.

Lincoln is proud to boast that its drivers will be employed by Lincoln itself, rather than ad-hoc contractors on the Uber model. That means that Lincoln can boast that the staff have had thorough background checks and won’t steal or trash your car. In addition, if you get along well with a particular individual, you can request them specifically and the company will try to hook you up.

Right now, the service is only testing in Miami, with the rollout expected to hit San Diego in the very near future. Any Lincoln owner can sign up and use the service, so it’s not limited to folks who are Black Label members. Oh, and if you buy a brand new Lincoln, you’ll get a free eight hours of Chauffeur — worth $30 an hour — as a taster.

Source: Autoblog

Vodafone scraps mobile roaming charges for 40 countries

In roughly two months, the European Union will scrap roaming charges for smartphone users across the continent. While the impact on the UK remains hazy — there’s that whole Brexit thing to take care of — mobile carriers have started falling in line and abandoning the fee system for Brits. Today, Vodafone has announced a new set of plans and obliterated roaming charges for all new and upgrading customers. That’s an improvement over last year’s offer, which offered ‘free’ minutes and calls for Red and Red Value customers, but capped data at 4GB or lower.

Now, Vodafone has three types of plans: Essentials, Red Extra and Red Entertainment. Essentials is the cheapest, starting at £9.50 per month (on a 12-month contract) for 250 minutes, unlimited texts and 250MB of data. Jumping up to the Red Extra bracket, you can get unlimited minutes, texts and 2GB of data for £18 per month, or 4GB of data for £22 per month. Finally, there’s Red Unlimited, which comes with streaming goodies and 8GB of data for £27 per month, 20GB for £35 per month or 40GB for £40 per month. There’s also some 30-day contracts, should you prefer.

Vodafone’s inclusive roaming covers 40 destinations: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, the Channel Islands, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, the French West Indies, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Isle of Man, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. Some of these, of course, are outside the European Union, but the move is clearly designed to pre-empt the incoming legislation from Brussels.

In addition, Vodafone is offering 60 “roam-further” locations, which require a £5 fee before you can use your regular data, minutes and texts from the UK. Three, by comparison, covers 42 destinations as part of its ‘Feel at Home’ scheme. These include Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, unlike Vodafone. Nick Jeffrey, chief executive of Vodafone UK, says the changes were made in response to customer feedback: “They want life to be simpler and for us to remove the things which make life stressful so they can live their lives, uninterrupted by these concerns.”

We suspect they’re being used to offset the anger over mid-contract price hikes too.

Source: Vodafone

Sony’s HDR camera helps self-driving cars see in the dark

As Tesla recently showed, video cameras are as important as radar and LiDAR in self-driving cars, tracking road signs, vehicles and pedestrians. However, most can’t handle tough lighting situations like very dark conditions, flickering LEDs or a sudden transition into a tunnel on a sunny day. That’s where Sony comes in with its latest automotive camera sensor. With high sensitivity, HDR capability and anti-flicker tech, it’s one of the first designed specifically to help autonomous vehicles function in less-than-ideal conditions.

Tunnels are particularly tough on entry and exit because of the huge differences in lighting (a RED camera demo from 2011 shows how well its HDRx feature handles that). As Sony illustrates in the video below, a non-HDR camera sees nothing but white when it encounters light at the end of a bright tunnel. With HDR and flicker removal enabled, however, the new sensor easily adjusts to the abrupt light transition and still spots a flickering LED light.

Features of the 2.45 (effective) megapixel sensor include light sensitivity down to 0.1 lux, helping a vehicle see road signs or pedestrians on a clear, full-moon night — without its lights. It’s also got 120dB HDR sensitivity, wide enough to handle tunnels or urban night driving. It can mitigate flicker using a longer exposure time, a function that works in parallel with HDR, since both situations often occur at the same time.

Sony says the device also meets automotive reliability and safety standards. That’ll make its low-light and HDR capability important, because Europe’s automotive safety board will “include nighttime pedestrians as targets for automatic braking collision avoidance systems in 2018,” Sony says. It plans to start sampling the new sensors next month and shipping them in March of 2018.

Source: Sony

Dropbox Paper For iOS Gains Offline Mode and Multiple Language Support

Dropbox’s collaborative editing software Paper received an update to its iOS app on Tuesday that allows users to edit their documents offline.

Similar to Google Docs, Paper offers Dropbox account holders a minimalist document editor and conversational tools for collaborative projects. Users review and revise work in a single, shared space which includes an image gallery feature, advanced search across files and comments, and a notifications system that works across both the iOS app and the web version of the service.

The new offline feature was introduced to allow users to create new documents, or access, edit, and comment on documents stored in the cloud even if they lost their internet connection. When the connection is restored, changes are automatically synced to the Paper service.

The change brings Paper one step closer to Google Docs functionality, but currently the offline mode applies to mobile users only – Dropbox has yet to add the support to the web app version of the service.

In addition to the offline mode, Dropbox announced Paper support for 20 additional languages, including Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Malay, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.

Paper is a free download for iPhone and iPad available on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Dropbox
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Feral Interactive to Release ‘Total War: Warhammer’ For Mac Next Week

Feral Interactive has announced that the first game in the Total War: Warhammer trilogy is set to come to the Mac next week.

Originally developed by Creative Assembly in partnership with Games Workshop and published by SEGA, Feral has completed the work of converting the popular PC title to run via Apple’s new graphics API, Metal, and will launch the Mac game on April 18.

A fantasy strategy game of colossal proportions, Total War: WARHAMMER combines an addictive turn-based campaign of skillful empire-building with explosive real-time battles as players strive to conquer all at the head of one of four mythic Races.

The deep and rich universe of Warhammer opens a new era for Total War by taking the series into a magical realm of grand high fantasy. Gigantic monsters, flying dragons, legendary heroes and regiments of nightmarish warriors all take their place on the bloody battlefields of Warhammer’s Old World.

Gamers get to command one of four races, each with its own radically different play style, units, characteristics and abilities. Players can choose to command the tough and vengeful Dwarfs, the undead Vampire Counts, the valiant men of the Empire, or the barbaric Orcs and Goblins of the Greenskin tribes.

The original Windows title proved a big hit, but some users reported technical glitches that marred their enjoyment of the game, so it remains to be seen whether Feral has managed to overcome those issues in the conversion process.

The Mac version of Total War: Warhammer will be available through the Feral Store, the Mac App Store and Steam from April 18. System requirements have yet to be announced.

Tag: Feral
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Chrome Browser Gains ‘Scroll Anchoring’ to Prevent Annoying Web Page Jumps

Google yesterday announced a new feature in the latest update to its Chrome browser that aims to make the progressive loading of web pages less jumpy and annoying.

The idea behind progressive loading is to allow users to begin consuming web content immediately before the page has fully loaded, but the offscreen loading of pictures and so on can cause unexpected page jumps and push down what’s already on screen, making for a frustrating experience, especially on mobile devices. Google’s answer to this problem is something called Scroll Anchoring.

Similar to other features designed to protect our users from bad experiences, starting in version 56 Chrome prevents these unexpected page jumps with a new feature called scroll anchoring. This feature works by locking the scroll position on an on-screen element to keep our users in the same spot even as offscreen content continues to load.

Google claims scroll anchoring is already preventing about three page jumps per page-view, but says it understands there might be some content for which scroll anchoring is either unwanted or misbehaving. For this reason, the feature ships alongside a CSS property to override it.

While the focus of this feature is on mobile, scroll anchoring is actually also on by default on Chrome for Mac. Meanwhile, Google is encouraging web developers to participate in a community group to discuss the feature’s functionality, offer feedback, and learn how to design websites or services “with a no-reflow mindset”.

Google Chrome is available to download for free on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Chrome
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Appe’s new Clips app neared a million downloads in 4 days

Why it matters to you

A million downloads is nothing to be scoffed at, but with Apple’s backing a more impressive start for Clips might’ve been expected.

Apple’s new video-editing app seems to be off to a tentative start, hitting up to a million downloads within four days of its release but failing to crack the iOS app store’s top 20.

Aimed primarily at the Instagram and Snapchat crowd, Clips went live on April 6 for Apple’s mobile devices and quickly entered the iOS app charts’ top 50. But despite Apple’s promotion of the new app via its prominence on the tech giant’s online store, the app has so far only managed to reach as high as 28 in the chart. It’s since slipped to 53.

Data shared by apps analytics firm App Annie with TechCrunch confirmed that Clips had received between 500,000 and 1,000,000 downloads from Thursday through Sunday.

App Annie’s Danielle Levitas  said that despite Apple’s marketing efforts, it’s likely that the “average user” still hasn’t heard of it, though she expects that’ll all change as users begin sharing their Clips videos on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook.

More: How to add music to Instagram videos

The free app, which currently has an average four-star rating from users, has been pitched as a fun way to create entertaining videos, with ease of use at its heart. In other words, when you use Clips, you’ll see no “timelines, tracks, or complicated editing tools,” as Apple says of the app.

With Clips you can easily import video sequences and photos already on your device, or alternatively record completely fresh material. The app features filters, soundtracks, speech bubbles, and emoji overlays to jazz up your work. A neat touch is Live Titles, which lets you add animated title cards or captions simply by speaking into your mobile device’s microphone. The software changes your spoken word into written text, which you can then incorporate into your clip.

Yet to take Clips for a spin? It supports most recent iOS devices — running version 10.3 — and you can grab from the app store here.

Here’s a retro-styled Bluetooth keyboard that you might actually want to use

Why it matters to you

Retro-styled keyboards seem pretty popular these days and the Penna could be a solid piece of good-looking kit.

We’ve seen all kinds of keyboards here at Digital Trends. There was the emoji keyboard aimed at those for whom typing out actual letters was a little too much to bear; the bonkers beer keyboard where you could type out a message and then drink the keys; and the rather cool waffle keyboard which, although not an actual keyboard, turned out to be as tasty as it looked.

On the slightly more sensible side of the fence, retro-styled keyboards seem to be growing in popularity. We recently came across the Lofree and Ncore Retro keyboards, while the latest design hoping to spend some clackety-clack time on your desk is the Penna, a Bluetooth device with a retro look.

The fact that the Penna has almost quadrupled its $50,000 Kickstarter target suggests your fingers could be caressing its keys as early as August, 2017, when it’s due to start shipping.

The Penna will be offered with a variety of customizable options. For example, you can go with a more conventional set of square keys “for more accurate typing,” or opt for the more impressive chrome-edged keys “to maximize the retro styling.” However, the suggestion appears to be that typing on the second model might take a little longer to master.

You can also choose the kind of key response you want with the Penna, from soft to hard. The former offers a quieter sound perhaps better suited for office environments so you don’t wind up your co-workers with a repetitive and audible clacking noise the whole time.

Penna’s California-based maker has built a smartphone/tablet stand into the device, too, so you can rest your iOS, Android, or Windows device upright for a more comfortable user experience. In addition, it comes in five different colors, and there’s a cool-looking wooden design that you might want to check out, as well.

A neat inclusion is the Macro Bar on the side of the Penna that lets you knock out frequently used words or phrases with a quick press. Finally, the keyboard takes a couple of AA-sized batteries that should keep it powered for up to six months.

More: The Heatbuff sits by your keyboard and keeps your hands warm

“We’ve been waiting long for a beautiful keyboard, and when we couldn’t any more, we started this project to make what we wanted,” maker Elretron says of the Penna.

It’ll sell for a pretty reasonable $99 though it still has some early-bird deals left at $89 a piece. If you’re tired of your boring plastic keyboard and fancy something a little more stylish, the Penna may be a bit of kit worth considering.

Here’s a retro-styled Bluetooth keyboard that you might actually want to use

Why it matters to you

Retro-styled keyboards seem pretty popular these days and the Penna could be a solid piece of good-looking kit.

We’ve seen all kinds of keyboards here at Digital Trends. There was the emoji keyboard aimed at those for whom typing out actual letters was a little too much to bear; the bonkers beer keyboard where you could type out a message and then drink the keys; and the rather cool waffle keyboard which, although not an actual keyboard, turned out to be as tasty as it looked.

On the slightly more sensible side of the fence, retro-styled keyboards seem to be growing in popularity. We recently came across the Lofree and Ncore Retro keyboards, while the latest design hoping to spend some clackety-clack time on your desk is the Penna, a Bluetooth device with a retro look.

The fact that the Penna has almost quadrupled its $50,000 Kickstarter target suggests your fingers could be caressing its keys as early as August, 2017, when it’s due to start shipping.

The Penna will be offered with a variety of customizable options. For example, you can go with a more conventional set of square keys “for more accurate typing,” or opt for the more impressive chrome-edged keys “to maximize the retro styling.” However, the suggestion appears to be that typing on the second model might take a little longer to master.

You can also choose the kind of key response you want with the Penna, from soft to hard. The former offers a quieter sound perhaps better suited for office environments so you don’t wind up your co-workers with a repetitive and audible clacking noise the whole time.

Penna’s California-based maker has built a smartphone/tablet stand into the device, too, so you can rest your iOS, Android, or Windows device upright for a more comfortable user experience. In addition, it comes in five different colors, and there’s a cool-looking wooden design that you might want to check out, as well.

A neat inclusion is the Macro Bar on the side of the Penna that lets you knock out frequently used words or phrases with a quick press. Finally, the keyboard takes a couple of AA-sized batteries that should keep it powered for up to six months.

More: The Heatbuff sits by your keyboard and keeps your hands warm

“We’ve been waiting long for a beautiful keyboard, and when we couldn’t any more, we started this project to make what we wanted,” maker Elretron says of the Penna.

It’ll sell for a pretty reasonable $99 though it still has some early-bird deals left at $89 a piece. If you’re tired of your boring plastic keyboard and fancy something a little more stylish, the Penna may be a bit of kit worth considering.

Here’s a retro-styled Bluetooth keyboard that you might actually want to use

Why it matters to you

Retro-styled keyboards seem pretty popular these days and the Penna could be a solid piece of good-looking kit.

We’ve seen all kinds of keyboards here at Digital Trends. There was the emoji keyboard aimed at those for whom typing out actual letters was a little too much to bear; the bonkers beer keyboard where you could type out a message and then drink the keys; and the rather cool waffle keyboard which, although not an actual keyboard, turned out to be as tasty as it looked.

On the slightly more sensible side of the fence, retro-styled keyboards seem to be growing in popularity. We recently came across the Lofree and Ncore Retro keyboards, while the latest design hoping to spend some clackety-clack time on your desk is the Penna, a Bluetooth device with a retro look.

The fact that the Penna has almost quadrupled its $50,000 Kickstarter target suggests your fingers could be caressing its keys as early as August, 2017, when it’s due to start shipping.

The Penna will be offered with a variety of customizable options. For example, you can go with a more conventional set of square keys “for more accurate typing,” or opt for the more impressive chrome-edged keys “to maximize the retro styling.” However, the suggestion appears to be that typing on the second model might take a little longer to master.

You can also choose the kind of key response you want with the Penna, from soft to hard. The former offers a quieter sound perhaps better suited for office environments so you don’t wind up your co-workers with a repetitive and audible clacking noise the whole time.

Penna’s California-based maker has built a smartphone/tablet stand into the device, too, so you can rest your iOS, Android, or Windows device upright for a more comfortable user experience. In addition, it comes in five different colors, and there’s a cool-looking wooden design that you might want to check out, as well.

A neat inclusion is the Macro Bar on the side of the Penna that lets you knock out frequently used words or phrases with a quick press. Finally, the keyboard takes a couple of AA-sized batteries that should keep it powered for up to six months.

More: The Heatbuff sits by your keyboard and keeps your hands warm

“We’ve been waiting long for a beautiful keyboard, and when we couldn’t any more, we started this project to make what we wanted,” maker Elretron says of the Penna.

It’ll sell for a pretty reasonable $99 though it still has some early-bird deals left at $89 a piece. If you’re tired of your boring plastic keyboard and fancy something a little more stylish, the Penna may be a bit of kit worth considering.