Capcom’s classic ‘Puzzle Fighter’ goes free to play on mobile later this year

Why it matters to you

For puzzle fans who spent hours in the arcades in the ’90s, Puzzle Fighter will bring back some fond memories.

At the PAX West show in Seattle this week, Capcom announced a new installment in its classic Puzzle Fighter series. The free-to-play mobile title is coming to Android, iPhone, and iPad later this year. This latest version lets you swap tiles and collect Capcom characters to use in melee battles against the computer or other players.

The original Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo was released in 1996 and was an incredibly popular coin-op game that borrowed characters and music from the popular Street Fighter series and Darkstalkers games. Originally a PlayStation exclusive in the U.S., an HD remake version, titled Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, was released in 2007 on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.

The new mobile version was built from the ground up by Capcom Vancouver, and it looks like there are many more characters from the Capcom universe to unlock. The game was available to play on the show floor at the Camcom booth, and some eager gamers gave it a try.

You start the game  by picking one main character, which has his or her own strengths and abilities. You also choose two additional characters that will supplement the skills of your main character. You can pick from “chibi” (literally, small, or miniature) versions of Capcom stalwarts such as Ryu, Ken, or Chun-Li (Street Fighter), Morrigan (Darkstalkers), Jill (Resident Evil), X (Mega Man), Dante (Devil May Cry), and Frank West or Chuck Greene (Dead Rising).

The game has plenty of hidden strategy, which made it a favorite among puzzle game aficionados. You can stealthily build up gems and then launch epic combos that can knock out your opponent. The new mobile version should make it easier than ever to find human opponents to challenge.

The developers are promising real-time player-versus-player gameplay on mobile devices, with all the action of head-to-head Puzzle Fighter on the go.

Apart from the two short teaser trailers, there aren’t many details about when the game will be available, though there is a promise of a “soft launch” in some countries soon, and a global release later in the year.

Jaguar’s steering wheel of the future revolves around AI

The steering wheel as we know it doesn’t have a bright future — in fact, it might disappear altogether as self-driving cars hit the road. Jaguar Land Rover, however, has an idea as to how it might survive. The British automaker has unveiled a concept steering wheel, Sayer, that’s designed for an era where cars normally drive themselves and personal ownership is a thing of the past. The wheel would have its own AI system, and would follow you from car to car — you’d just hook it in to bring your experience with you.

The AI would largely serve as a concierge. It would link you to an on-demand service club, whether or not you own your car, and would help you get a ride when and where you need it. If there’s a must-attend meeting, for example, you could tell the wheel while it’s still in your living room and it would figure out when a car needs to arrive and tell you when you might want to take control.

Sayer (named after influential designer Malcolm Sayer) will be a core feature on an upcoming concept car, the Future-Type.

Will something like this wheel ever reach production? Probably not. Jaguar Land Rover is making a few assumptions about self-driving cars, such as the likelihood that you’ll have a steering wheel and the need to integrate AI into a dedicated device. Your phone and a cloud service might be all you need. Instead, we’d treat this as a thought exercise. It might never come to pass, but it could give engineers something to consider when they design the first wave of autonomous vehicles.

Source: Newspress

The reborn Lily drone isn’t what you were expecting

To say that Lily drone backers were disappointed would be an understatement. They were promised a cutting-edge machine only to watch the $34 million crowdfunding campaign go up in flames, and only some contributors have received their funds so far. However, Lily is back — sort of. Mota Group (which bought the brand name) has introduced a reborn “Lily Next-Gen” that includes the the same cute black-and-chrome look as the original, but not much else. You’re not going to launch the drone by throwing it, and it’s definitely not waterproof. Its biggest selling points are 4K video and one-button takeoff.

The machine will normally sell for $699, but early adopters can buy it for $499 during the drone’s “first few days” on sale.

Mota’s version of Lily is bound to be a bit frustrating if you poured hard-earned money into the crowdfunded project, especially knowing that another company (LR Acquisition) holds the patents for what made Lily special. With that said, the very fact that it exists could be important if you’re a former backer. The sale of the Lily badge could help more people get refunds and put an end to the whole tragic tale.

Via: Fstoppers, Droning On

Source: Mota

Here’s how Xbox One games will handle mouse and keyboard support

Microsoft has been promising mouse and keyboard support on the Xbox One for ages, but it’s finally getting close. As part of a PAX West panel, the company’s Mike Ybarra revealed that the first Xbox One games to support these peripherals are coming “soon,” and that the company already has an idea as to how it’ll handle support. A lot of it will be “up to developer choice,” Ybarra says, but Microsoft will “coach” studios to make sure they add the feature responsibly — it’s aware that there are potential balance problems.

The big concern is in multiplayer, where mouse and keyboard players could have advantages in some games (they can maneuver more quickly in shooters, for example). Microsoft would prefer that developers offer the choice of playing only against rivals with similar controllers, so players who can’t or don’t want to buy extra peripherals won’t be at an automatic disadvantage. Also, support won’t be mandatory. Ybarra says that’s “based on developer interest.”

To some extent Microsoft has already been experimenting with support between Gears of War 4 (where there have been mixed-input online playlists) and Minecraft’s Better Together update (which has some mouse and keyboard functionality). However, it’s difficult to say how well support will pan out once compatible games arrive in earnest. Will studios honor Microsoft’s recommendations? And if they do, will they risk splitting the community? There’s also the temptation to offer ‘lazy’ ports of PC games where the gamepad interface is almost an afterthought. It’s likely that creators will accommodate both control methods in order to reach as many players as possible, but there could be some hiccups as producers get used to the concept.

Mouse and Keyboard are still coming… pic.twitter.com/jbzcQvAsyS

— Xbox E3 Fans (@XboxE3Fans) September 2, 2017

Via: Windows Central

Source: Xbox E3 Fans (Twitter)

Augmented reality bottle labels could change the way you view beer

Why it matters to you

Augmented reality is finding its footing in our world through its implementation in everyday products and activities.

No, you haven’t had too much to drink — that beer label is moving, thanks to augmented reality. You don’t need to visit a high-end market or tavern to see that craft beer is on the rise.  Suds of all types from every corner of the country can be found at the corner deli or your favorite dive. Microbreweries peddling their wares in cities like Seattle, a city whose love of craft beer is on the rise, can get lost in a sea of delicious foam. That’s why one brewer turned to tech to augment its visibility.

As reported by GeekWire, Snoqualmie Brewery and Taproom of Snoqualmie, Washington, has implemented augmented reality bottle labels for one of its products. A nearby art studio called The Medium was brought on to help.

“When you’re staring at crowded shelves full of great offerings, you can’t taste the beer like you can in a pub, so the design is really all you have to attract that hand toward the bottle neck,” brewery manager Dave Eiffert told GeekWire.

When seen with the naked eye, the Sno Falls American Pale Ale labels look could be compared to any other colorful label. But if you download the free mobile app Layar, you can scan the label and watch it come to life.

A YouTube video shows the waterfall come to life; fish swim upstream against its current; a flock of birds flies by; and the brewmaster rides a barrel over the falls.

“The Medium has worked with the brewery for years creating new fun label design ideas and we had the idea to do an augmented reality label,” Josh Tuininga, creative director at The Medium, said. “After presenting the concept to the brewery we began design with Snoqualmie Falls as the theme. For the AR, we did some testing to make sure the technology would work on a bottle surface. After testing and design approvals, we started the fun part — animation.”

Unless you live in the area, you’re out of luck if you’d like to view these bottles firsthand. The beer can currently be found at Snoqualmie Safeway, Crescent Market at Snoqualmie Casino, Pourhouse in North Bend, IGA in Snoqualmie, the North Bend and Snoqualmie 76s, Family Grocer in Fall City, and the Snoqualmie Market.

You can also try your hand at brewing your own beer at home and find someone to help you make your own cool labels. Once this is done, try one these augmented reality apps to view your masterpiece!

Augmented reality bottle labels could change the way you view beer

Why it matters to you

Augmented reality is finding its footing in our world through its implementation in everyday products and activities.

No, you haven’t had too much to drink — that beer label is moving, thanks to augmented reality. You don’t need to visit a high-end market or tavern to see that craft beer is on the rise.  Suds of all types from every corner of the country can be found at the corner deli or your favorite dive. Microbreweries peddling their wares in cities like Seattle, a city whose love of craft beer is on the rise, can get lost in a sea of delicious foam. That’s why one brewer turned to tech to augment its visibility.

As reported by GeekWire, Snoqualmie Brewery and Taproom of Snoqualmie, Washington, has implemented augmented reality bottle labels for one of its products. A nearby art studio called The Medium was brought on to help.

“When you’re staring at crowded shelves full of great offerings, you can’t taste the beer like you can in a pub, so the design is really all you have to attract that hand toward the bottle neck,” brewery manager Dave Eiffert told GeekWire.

When seen with the naked eye, the Sno Falls American Pale Ale labels look could be compared to any other colorful label. But if you download the free mobile app Layar, you can scan the label and watch it come to life.

A YouTube video shows the waterfall come to life; fish swim upstream against its current; a flock of birds flies by; and the brewmaster rides a barrel over the falls.

“The Medium has worked with the brewery for years creating new fun label design ideas and we had the idea to do an augmented reality label,” Josh Tuininga, creative director at The Medium, said. “After presenting the concept to the brewery we began design with Snoqualmie Falls as the theme. For the AR, we did some testing to make sure the technology would work on a bottle surface. After testing and design approvals, we started the fun part — animation.”

Unless you live in the area, you’re out of luck if you’d like to view these bottles firsthand. The beer can currently be found at Snoqualmie Safeway, Crescent Market at Snoqualmie Casino, Pourhouse in North Bend, IGA in Snoqualmie, the North Bend and Snoqualmie 76s, Family Grocer in Fall City, and the Snoqualmie Market.

You can also try your hand at brewing your own beer at home and find someone to help you make your own cool labels. Once this is done, try one these augmented reality apps to view your masterpiece!

Q&A live-stream app, Askedoo, will remind you to never take Google for granted

App Attack is a weekly series where we search the App Store and Google Play Store for the best apps of the week. Check out App Attack every Sunday for the latest.

It’s tough to envision a world where our questions aren’t answered with one simple Google search. But sometimes, the search engine has you going past the second page only to realize you’ve reached a dead end. This week, we have an app specifically created for answering your questions in an unconventional way: Live-streaming.

Askedoo is a live-stream Q&A video chat platform meant to replace text-based Q&A websites. It connects you to a community of people who can answer your question in real time related to categories such as technology, home and garden, fashion, as well as beauty. Described as “Periscope meeting Ask Jeeves,” the app’s goal is to set you up with someone who has an answer, and seeing as how its user base is global, someone should always be around to help out.

Through the app, you can start a live broadcast with your own question or watch in on someone else’s. There’s also the option to rate your experience through high fives and search for other questions you can help answer yourself. The app even welcomes people to “Host a Topic,” where influencers and experts host a webinar-type stream and set prices for others to participate. For example, if you’re a professional makeup artist and want to earn some additional cash on the side, you can host a live-stream class training session at your own price.

Another way to make money through the app is through private Q&A sessions — similar to the days of ChaCha. For a nominal fee of $10, askers have the option to enter a one-on-one live-stream broadcast. The selected “answerer” receives 80 percent of the amount — $8 — and Askedoo takes 20 percent. The asker can tip the answerer up to $100 for their expertise, if they’d like. All of your revenue is tracked in the app labeled under the piggy bank tab. It shows how much you’ve made through Askedoo along with the amount you’ve earned in tips as well.

Your profile can be customized to include details like your expertise and a short bio. There’s usage stats that show how many questions you’ve asked and your broadcast time, along with the amount of questions you’ve watched and your watch time. All of your recent broadcasts and announcements are archived in your history which you can refer back to later through your profile. When you’re on someone else’s live-stream, a swipe to the left will reveal the question, channel, time elapsed, and total views.

With a scroll-through interface similar to Instagram’s feed, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through the questions until I reached the end rather quickly. The app officially launched in July, but the amount of questions were dismal. Even when I went to check back the next day, I refreshed the app and found the same ones from before.

There were no live broadcasts to tune in to, so I had to settle for checking out the past streams. It’d be nice if you could subscribe to specific categories you consider yourself an expert in and receive push notifications when someone goes live.

Similar to Facebook Live, you can play back the livestream and watch when people joined in and asked questions. With 5,000 active users on the app, I saw nine people join the live stream at most and only a few comments generated — which you could argue is enough as long as one of them answers the question, but it felt uncomfortably empty.

When I tried asking a question on Askedoo, the setup was simple. I typed in my question, chose a category, hit “Go Live,” and waited for someone to answer. It only took a few seconds before one person entered the chat and started sending answers. But sitting there and waiting for a response became boring rather quickly, and I ended it after only a few minutes. The experience wasn’t at all revolutionary. It didn’t help that the front-facing camera zooms in so closely on your face that you start to panic while trying to find the “end” button.

But if a livestream is only attracting a few viewers and responses, it’s tough to see a difference between posting it on your social media accounts instead. Or the even more obvious resource — typing it into Google. When I showed the app to a co-worker, he took two of the first questions that appeared on the app and immediately found a straight-forward answer on Google in seconds. Having to log on to Askedoo, type in your question, go live, and wait around hoping someone is there to answer your question correctly is a lot of unnecessary work.

One broadcast I watched titled, “How do I sharpen these knives” saw only one semi-helpful response but the most ironic was when two people suggested searching Google or YouTube.

While I understand this app is trying to stand in as a modernized version of Q&A platforms, the fact that it’s visually based is its downfall. Random questions that pertain to household items or beauty don’t require a live-stream. What differentiates Askedoo is the ability to make a few extra bucks. But judging off the amount of content posted on a daily basis, don’t expect to be rolling in dough.

The education and tutoring category seem to be great for the live-stream format — there aren’t many successful apps that bridge the gap between online tutoring and smartphones. It’s a situation where a one-on-one Q&A session would make the most sense, especially when you need help right away. It’s also where Google and YouTube fail at times because homework problems are all unique, and it becomes tough to find a specific answer. Too bad the category was empty with content in Askedoo.

If you want to check the app out, it’s currently available for iOS. As for Android and desktop apps, it’s currently in development.

Honda sets aside $605 million to settle Takata airbag claims

The Takata airbag scandal affected several companies, but Honda felt its impact the most. Now, the Japanese automaker has agreed to a $605 million settlement to pay for buyers’ claims related to the deadly airbags in the US. The money Honda set aside will go towards paying for all the out-of-pocket costs and lost wages customers might have incurred from having to get their Takata airbag-equipped cars repaired. According to Financial Times, part of that amount will also be used to create an outreach program designed to speed up the pace of the recall as well as the replacement of recalled parts.

If the court approves the amount Honda is offering to pay, it’ll be the biggest among all Takata-related settlements. Toyota, Subaru, Mazda and Subaru agreed to settle for a total of $553 earlier this year, while Nissan settled a class-action lawsuit for $97.7 million. It only makes sense, though, since Honda is Takata’s biggest customer: among the 18 deaths related to the the company’s rupture-prone airbags, 17 happened in Honda vehicles.

Takata has been in hot water for years, since its airbags have the tendency to explode violently and shoot out hot metal shrapnels inside vehicles. However, things only got serious when the Senate accused the company of faking crash data in 2016, leading to the biggest auto recall in the US. A total of 42 million vehicles have been recalled so far, but the companies involved expect to recall 83 million more vehicles. Takata agreed to plead guilty to criminal misconduct and to settle for $1 billion late last year. Since then, three of its executives have been charged for falsifying crash data, while the company itself had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Source: Reuters, Financial Times

Reddit turns off access to its main source code

Reddit has made its website source code available since 2008 in a bid to keep the community alive no matter what, but it’s having a change of heart now that it’s older and larger. The company has announced that it’s turning off access to a monolithic source code for its site and mobile apps, and will instead offer “many” smaller code bases. This is partly because the team hasn’t done a great job of keeping this centralized code up to date, Reddit says, but it’s also due to competitive reasons. It’s difficult to develop features like video uploading in open source code without telegraphing your plans to your competitors, according to Reddit.

The firm argues that this isn’t really a change in its behavior, but it’ll still have an effect — you’re only going to get access to bits and pieces of Reddit, rather than everything all at once. And some in the community have pointed out that Reddit could theoretically develop features behind closed doors and still release source code once it’s officially ready.

However, it’s not hard to see why Reddit would make the move. It isn’t in a rush to offer public stock like some social companies (it actually ruled out an IPO), but it’s still a large internet company feeling pressure to keep its strategy a secret and stay ahead of would-be rivals. It’s just trying to balance this strategy with the community-driven approach it’s had for more than a decade.

Via: Slashdot

Source: Reddit

Menu Bar Tools Bartender 3 and iStat Menus 5 Now Support macOS High Sierra

Surtees Studios recently announced it has released a public beta of Bartender 3 for testing on macOS High Sierra and macOS Sierra. It’s a free update available within Bartender 2, which costs $15 after a free four-week trial.

The popular tool for rearranging or hiding Mac menu bar items has been completely rewritten in Swift, according to the release notes.

Bartender 3 also no longer requires the Bartender Helper to be installed in menu bar apps in order to control them. As a result, Bartender is no longer able to display the Bartender Bar beneath the menu bar—only within it.

The change was necessary since, in macOS High Sierra, Apple has apparently tightened its System Integrity Protection security feature, preventing system items like Spotlight search from being controlled by Bartender 2.

iStat Menus 5 was also recently updated with improved support for macOS High Sierra and MacBook Pro, MacBook, and iMac models released in 2017.

The popular Mac system monitor also gained improved per-process network monitoring, improved per-process memory monitoring in OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra, improved Bluetooth battery monitoring, and improved disk monitoring performance, plus a fix for an issue with the sun position in light map.

iStat Menus is built into the macOS menu bar, providing power users with convenient access to system information, such as CPU and GPU usage, memory stats, fan speeds, temperatures, disk usage, and battery life.

iStat Menus 5 is $18 on developer Bjango’s website, with a free 14-day trial available. The latest update is version 5.32.

Related Roundup: macOS High Sierra
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