Google lists out the ‘Best of 2015’ US edition apps, games and entertainment; Proves we all have issues
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It is hard to believe that 2015 is just a few short weeks from coming to a close. It was full of ups, downs and a few sideways maneuvers. Hopefully every single one of our readers can look back through the year and pluck out some amazing moments, achievements and a few ah-ha learning moments. In typical year-end fashion, the worlds biggest publications will start to dropping their various versions of the Year in Review. Be it the best movies, best tv series, best PC game or best dressed. Whatever you are into, you will find a recap of the year somewhere, by somebody. Google follows suit in this yearly tradition by crunching the numbers from users on Google Play and pieces together the best of everything. Whether or not you end up agreeing with the masses is a completely different topic.
So what made the best of the best in 2015? Well, according to the Google Play data crunch team, a whole heck of a lot of things. They break down each list into various categories The entertainment side of hings covers Best Movies, TV Shows of the Year, Albums of the Year and Books of the year. Check it out:
Movies of the Year: 1. Interstellar 2. Lucy 3. American Sniper 4. The Interview 5. Kingsman: The Secret Service 6. Big Hero 6 7. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 8. Get Hard 9. Avengers: Age of Ultron 10. Jurassic World
TV Shows of the Year: 1. Game of Thrones 2. The Walking Dead 3. Downton Abbey 4. Fear the Walking Dead 5. Vikings 6. Better Call Saul 7. The Big Bang Theory 8. Rick and Morty 9. Archer 10. American Horror Story
Albums of the Year: 1. 25 from Adele 2. If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late from Drake 3. To Pimp A Butterfly from Kendrick Lamar 4. Fifty Shades Of Grey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) from Various Artists 5. Beauty Behind The Madness from The Weeknd 6. Dark Sky Paradise (Deluxe) from Big Sean 7. American Beauty/American Psycho from Fall Out Boy 8. Dreams Worth More Than Money from Meek Mill 9. Compton from Dr. Dre 10. DS2 (Deluxe) from Future
Books of the Year: 1. Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E L James 2. Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian by E L James 3. Fifty Shades Darker: Book Two of the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E L James 4. Fifty Shades Freed: Book Three of the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E L James 5. American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice 6. The Girl on the Train: A Novel by Paula Hawkins 7. Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn 8. The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir 9. Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle: Fifty Shades of Grey; Fifty Shades Darker; Fifty Shades Freed by E L James 10. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Any surprises in there? I know a few of he movies and TV shows that I enjoy occasionally made the lists. As for tunes, I don’t listen to much that didn’t originate prior to the mid 90’s. I will certainly be checking out some of the things I am not familiar with to see how they fair to me. The list above isn’t all the details that exist though. There is a complete page dedicated to the best of 2015 for apps and games as well.
The games front shows what many of you might suspect. Titles like Crossy Roads, Fallout Shelter, Clash of Clans and Mortal Combat X are obvious choices. Dude Perfect 2, Doodle Jump, Alpha Bear and Prune might not have been on your radar though.
App brought in titles like YouTube Kids, HBO Now, Showtime, Skype, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Nova Launcher. Some lesser known apps like Wishbone, Doodle: Schedule Maker, Cleo for Messenger and Memrise Learn Languages Free might be worth checking out.
You can browse the entire 2015 collection of entertainment, apps and games on the dedicated Google Play Store Best of 2015 page at your leisure.
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Yes, everyone has been breached
Oh, a company you do business with was breached? No biggie. You probably won’t die or be sold to a Russian white slavery botnet cartel. Probably. But your data will.
It’s really hard to come up with a sector that hasn’t been hit with a big data breach in the last five years. Health insurance files? Check. Classified government personnel records? Check. Hotels, banks, retailers, credit companies, crowdfunding platforms, online hookup sites, video game companies, Hollywood giants, cable and broadband providers… The list is endless.
An ‘XCOM’ game in Excel beats playing with spreadsheets
Who said that spreadsheet apps had to be dry and boring? Certainly not Reddit user Crruzi. As a test of Visual Basic skills, the budding programmer wrote and released an XCOM game, EXLCOM, for Microsoft Excel. That’s right — the same software you use to create charts and graphs will also let you fight invading aliens. It’s not what you’d call visually rich (just about everything on the map is represented by crude squares), but it’s a surprisingly thorough recreation of the game’s tactical battles, complete with unique character stats and terrain you can blow up. There’s even a basic level editor.
Via: Polygon
Source: Crruzi (Reddit)
Recreate the old-school internet with this web browser emulator
Sure, you can visit the Internet Archive if you want to see a website the way it looked years ago, but it won’t recreate the feel of browsing that site when it was fresh. What if you want both? That’s where the new Oldweb.today tool might save the day. It not only grabs an archived version of the website, but gives you a choice of old browsers for the visit. If you want to know what the Space Jam movie page looked like in an era-appropriate version of Netscape Navigator, you can do it.
Source: Oldweb.today, Rhizome Blog
Hiroshi Lockheimer tweets that new emoji for Android are coming next week
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If you’re one of the people who have been pining for new emoji for the last few months, fear not, your wait may not be much longer. After promising that his team was working on new emoji for Android back in October, Senior Vice President of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer, has tweeted out that these new emoji are coming as soon as next week. Because the change actually requires new code within Android itself, these new emoji will be rolled out as part of a system update which will start rolling out to Nexus devices first, naturally.
Look! New emoji coming to #Nexus next week. Fonts and tech details shared with OEMs to include in their updates too. pic.twitter.com/GwvKw2d67p
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) December 3, 2015
http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWhat this does unfortunately mean for everybody that doesn’t have a Nexus device is that you are at the mercy of your OEM who will have to make their own changes before rolling out the update – and let’s not even get started on the carrier variants of devices. Presumably it’s just a small change, so some of you may get lucky as OEMs gear up to roll out their Android Marshmallow updates.
What do you think about getting new emoji for Android? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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Gameloft announces ‘Gods of Rome’, fight to become a legend
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Gameloft puts out more games than I have time in my life to play and enjoy, that doesn’t mean that I don’t give it my best effort. The gaming studio is starting the usual pre-registration phase for another new title that they will be launching entitled Gods of Rome. The basic gist of the title is that all the greatest warrior souls from throughout time have been captured and are now fighting the evil to be free. Your character base includes Zeus, Atlas and Spartacus. There are many others to choose from though. Judging from the release trailer the game looks a bit more like the old school side scrolling fighter style game play along with an online arena to challenge your friends to battle. Take a look at the trailer to get a better look at what it is all about.
I didn’t catch a release date anywhere yet, just the typical ‘coming soon’ verbiage. Gameloft does state it will launch for Android, iOS and Windows though. I will be sure to let you all know when it launches officially. However, if the trailer got you excited, then you should head over to the Gods of War site and pre-register for the game. After all, you can get some exclusives at launch day if you do.
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Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards
Before the sun sets on 2015, Adobe has another round of updates for its Creative Cloud software. The new features span a number of apps, but we’ll focus on Photoshop CC. To boost overall productivity, and to save you time and a few headaches, Adobe is giving the photo-editing software custom toolbars. This means that you’ll be able to add, delete and rearrange what appears in that set of tools on the left side of the interface. The new feature allows to you customize the layout of your workspace so that only the items you use are taking up valuable space. In theory, you’ll spend less time hunting for the tool you’re after, too. Slideshow-344396
App turns your writing into trippy 3D images
It’s easy to imagine a piece of art in your head, but making it real is another matter if you’re not an artist. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply describe what you wanted? WordsEye is trying just that. Its beta web app lets you describe a scene using natural-language text, and uses statistical parsing to translate that into a 3D image. You can name objects and their qualities using terms that are as fuzzy or exacting as you like, including relative concepts like position. It’s easy to use, although the results can be more than a little surreal — just look at the pictured rat on a cat on a Christmas cow if you need proof.
Via: Product Hunt, The Next Web
Source: WordsEye
The Coin universal card is ready for 2012
If your wallet is bursting at the seams with credit, gift and loyalty plastic, the Coin universal card is supposed to lighten the load. Just add all your information to the app, sync it with Coin and get ready to buy all the things with a swipe or an NFC tap. Except when you can’t. While the premise and feature set are intriguing, and in some cases helpful, in practice, it feels like too little too late. With Apple Pay, Android Pay. Samsung Pay and others already working on the future of transactions, Coin might might have missed the boat.
New rumours suggests Google wants to help Samsung optimize TouchWiz
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Google and Samsung haven’t always seen eye-to-eye about how the Android platform should progress – usually it has been Google looking on like a disappointed parent as Samsung does it’s own thing. Infamous reports of this include Google pressuring Samsung to get rid of Magazine UX it had initially implemented on the Galaxy Note Pro and Tab Pro tablets, as well as Google getting all worked up about Samsung using Tizen in its wearables instead of Android Wear, and the always good story of Google telling Samsung to stop bloating its devices with apps. This time, reports are alleging that Google wants to help Samsung optimize TouchWiz, it’s user interface experience, presumably because while it is significantly better than previous iterations, it’s still not quite silky smooth.
We can’t confirm the validity of this report, but there are a few things to consider. First and foremost, why would Google only be getting involved now – Samsung is hardly at the height of its powers and the TouchWiz we have now isn’t all that bad, all things considered. Another interesting consideration is why Google would be taking an active role in helping Samsung as opposed to saying “Hey Samsung, be more like stock Android”.
While these are not questions we likely have answers to right now, it’s an interesting scenario to consider if true – what do you think about all of this? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: SamsungViet via SamMobile
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