Here’s our first look at Windows’ new adaptive interface

Microsoft has been steadily working on bringing the full Windows experience to devices of all types over the past few years, including PCs, phones and even the Xbox One. But there are still a few differences with how Windows runs across them. That’s why the company is developing CShell, a new version of the Windows Shell that can adapt to screen sizes of all types, as well as unify the overall experience. It’ll likely play a large role in Microsoft’s Fluent design strategy, which is broadly focused on scaling Windows to more devices. Now, we’ve got our first look at what CShell actually looks like on a Windows Phone, Windows Central reports.

At first glance, CShell looks exactly like the current Windows shell on mobile. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll notice some important changes. It gives you more size options for Live Tiles on the Start screen, for one. It also brings over the Action Center from Windows 10, and adds a landscape option for displaying the Start screen. CShell also gives Windows Continuum the ability to run several apps at once in windowed mode, instead of forcing them to be full screen. Given that that was one of our biggest gripes with Continuum, it’s a particularly useful upgrade.

Source: Windows Central

Walmart takes on Amazon’s grocery pickups with automated kiosks

Walmart isn’t letting up in its quest to one-up Amazon whenever possible, especially when it comes to in-person pickups. The retailer is testing a kiosk in Oklahoma City that lets you pick up your online groceries at any time of the day or week. Instead of parking and waiting for a staffer to bring out your food, you enter a pickup code and wait for the kiosk to automatically fetch the order from bins inside. You need to spend at least $30 and order during store hours, but there are no special fees or other limitations. If you can’t fetch your groceries until 3AM on Sunday, you’re fine.

Whether or not you see more kiosks like this in the US will depend on feedback over the next several months. Walmart is already exploring a similar concept in the UK, however, and it’s also experimenting with vending machine-like “Pickup Towers” in five cities across the US (Atlanta, Bentonville, Detroit, Houston and Raleigh) that streamline the process of retrieving non-food orders.

It won’t be shocking if Walmart pushes forward. Amazon just opened its first drive-through grocery store, and it’s already piloting an internet-powered grocery store with no checkout lines. If Walmart doesn’t automate some of the shopping experience, there’s a risk that Amazon will snap up those customers reeled in by the prospect of faster shopping.

Via: The Verge

Source: NewsOK

Lyft bolsters autonomous-vehicle efforts with NuTonomy partnership

Why it matters to you

Lyft has been investing a lot in self-driving tech lately as it attempts to establish a mostly autonomous fleet by 2021. The NuTonomy partnership adds to that goal.

Your Lyft driver may in time need to start looking for other work. On Tuesday, June 6, Lyft announced a new partnership with Boston-based NuTonomy, a self-driving car technology company. The goal of the “strategic R&D partnership” is to better understand and optimize the “end-to-end experience of autonomous vehicle passengers.” So what does that mean for you? Basically, you can soon expect to see “thousands” of on-demand, self-driving cars in Boston over the course of the next several months.

“By combining forces with Lyft in the U.S., we’ll be positioned to build the best passenger experience for self-driving cars,” Karl lagnemma, CEO and co-founder of NuTonomy, said of the new collaboration. “Both companies care immensely about solving urban transportation issues and the future of our cities, and we look forward to working with Lyft as we continue to improve our autonomous-vehicle software system.”

This is by no means the first time Lyft has toyed with the idea of a self-driving fleet. Just last month, the Uber competitor announced that it would be collaborating with Alphabet’s Waymo on autonomous cars, and before that, it accepted a $500 million investment from GM to put self-driving Chevy Bolts on the road. Of course, with this considerable preponderance of partners, it certainly seems as though Lyft could hit its goal of having most of its rides conducted by autonomous vehicles by 2021.

“At Lyft, we imagine a world where car ownership is optional and cities are designed for people instead of cars,” said Logan Green, CEO and co-founder of Lyft. “Partnering with NuTonomy is an important step towards making this vision a reality. The NuTonomy team is one of the first movers in autonomous vehicle development, and we look forward to working with them to bring their autonomous vehicles to the Lyft network.”

So when can we expect to see the fruits of this labor? Apparently, a limited pilot in Boston will be launched in just a few months, whereupon Lyft users will be able to hail a driverless car from NuTonomy directly through the Lyft app.

Oculus says it has no news on MacOS VR support for now

Why it matters to you

Don’t expect official Rift support on MacOS any time soon, but it will likely show up at some point in the future.

Oculus has no immediate plans to bring its Rift headset to Apple’s MacOS, despite the recent announcement of SteamVR support on the platform and the debut of Apple PCs that meet the minimum hardware requirements for comfortable virtual reality. The firm did, however, claim that it was “committed to bringing PC VR to as many people as possible.”

Once upon a time, during the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 days of the headset’s development, Oculus did have support for then OS X, but as of mid-2015, that all changed. With specifications of the headset creeping upward and Apple hardware not progressing swiftly enough, especially with regard to graphics, Oculus elected to drop support in favor of focusing on Windows PCs.

That proved to be a viable strategy at the time, but now that Apple has high-end systems that are more than capable, there is an argument to be made for re-enabling that support. As it stands though, Oculus has no immediate plans. When contacted by RoadToVR, Apple said in a statement: “We’re committed to bringing PC VR to as many people as possible, but no news on MacOS support at this time.”

This is a shame for those looking to pick up one of Apple’s powerful new systems, and certainly for developers who would rather build games and experiences on MacOS. Even so, the gaming audience, which is the dominant force in the VR market right now, is predominantly a Windows audience. And when you also consider that of the much smaller number of MacOS gamers, few of them will buy a new, VR-capable system in the near future, Oculus’ decision doesn’t seem quite so silly.

This is likely a temporary decision as well, as Oculus is likely to return with MacOS support in the future. With hints that Apple could one day begin producing its own virtual or augmented reality headsets, it would be a surprise if Oculus didn’t look to compete for the not-insubstantial dollars of the Apple audience.

Ghostek’s waterproof Atomic 3 keeps the iPhone 7 safe, but causes audio problems

Since the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus added IP67 water-resistance to their feature set, we often hear people asking whether or not waterproof cases add any value. The short answer is: Yes, it’s never a bad idea to add extra protection to your device. One of the benefits of using a waterproof case like Ghostek’s Atomic 3 is that you get protection all-over, including the screen, which most slim cases don’t offer. Also, if you’re a rough and tumble explorer or frequent traveler, you’ll want a case that can handle tougher situations than everyday hazards, so using a rugged case also makes perfect sense.

The Atomic 3 features a durable aluminum bumper with reinforced corners to form a strong layer of drop and shock protection around your phone. The metal frame’s matte finish comes in five colors: Black, silver, red, pink, and gold. A frosted poly-carbonate back plate fends off scratches and dents while a gasket-lined film screen protector guards the glass and seals out water. As with nearly all rugged cases, the Atomic 3 is bulky and one of the largest we’ve used even when compared with Otterbox and Lifeproof cases. What you get though, is twice the military-grade standard for drop-protection, and a case that won’t bend or shatter.

Installing your phone is almost too easy. The flexible screen protector peels off the front of the case, allowing you to simply drop your phone in and seal it right back up when you press and run your finger along the gasket around the screen. Can something so simple really be watertight? We dropped the case in a bowl of water to find out and indeed, when we pulled it out 15 minutes later, it was dry as a bone inside.

The one complaint we have with the screen protector is how it leaves an air gap between the glass of the screen and the plastic film. It makes the screen appear a bit hazy, and the extra tactile sensation of pressing through the gap might be annoying for some — it doesn’t impact screen responsiveness, and it does leave enough room for you to use an additional tempered glass screen protector if needed.

As for the other external features, the fingerprint scanner responds well through the plastic film over the home button, and the camera and flash performed as expected without noticeable impact to image quality. We really like the rotary crown over the mute switch which allows you to mute or un-mute the phone with a simple twist, rather than trying to flip a tiny switch with your fingernail. The buttons over the volume and sleep keys, though small, are as easy to use as the ones on the naked iPhone.

Along the bottom, however, is where we ran into a few issues. The rubber door over the Lightning port does such a good job sealing it off from dust and water that it was sometimes more of an effort to open it for charging than taking the phone out of the case. The cutout’s narrow profile also prevents some third-party cables and connectors from working with the case. Call quality and audio were less than impressive, as well, thanks to the mic being covered. Sound through the top and bottom speakers carried noticeable graininess, likely due to vibrations in the air gap between the screen and the film protector.

For us, the audio issues and screen gap make the Atomic 3 a case to skip for day-to-day use. However, when we need a rugged case for a hike or traveling where we’ll be around water, the Atomic 3 is an easy choice because it’s quick to install, and we know the phone will be protected. It’s available now at various online retailers for as low as $55.

Amazon offers discounts to customers on government assistance programs

Why it matters to you

Amazon is going after Walmart’s food stamp revenue with discounts for customers on government assistance programs.

Amazon Prime’s benefits run the gamut from the entertaining (on-demand shows via Prime Instant Video and streaming music) to the practical (Prime Fresh grocery deliveries), but none come cheap — subscriptions start at $99 per year or $11 per month. Those costs add up for folks on fixed incomes, which is why Amazon’s new incentive program offers a cut-rate Prime membership for customers on food stamps, welfare, and other government assistance programs.

Starting this month, Amazon Prime subscribers with a valid electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card — the electronic system that allows state welfare departments to issue payments to welfare recipients — can apply for cheaper subscriptions. They’ll only have to pay $6 per month, which equates to $72 per year — almost a 50-percent savings on the month-to-month plan.

Amazon has taken preemptive measures to curb potential abuse. Eligible subscribers will have to submit their EBT number when they sign up for Prime, and they cannot use it to pay for the Prime membership itself — it is only used to confirm their eligibility. And once customers enroll in the discounted Prime program, they have to re-validate their EBT card every 12 months for a maximum of four times, after which they will have to pay a normal subscription fee.

Amazon said customers on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC) will be eligible.

The move marks a departure for Amazon Prime, which is most popular with upper-income households — the fastest-growing customers are those earning more than $112,000 in annual income. But Amazon has Walmart in its crosshairs. More than one in five customers on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) shop at the brick-and-mortar giant, which has the second-biggest share of online sales. In 2014, Walmart made an estimated $13 billion on food-stamp purchases, or 4 percent of its total sales.

The new program is Amazon’s second to offer Prime discounts. The Seattle-based retailer’s Prime Student, which includes six free months of Prime benefits and offers 50 percent off Amazon Prime fees, is available to any college student with a valid .edu email address.

“We know when people try Prime they love it, because they save time and money with low prices on millions of items, unlimited access to premium videos and music, and fast, convenient delivery,” Amazon Prime vice president Greg Greeley, said in a press release. “We designed this membership option for customers receiving government assistance to make our everyday selection and savings more accessible, including the many conveniences and entertainment benefits of Prime.”

Amazon offers discounts to customers on government assistance programs

Why it matters to you

Amazon is going after Walmart’s food stamp revenue with discounts for customers on government assistance programs.

Amazon Prime’s benefits run the gamut from the entertaining (on-demand shows via Prime Instant Video and streaming music) to the practical (Prime Fresh grocery deliveries), but none come cheap — subscriptions start at $99 per year or $11 per month. Those costs add up for folks on fixed incomes, which is why Amazon’s new incentive program offers a cut-rate Prime membership for customers on food stamps, welfare, and other government assistance programs.

Starting this month, Amazon Prime subscribers with a valid electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card — the electronic system that allows state welfare departments to issue payments to welfare recipients — can apply for cheaper subscriptions. They’ll only have to pay $6 per month, which equates to $72 per year — almost a 50-percent savings on the month-to-month plan.

Amazon has taken preemptive measures to curb potential abuse. Eligible subscribers will have to submit their EBT number when they sign up for Prime, and they cannot use it to pay for the Prime membership itself — it is only used to confirm their eligibility. And once customers enroll in the discounted Prime program, they have to re-validate their EBT card every 12 months for a maximum of four times, after which they will have to pay a normal subscription fee.

Amazon said customers on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC) will be eligible.

The move marks a departure for Amazon Prime, which is most popular with upper-income households — the fastest-growing customers are those earning more than $112,000 in annual income. But Amazon has Walmart in its crosshairs. More than one in five customers on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) shop at the brick-and-mortar giant, which has the second-biggest share of online sales. In 2014, Walmart made an estimated $13 billion on food-stamp purchases, or 4 percent of its total sales.

The new program is Amazon’s second to offer Prime discounts. The Seattle-based retailer’s Prime Student, which includes six free months of Prime benefits and offers 50 percent off Amazon Prime fees, is available to any college student with a valid .edu email address.

“We know when people try Prime they love it, because they save time and money with low prices on millions of items, unlimited access to premium videos and music, and fast, convenient delivery,” Amazon Prime vice president Greg Greeley, said in a press release. “We designed this membership option for customers receiving government assistance to make our everyday selection and savings more accessible, including the many conveniences and entertainment benefits of Prime.”

‘Monument Valley 2’: Our First Take

Research Center:
Monument Valley 2

Apple surprised a lot of people during its WWDC 2017 keynote address with the offhanded announcement that Monument Valley 2 launched on the iOS App Store Monday. Ustwo Games’ original 2014 mobile puzzler was a smash success, earning a raft of awards and nominations for its elegant gameplay and striking presentation, so the surprise release of its sequel is a major event for mobile gaming.

Like the original, Monument Valley 2 is a third person puzzle platformer in which you guide a character through beautiful, isometric environments by tapping where you want her to go. The built environments are heavily inspired by the impossible architecture of MC Escher, relying on perspectival tricks to do things like rotate a platform such that it visually (and thus effectively) bridges two areas that would be impossible to connect in actual space.

It never gets exceptionally challenging, but there’s still a satisfying frisson whenever you solve a given challenge.

Where the first game had one protagonist, the princess Ida, MV2 has two: a woman named Ro and her little daughter, following eagerly behind. The timid daughter follows directly behind Ro at first, but she gains more agency as the game goes on. First she mirrors Ro’s movement, and eventually she’s controlled separately.

At first MV2 returns to the same well of mechanical ideas that served the first game so well, with discrete sections of the level rotating or sliding around in order to create a path to the exit. As it goes on, it introduces more complex interactions, such as trees that grow when exposed to sunlight, and the previously-mentioned use of two simultaneous characters. Like the first game, it never gets exceptionally challenging, but there’s still a satisfying frisson, or feeling of excitement, whenever you solve a given challenge.

The audio and visual presentation are just as gorgeous as the first game’s, creating as immersive, coherent, and complete a world as you could ever hope to fit onto a single iPhone screen. The experience is quite meditative. Like the first game, there is also a photo mode that allows you to pinch and zoom to take pictures of particular sections at any point.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the two games is Monument Valley 2’s increased focus on story and character. Ida’s lonely journey through the first game lacked context, leaving players to ascribe meaning (or not). While the sequel’s story remains veiled, the addition of multiple characters makes the world much less sterile, and provides opportunities for more elaborate narrative themes. Ro’s relationship with her daughter is front and center, with the mechanics of how the two control telling a coming-of-age story as the daughter learns to strike out on her own. There are also interludes in which Ro consults with another, larger woman, offering sage, sometimes cryptic advice about mother-daughter relationships (“Even in youth we knew the work our mothers left for us.”) You can also see what appear to be memories of Ro as a little girl with her own mother ahead of you in certain levels.

Monument Valley 2 is more or less exactly what we wanted from a sequel to the fantastic first title. It takes and expands upon the ideas and aesthetic of its predecessor, creating another perfect, soothing little nugget of experience for mobile phones. The thematic addition of exploring mother-daughter relationships is the icing on an already delicious cake, giving it an emotional quality the first game didn’t achieve. While it shares the original’s drawbacks of being neither particularly challenging or long, returning and new players alike will find a lot to love.

Monument Valley 2 is available now in the iOS app store for $5. Presumably it will come to Android as well, as the original did one month after its Apple release, but there’s no official date yet beyond “soon.”

Monument Valley 2 Compared To

Rime

Inside

The Witness

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

LittleBigPlanet 3

Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes

Roundabout

CounterSpy

Road Not Taken

Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure

Metrico

80 Days

Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics…

Bust-A-Move Universe

Astronomers discover a huge planet that is hotter than most stars

Why it matters to you

Although the planet is completely unlivable, it gives scientists clues to how other planets in the universe form and perish.

Astronomers have discovered a massive planet that is hotter than most known stars.

Dubbed KELT-9b, the planet’s features are strange, to say the least. It is nearly three times the size of Jupiter. It is a gas giant that is tidally locked to its host star, like the moon is to Earth. That means one of the planet’s sides is constantly pointed toward its sun, causing it to bask in temperatures over 7,800 Fahrenheit, only 2,000 degrees cooler than the surface of our sun. On top of that, the planet’s “year” — how often it orbits its star — is just about 1.5 Earth days long.

In fact, KELT-9b is so unusual, the researchers who discovered first thought their data was wrong.

“I thought it couldn’t be real,” Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, told Digital Trends. “We always joke with KELT that either we’ve discovered the most amazing planet ever — or it is a false positive. Turns out, in this case, it was real. Even after 22 years in astronomy, I’m still occasionally floored by what the universe reveals.”

KELT-9b isn’t the only giant in the neighborhood. It’s star, KELT-9, is almost twice as large and twice as hot as our sun, which makes it tough to even spot the planet. Astronomers first discovered KELT-9b when they noticed a fractional dip — about half of one percent — in the host star’s brightness.

KELT-9 contributes to most of the planet’s extremities. The star’s intense radiation has bloated KELT-9b’s atmosphere into a balloon while sizzling its surface. All this intensity comes at a cost. According to Keivan Stassun, an astronomer from Vanderbilt University who led the study with Gaudi, KELT-9b’s existence will be turbulent.

“The future for KELT-9b is likely to be quite interesting and dramatic,” he told Digital Trends. “The planet receives such an intensity of extreme ultraviolet radiation from the host star that its atmosphere is very likely being boiled away. By the time the star begins to die in a billion years, all that may be left of the planet is its rocky core, if it has one. And all of that before the planet almost certainly gets gobbled up by the star as it swells to become a red giant in its final days.”

The researchers published their findings this week in the journal Nature.

Close to the Metal Ep. 46: How close is MacOS to Apple’s Core?

You’ll have to forgive us for not being more excited about Apple’s MacOS related announcements yesterday. Despite Tim Cook referring to the Mac computers as Apple’s “heart and soul,” they haven’t seen the amount of love or attention to detail the iPhone and iPad lines have over the past few years. The OLED Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro came at the cost of battery life and competitive pricing, and made the MacBook Air look even more dated.

With recent updates to the portable Mac systems, yesterday’s WWDC keynote focused instead on improvements to the iMac all-in-one desktops, but it wasn’t anything revolutionary. The systems have the same design and footprint, with changes under the hood meant to keep the systems in line with Apple’s recent initiatives.

That, alongside only modest, and somewhat confusing updates, to MacOS, leave us wondering just how close these systems are to Apple’s core. Devotees are sure to continue to swear by the Macbook and iMac lines, mostly because of deep integration between the mobile and desktop operating systems, but entering the ecosystem is becoming tougher with every release. Join us this week as we talk everything Mac, WWDC, and ask whether anyone will actually want to game on a Mac.

Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that takes a deep dive into computing and PC gaming topics. Each show, we’ll focus in on one topic, and leave no stone unturned as we show off the latest in hardware and software. Whether it’s the latest GPU, supercomputers, or which 2-in-1 you should buy, we break down the complicated jargon and talk about how user experience is affected in the real world. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to podcast@digitaltrends.com. We broadcast the show live on YouTube every Tuesday at 1pm EST/10am PST.