Dan Jones

Microsoft Open Sources .NET, Saying It Will Run on Linux and Mac:

This is certainly interesting.

Grandma banned from calling emergency services after making 1,000 bogus calls:

Hilarious. I wonder what she was calling about.

The long winter evenings are about to get a lot more fun, with Google announcing a swathe of new gaming titles now available for Chromecast.

The article 8 New Games Arrive on Chromecast In Time For Holiday Season was first published on OMG! Chrome!

[Image: Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, hunched over and looking shocked.]

(203): Church boner. Awkwardddd

John Reed thinks his grandma poisoned a number of her relatives over many years. Maybe.

But here's the thing: You don't want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you -- there's no doubt of that -- and she's so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you've passed out so many times that you can't keep doubting yourself. Eventually, we would arrive for holidays at Grandma's with groceries and takeout, and she'd seem relieved that we wouldn't let her touch our plates. By then, her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn't notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.

So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.

Tags: crime   food   John Reed   murder

Kofi Outlaw | Screenrant:

There’s been so much secrecy surrounding J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode VII that we didn’t even known what the customary subtitle to the film would be. We finally know that the full title of the film will be Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, and that knowledge allows us to begin to speculate about what that subtitle may imply.

For months on end there has been a steady stream of rumors about Episode VII’s storyline - and there a curious amount of those rumors which could be seen as fitting in perfect synch with what the title “Force Awakens” could be hinting at.

The article goes on to detail a pretty convincing plot synopsis for the upcoming movie.

Honestly, I’m not the biggest fan of the new subtitle. It lacks the epic rush you get from hearing a subtitle like Empire Strikes Back or Revenge of the Sith.

But if you read this take on what the movie could be about, you might (like I did) rethink how well the title fits into this risky, but ambitious, entry. Time will tell, of course, if J.J. will go ahead and title the next movie as Wrath of Han.

Filed under: Entertainment

superlegalshow:

Laura’s Job Interview - Super Legal (x)

The creators of Texts From Superheroes are proud to bring you, Super Legal, a hilarious new TV show about life at a superhero law firm.

We created Super Legal as part of the ComedyCoup competition in hopes of getting picked up as a national TV show. We are now in the finals of the competition and need your help! Check out our trailer for Super Legal and if you like what you see, please vote for Super Legal to win ComedyCoup! It would mean a lot to us.

Tell the networks that you want a superhero comedy on TV and you want it now! Voting closes November 9th and is open to people from all countries, so vote right now, right here (please and thanks):

http://comedycoup.cbc.ca/superlegal/trailer

“Did it ever occur to you to wear a hockey mask when you go outside? Seems like you are purposely avoiding a simple solution.”

A minor update to Google's stunning Earth View add-on for Chrome is now rolling out on the Web Store, adding a new 'default tab' link and social sharing.

The article Minor Update to Google Earth View Chrome Tab Extension Now Rolling Out was first published on OMG! Chrome!

You can’t just expect people to switch to an altogether unfamiliar device because of a corporate sponsorship. iPads are essential tools for many people. Familiarity matters. Microsoft needs to focus on getting people to want to use Surface tablets, not use them because of a corporate sponsorship. This is just embarrassing.

Matias Duarte, “one year ago” (that’s the actual granularity of the time stamps in Google Plus), on why Google’s iOS apps use Google’s share icon:

The share icon Google uses in its properties (and the share icon that Android endorses) is a popular opensource icon and one that we feel well describes the connective nature of sharing. In a sense you could say we believe it’s part of our brand and that Google’s brand is to embrace the open and universal standard.

I keep wanting to say “Android’s share icon” instead of “Google’s share icon”, but the more I think about it, the more clear it is that Google is pushing a meta platform UI style, and Android is just one outlet for it. I don’t think they see their iOS apps as being Android-style, but rather Google-style.

With Android 5.0 Lollipop now complete and in users’ hands, Google has kept busy by updating its core apps with Material Design user interfaces. Today El Goog revealed Google Maps as the next app to get a makeover.

The new Google Maps features “a fresh new design” with colors that are described as “bright” and “bold.” The app is definitely Material Design-ish, featuring a flat look, solid colors and layers.

In addition to its new look, this refreshed version of Google Maps has several features that are worth taking note of. For example, you can tap the info sheet at the bottom of you screen for more information on a venue, make a reservation with OpenTable (U.S. only) and get an estimated pickup time and price for Uber. In order to get the Uber integration, you’ll need to have the Uber app installed on your device.

This Google Maps update will roll out to users over the coming days. It looks like another great app update that’ll fit right in with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Good on Google for working hard to quickly update its core apps so early on in Android 5.0’s life.

 

Photographer Kelly Lewis has found a unique way to bond with her adopted daughter, Alice, who loves cosplay. She works with her daughter on the amazing costumes and then creates professional photographs complete with props. Kelly says on her tumblr:

The masses are offended at the mention of Alice’s adoption but it’s something she’s proud of. When you’ve had six mother figures before the age of seven it’s a pretty big deal when you get adopted into a forever home. It’s life changing in the best possible way. Alice loves sharing her story so that others might get inspired to adopt a child, an older one at that. Reading another child’s adoption story is what inspired us to foster-to-adopt in the first place… It’s relevant to the portraits we create together because it’s what we do to bond. We didn’t have a natural maternal link – we created one the best way we knew how and it’s stronger that I could have ever imagined.

The photographs are all the more beautiful when you realize that they’re the roots of a mother-daughter relationship and that they might inspire other people to investigate adopting a child in need of a home.

See more pictures after the break.

(Bored Panda via Laughing Squid)

Coincidentally, I’ve just finished binge-watching the first 6 seasons of Parks and Recreation, so finding this clip was too perfect timing-wise. In this “behind the scenes footage,” you’ll see Pratt joking about getting a text from Spielberg about his upcoming role in Jurassic 4 (which will actually be called Jurassic World).

Found this pretty entertaining as a huge Andy Dwyer fan. And it’s painfully obvious that this man controls the future.

Seriously, after starring roles in The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy (which ended up being the biggest superhero movie of the year, by the way) and the upcoming Jurassic Park franchise, there’s literally no stopping this guy. And that’s a good thing.

If you still haven’t seen an episode of Parks and Recreation, do yourself a favor and check out the whole series on Netflix. Stomach through the admittedly bland first season and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the payoff.

Filed under: Entertainment

J2ObjC is a “Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime”. Google uses it to maintain a cross-platform shared codebase for its mobile apps; internal logic is written once (in Java) and ported to Objective-C using this tool. But it’s only for non-UI code. Here’s why, from creator Tom Ball:

It’s regularly asked why J2ObjC purposely avoids translating UI code; after all, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a tool existed where a developer can drop in Android source and out pops an iOS app? Our usual response is that world-class apps need user interfaces that are tightly integrated with each platform, and that common-denominator attempts to span platforms provide degrades user experiences. As I found when working on Swing many years ago, customers notice the smallest deviations from a platform’s UI standards and generally find them off-putting. But non-compromising UIs are just one of the reasons we focus on translating shared logic.

I wasn’t aware of this; my thanks to Google’s Ray Cromwell for bringing it to my attention. What I find interesting is that Google is (wisely, in my opinion) hand-crafting their iOS UI code for performance reasons and to avoid all the well-known pitfalls of cross-platform UI code, but they’re using their cross-platform “Material Design” visual style. That is, they’re writing native iOS code to create Google-styled apps.

Recently, Google announced that it had partnered with nearly 100 North American carriers to enable sending MMS to Google Voice numbers. It used to be thatMMS messages sent to Google Voice numbers would disappear without even a warning that they were not received. Thankfully, this issue was fixed by Google with the cooperation of many carriers.

Of course, Verizon decided not to play nice and was not included in this list of supported carriers and it seemed as though Google even made a subtle jab at Verizon the day of the announcement (a well deserved one, of course). The good news is that people are now reporting that MMS from Verizon to Google Voice numbers now go through as they should.

Verizon hasn’t announced any changes, so we don’t know what caused this. Whether Verizon had a change of heart, or Google figured out some workaround, it’s great news for users of Google Voice and everyone in contact with them. Have you noticed Verizon MMS coming in? Leave a comment!

Originally launched back in February, the Disney Movies Anywhere initiative brings your Disney, Pixar and Marvel movies together under one app across platforms. It will sync your content through iTunes, through the codes on DVDs, and now through Google Play as well.

The app allows you to play all of your existing content and to browse through the Disney, Pixar and Marvel archive. You can watch previews of the movies in the app, but purchases are all routed through Google Play.

For a limited time you will receive “Wreck-It Ralph” for free when you connect your Google Play account through the Disney Movies Anywhere app.

If you are a single platform family, then this may not seem like a huge deal to you, but if you have some iOS and some Android devices in the family then this is fantastic news. In an interview with TechCrunch, Disney Studios CTO Jamie Voris also indicated that another major partnership would be announced soon; Amazon would be the natural candidate to come next.

As the parent of two young kids and a fan of the Marvel movies, I’m thrilled to see Disney make this move, and I hope Amazon is next on their list. Having content that I purchase end up trapped within any one platform is infuriating, and as digital is increasingly the only way that we are buying content, we can only hope that Disney is showing other content producers that this is the model to follow.

 

New today: updated Android apps for Google Calendar and Gmail. Both look interesting — as Benedict Evans succinctly put it, “Google is reworking Mail and Calendar from database displays to task-led interfaces. I wonder how far they’ll take that.Google is reworking Mail and Calendar from database displays to task-led interfaces. I wonder how far they’ll take that.”

And intriguingly, as Google’s new “material” design language evolves, it’s very clearly heading in a different direction than iOS. Talking about flatness is simply too superficial to be a useful discussion. Superficially, iOS and Android seemingly converged toward flatness (and Windows Phone, of course, was there already), but once you get past those surface similarities, all three mobile platforms are evolving in noticeably different ways.

But Google’s “Material Design” isn’t merely the design language for Android, it’s the design language for all the company’s software. One result of this is that Google’s iOS apps feel less and less like iOS apps with each major release. To me, they look and feel like Android apps running on iOS. Android users might disagree with that assessment, as much of what makes a good Android app Android-y is not how the software looks but the way it interacts with the system. But these Google apps certainly don’t look or feel quite like iOS apps. Their brand-new you-need-a-beta-invitation Inbox app is also interesting (I got an invitation last week), but even though it’s a brand-new app, if anything, it feels less like an iOS app than Google’s other iOS apps. For one thing, Inbox uses a blue background for the status bar, which is the system-standard cue to indicate that cellular tethering is engaged. Another example: None of the Google iOS apps I have on my iPhone (Maps, Gmail, Inbox) support the iOS standard swipe-from-left-edge shortcut to go back in the view hierarchy. That’s a two-year-old standard design pattern for iOS, and I find it downright essential with the bigger displays on the new iPhones. (In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious that Apple added this gesture in iOS 7 because they knew then that bigger-screen iPhones were in the pipeline.)

One last thought. Lost in the competition between platforms (iOS vs. Android) is the more philosophical competition between native and in-browser web apps. In the early days of iOS, say, circa 2008-2011, it was easy to conflate these two battles in public debate, because Apple was seen as the primary proponent of native app development, and Google was seen as a proponent of cross-platform web apps. No more. Google today (like Facebook) seems all-in on native apps, at least (again, like Facebook) for post-PC devices. Just a few years ago, I used to see a lot more arguments from web-app proponents that native apps’ dominance on mobile devices would be short-lived. I don’t see so much of that any more.

One reason some people argue in favor of in-browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript web apps is that its the last bastion for write-once-run-everywhere. The lament I hear most frequently about mobile development is that if you want to reach the widest possible audience, you have to write at least two apps, iOS and Android. If you include Windows Phone, now you’re up to three. My take has always been: Tough luck. The point of making apps shouldn’t be about making life easier for developers, it’s about making the best possible apps for users. If you value user experience above developer convenience, it’s easy to see why native apps are winning the war. But even on the desktop, with PC browsers, write-once-run-everywhere is often just a pipe dream. Here’s the screen I see when I try to log into the desktop web app version of Google Inbox using Safari on OS X Yosemite.

I don’t think the web version of Inbox is Chrome-only because Google wants to lock people into Chrome. I don’t think it’s about spite. I think it was just a practical decision that fell out of a desire to push the limits of the in-browser web app experience, rather than limit themselves to a common baseline of functionality available across the X top browsers. Cynics surely look at this as the second coming of Microsoft’s IE-only web technologies from the late ’90s, but my guess is that support for additional browsers is coming, that Safari is probably high on that list, and they shipped Chrome-first only because it was the fastest way they could ship. One reason Google created Chrome in the first place was to have a browser they controlled to better enable the sort of web apps they wanted to build.

In short, though, a Chrome-only app from Google — even if only temporary — is not how the world of standards-supporting web apps was supposed to work, in the aftermath of the breakup of Microsoft’s IE hegemony. But I’m not surprised. Practicality trumps idealism in the long-run, and the idea that the post-IE world of web browsers would lead to a world of universal cross-platform software is pretty much the definition of an idealistic crusade.

I see a certain irony in all this. Google is cultivating a single look-and-feel for their apps. But for mobile they’re creating them as separate native Android and iOS apps. But their latest web app for desktop PCs, Inbox, only runs in one browser, Chrome.

Annalee Horne’s friend Tom Schutt has been on quite the journey since last Halloween. In 2013, he dressed as Captain Picard from Star Trek because he was going through chemotherapy for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and lost his hair in the process. For Halloween this year, Schutt had recovered and dressed as Commander William Riker. He got the idea to be Riker from his fiancée.

Horne tweeted the above picture, and it spread across Twitter in no time. She followed up with the statement after the break…

Not gonna lie, it is really, really nice when thousands of complete strangers celebrate the fact that your friend beat cancer.

— Annalee (@leeflower) November 2, 2014

(via Mashable)

Philanthropist
[ES]

 

Artist's Note: 

As a gamer, I've found myself struggling with the issue of Gamergate, and thankfully this strip helped me to figure out my stance on it.

On a positive note, I love drawing Malala! Or rather, I love the fact that I got to draw her in a pumpkin costume. Was it necessary? Well... yes.

Writer’s note:

I learned this week that comics are not an easy medium in which to address things like Gamergate. While Gamergate is not a particularly complex issue, trying to convey the right message and tone in the limited space of a comic strip was extremely difficult, so I don’t think I really got it right. That being said, even though I do believe that the online antagonists have no moral position here, I think the best people can do is either ignore them or treat them with equanimity (even if they don’t deserve it). Anything else would likely make things worse.  

 

 

Tom Burns is showing us all just how great and supportive a father can be by dressing up as Princess Leia to compliment his daughter’s Han Solo costume for Halloween. Initially, his daughter wasn’t sure if she would be allowed to dress as Han Solo for Halloween, since she was a girl and Han Solo was a boy. Tom immediately used the power of the internet to show his daughter that many women successfully rock a genderbending Han Solo cosplay.

Then Burns’ daughter hesitantly suggested, “If I’m a Han Solo, you should probably be Princess Leia, I guess?”

Read what Burns did next after the break!

Rather than suggest he could be Luke Skywalker or Chewbacca instead, Tom decided to demonstrate that his awesomeness by eagerly agreeing that yes, he could be Princess Leia. As he wrote on The Good Men Project:

“as quickly as I could, I said ‘That would be FANTASTIC. I totally should be Leia.’ And that’s exactly what I did. I’ll admit — my take on Princess Leia Organa isn’t 100% flattering to Carrie Fisher, but, you know, I made due with what I had. I found an incredibly cool Princess Leia hoodie at HerUniverse.com that came with the trademark Leia hair buns on the hood, which made it hard to resist.”

He added:

“I think, my big take-away from all this will be — equality goes both ways. If I’m going to tell my daughter that she can do almost anything a man can do (excepting some very specific biological acts), then I also need to show her that a man can do almost anything a woman can do too… especially when it’s something awesome like dressing up as a character from one of the best movies ever.”

You rock, sir!

(via i09)

Alistair Barr, reporting for the WSJ:

Andy Rubin, co-founder and former leader of Google Inc.’s Android mobile business and the current head of its nascent robotics effort, is leaving the Internet giant, the company said Thursday.

Mr. Rubin is starting an incubator for startups interested in building technology hardware products.

Took a lot longer than I expected, given the acrimonious nature of his being removed as Android’s chief. Maybe he was waiting for stock to vest or something?

Yoga pants are technically for doing yoga, but they work just as well as the perfect lounge wear for lazy weekends. There’s a blue pair with a star-spangled waistband and the Wonder Woman logo or a black pair with the Batgirl logo on the waistband. Both are a 55% cotton/40% polyester/5% spandex blend for a snug and comfy fit.

See the Wonder Woman version after the break.

Product Page Batgirl/Wonder Woman ($29.99)