Adobe Photoshop Updated With Touch Bar Support

Adobe has released an updated version of Photoshop CC 2017 for Mac with support for the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, providing users with access to controls based on three categories: Layer Properties, Brushes, and Favorites.

Photoshop’s implementation includes a History Scrubber to jump to any recent state of a document created during the current session. Each time a user applies a change to the document, a new document state is added. Users can scroll through or tap thumbnails on the Touch Bar to navigate the document history.

Touch Bar functions for Layer Properties include adjusting the layer opacity and visibility, scrolling through available blending modes, and making a layer a clipping mask. For brushes, users can use the Touch Bar to pick a color, brush size, brush hardness, brush opacity, and brush flow.

Favorites includes a Screen Mode for toggling between the normal screen mode and full screen mode, and controls for invoking the New Layer command and flipping layers horizontally or vertically. Meanwhile, a Fill Mode control invokes the Fill command with the Content-Aware Fill option preselected.

Photoshop design manager Bradee Evans demoed the Touch Bar features at Apple’s new MacBook Pro event in October. Skip to the 52:30 mark.

Photoshop users can update to the latest version using the Adobe CC Updater. Adobe says Touch Bar support is a “technology preview,” meaning the feature is not considered “production-ready” but nonetheless is available for users to try out.

Tags: Photoshop, Touch Bar
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Delayed no more, Apple AirPods go on sale

Just when we thought we might not see Apple’s wireless AirPods before Christmas, the tech giant has come out and said they’re now available to pre-order, with units arriving in stores and online from next week.

• Apple’s delayed AirPods will finally ship ‘over the next few weeks’

The AirPods were announced on stage alongside the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in September, and were said to be available to buy from late October. That date never came and Tim Cook was forced to tell customers that Apple needed “a little more time” before the AirPods would be ready for customers.

Thankfully, the £159 wireless in ears can be yours or a gift for a loved one in time for Christmas.

The AirPods have no interconnecting cable but instead connect to each other via Bluetooth and can automatically connect to any of your iDevices when they’re placed in the charging case and then near your iPhone or iPad. Once you have connected, the AirPods can connect to any of your other devices registered with iCloud automatically.

• Apple AirPods review: Wire-free future or design disaster?

The design of them could cause many to be worried that they’d fall out on a run or walking around, but from our time with them we encountered no such problems. They fit snugly, sounded good and we loved the intuitive features enabled by the W1 chip, such as pausing music when you take one of the earphones out.

You can buy a pair of AirPods from Apple’s website now for £159, with a delivery date set for Monday 19 December.

Hollywood forces VidAngel to stop streaming its movies

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Warner Bros, Disney and Fox have won an injunction against “family values” streaming service VidAngel. In the aftermath, VidAngel has announced that it will “cease streaming all works for which it has not obtained licensing.” The company has also pledged to appeal, taking the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

VidAngel’s pitch is twofold: you can stream new movies for a dollar, with the added bonus of very specific censorship options. In its commercial, it suggests that you can watch The Wolf of Wall Street without the language or Game of Thrones without the nudity or violence. Which will save you a bucketload of time, since a sanitized version of each would last about four minutes.

In order to make that happen, however, VidAngel purchased movies on DVD, uploaded them to its server and then “sold” a copy to its customers for $20. When the film had been seen, the company would then “buy back” the copy for $19, making the price for each rental a tidy buck. It sounds dodgy, but VidAngel felt that it was protected by the Family Movie Act (2005), which relaxed provisions of the DMCA for this sort of “family-friendly filtering.”

The studios felt differently, and called VidAngel an unlicensed VOD streaming service that violated windowing regulations. For instance, you could watch an edited version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens days after it was available on DVD, even though it wasn’t yet due to appear on streaming services. Judge Andre Birotte Jr. sided with the studios, saying that the protections afforded by the Family Movie Act didn’t apply. Mostly because you need to work with an “authorized” copy of a studio movie, not just a DVD you picked up at the store.

As a consequence, VidAngel has stopped offering its current catalog to users, but has pledged to keep fighting. It’s not shutting down in the interim, however, and will stream its first fully-licensed movie to customers at some point this week. Although there’s no guarantee that it won’t be something starring Kirk Cameron.

Via: THR

Source: Judgment (Documentcloud)

Omnity’s search engine uses rare word matching to find unexpected results

When it comes to search, there’s Google and there’s everyone else — the company is basically synonymous with searching the internet. But Omnity, a relatively new company from San Francisco, thinks own search that’s based on “semantic mapping” offers something that Google can’t do. Omnity’s trick is that it looks for the connections between documents on the internet based on rare words — the theory that research that has several of the same rare words will likely be about related topics, even if that research doesn’t directly link to or cite each other.

Thus far, Omnity has operated primarily by selling enterprise plans to companies and educational institutions. Omnity can search not only all of the public datasets it scans (like patents, scientific, engineering and medical documents, clinical trials, case law, SEC filings and so forth) but also a company’s internal documents — for some companies, Omnity indexes 150 petabytes of data.

That may be useful to massive institutions, but plenty of ordinary people could benefit from Omnity’s research features — so today, the company has announced that anyone can search the public databases it indexes for free. Omnity groups the free datasets into four groups: biomedicine, engineering, finance and law, and each set pulls from a wide variety of publicly available sources. Previously, the company offered limited demo searches for free, but now anyone can look up whatever they want.

Once you’ve signed up for a free Omnity account, you can initiate a search by typing in the Google-like search bar. You’ll be served up results grouped by primary sources (those directly related to your query) and secondary sources (documents that share key vocabulary with the primary documents). From there, Omnity offers lots of different ways of visualizing the connections between various documents so you can see what’s most potentially related before diving down the research long tail.

There are a lot of ways to extend your search from there, including clicking a word cloud to see specific documents containing those words or seeing a map which shows where the research originated. But one of Omnity’s most interesting features is that you can upload documents of your own for it to analyze. Once the document is uploaded, it’ll automatically look for those “rare words” and find other documents in its databases that match up with the one you added yourself. It’s worth noting that those documents you upload stay private to you — they aren’t added to Omnity’s overall database.

This adds up to a search tool that’s decidedly not for your average, day-to-day basic informational queries. But, if you work in a field and spend lots of time going down the rabbit hole of the internet, it’s entirely possible Omnity can reveal documents that you might have otherwise missed using a traditional keyword-based search engine like Google.

Students and researchers alike may find the tool useful — and now that it’s fully open and free, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. And Omnity expects this free version to serve as a good proof-of-concept for its work with larger enterprise companies. If a company or university gets hooked on the free version, it’ll probably be a lot easier for Omnity to show them the benefits of its paid service.

Synaptics Debuts New Fingerprint Sensors Capable of Scanning Through Display Glass

Amid rumors suggesting Apple plans to debut a 2017 iPhone with an edge-to-edge display with built-in Touch ID, Synaptics has announced its own under-glass fingerprint detection solution, debuting a new line of Natural ID FS9100 optical fingerprint sensors.

The FS9100 sensors are capable of scanning a fingerprint through 1mm of full cover glass, allowing for button-free display designs that are still able to take advantage of fingerprint recognition functionality.

According to Synaptics, the sensors have been specifically designed for placement under cover glass, including 2.5D glass, located in the front, bottom bezel of smartphones and tablets.

The FS9100 sensors eliminate the need for cutouts on the display of a device, and because they’re under glass, they’re scratchproof, waterproof, and respond well to wet fingers. Wet finger performance is something that causes most fingerprint sensors, including Apple’s, to fail.

Synaptics says its sensors are also designed to be thin and consume a minimal amount of power, while also using AI to distinguish between fake and actual fingers.

“Synaptics’ FS9100 family of fingerprint sensors represent a new breed of optical fingerprint sensor technology that is designed to meet the needs of mobile devices, including the ability to image through thick 2.5D glass. In addition to opening the door to new industrial design options, it enables OEMs to provide highly durable, button-free cover glass and more easily provide water resistant products while eliminating low yield glass processing.” – Synaptics VP of marketing Anthony Gioeli

Apple likely has its own proprietary solution in the works for the display of the 2017 iPhone 8 because it has been in development for some time and is said to have in-house engineers working on the product, but Synaptics is a known Apple supplier and provided Apple with LCD display drivers in 2015 following its acquisition of Renesas SP Drivers, a chip company Synaptics purchased in 2014.

If the rumors are true, Apple’s iPhone 8 will include a Touch ID fingerprint sensor, a camera, and other components that are located behind the display of the device, entirely eliminating the existing home button and allowing for an iPhone that looks like a single piece of glass.

Other rumors for the iPhone 8 suggest it will include a glass body, an OLED display, a faster A11 processor, and wireless charging functionality.

Synaptics’ optical fingerprint sensors are scheduled to begin sampling during the first quarter of 2017, with production to begin in the second quarter of the year.

Tag: Synaptics
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Tim Cook Named One of ‘The World’s Best-Value CEOs’

A new ranking by Bloomberg today has listed “The World’s Best-Value CEOs” in order of how well their yearly salaries align with their performance at each company. In total, 100 CEOs of companies from around the world — including Apple, Alphabet, Verizon, and China Mobile — were placed in the ranking to determine which organizations “are getting the best value from their CEO.”

According to the list, Apple has the eleventh-most-valuable CEO with Tim Cook, whose latest reported pay of around $10.3 million is “a bargain” when compared to Apple’s three-year average economic profit of $22.6 billion. Cook’s pay is broken down into a salary of $2 million, non-equity incentive plan of $8 million, and “other” compensation of $281,327. Not part of his base salary, Cook netted over 1.2 million Apple shares worth over $130 million upon reaching his fifth anniversary as CEO on August 24, 2011.

Cook’s lower compensation in comparison to other CEOs, along with his performance at Apple, have earned him the spot near the top of Bloomberg’s chart. The rankings included companies with market capitalizations of $1 billion or higher, and each CEO had to have served three or more fiscal years to be considered.

Are chief executive officers worth their pay? Apple CEO Tim Cook’s $10 million in compensation isn’t chump change, but it’s a bargain when you compare that to the company’s massive average economic profit over the last three years. Other companies pay their CEOs much more, but seem to get a lot less for it. Bloomberg looked at the pay-for-performance ratio of 100 CEOs at some of the largest companies around the world to see which companies are getting the best value from their CEO.

In the number one spot is Kosta Kartsotis of Fossil Group, who has waived compensation completely on an average three-year economic profit of $147 million for the company. Alphabet’s Larry Page is in 3rd, Verizon Communication’s Lowell McAdam is in 14th, and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson is in 65th. Check out Bloomberg’s full rankings of The World’s Best-Value CEOs right here.

Tag: Tim Cook
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AirPods Launch on Apple Store for $159 With December 21 Delivery

Apple’s AirPods are now available to order from the company’s online store for $159.00, following weeks of speculation on exactly when the wireless headphones would launch. Originally, the AirPods were going to debut in “late October,” but Apple delayed the launch for unspecified reasons.

Now, users can order the Bluetooth-enabled headphones, which provide up to 5 hours of music playback and high-quality sound through a “seamless and automatic connection” between the AirPods and an iPhone. To charge the AirPods, the included travel case doubles as a charging station that provides up to 24 hours of battery life for the headphones.

The new W1 chip inside the AirPods allows for seamless connection with devices in Apple’s ecosystem, so that they connect instantly whenever the rechargeable battery case is flipped open near an iOS device. When in the user’s ears, the AirPods “know when you are listening” and will subsequently pause music when they’re taken out of an ear. Playback controls are left to Siri-enabled voice commands, which are brought up by double-tapping on the buds.

Included with the AirPods is a Lightning cable used to charge the carrying case, and the headphones require Apple devices running iOS 10, watchOS 3 or macOS Sierra. Buy your own AirPods now at Apple.com for $159.00. Deliveries are currently estimated to begin arriving on December 21 in the United States.

Tag: AirPods
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