I grew up on Star Trek. My Dad was a NASA engineer. This is why I am fascinated by technology. What happened to us? Why did we stop going to space? I am looking forward to this movie, which seems to attempt an answer.

In the 2013 election, Premier Christy Clark was quite vocal about requiring a referendum for any new tax, fee or whatever that the mayors wanted to help pay for the regional share of transit.

This time, candidates have stayed away from that.

However, the Liberal Party made it clear — in its response to the TransLink mayors’ council questionnaire — that a referendum will still be required when mayors are trying to decide this time how to come up with the rest of their share for the 10-year, $7.5-billion plan for transit improvements. The feds and province have kicked in about $5 billion at this point and the mayors have approved some property-tax and fare increases, but none of that is enough to cover the full bill.

(My Globe story on this in today’s paper here.)

The party also said it will fund one-third of the Pattullo Bridge as long as there is a “strong business case.” I always thought the strong business case was that the bridge is about to fall into the river, but I guess I know nothing.

I couldn’t understand why that wording would suddenly appear until I remembered that the Libs also promised a cap on all tolls in the region. And the planning for the bridge had always factored in tolls. In fact, at a transit panel that I moderated recently, TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond said that the one thing TransLink would do differently to avoid the problems the Port Mann Bridge has had with finances is to ensure that no money has to come out of the operations budget to help make the mortgage payments on the bridge.

So, if the possibility for revenue from tolling the bridge is now limited, that means TransLink will have to develop a new business case.

Anyway, transit planners must be praying for an end to this election campaign, before any more little grenades can be thrown their way.

As I noted last week, that started with the two major parties competing to reduce or eliminate tolls altogether, to the dismay of mayors and rational policy-makers.

Remember eRoom? I think OpenText should dig that out of the archives and relaunch some version of that. It’s still live at the UN, for example.

In a trailer quietly released on its official YouTube channel, Nintendo has announced the 2DS XL, an upgraded version of its low-cost 2DS handheld game console.

The new dedicated portable system, set to be released on July 28th, will launch in Canada at $199. Nintendo says the new 2DS XL gives consumers a third choice in its handheld lineup, “one that offers pricing and features that fit between the 2DS and the New 3DS XL.”

The 2DS XL is set to launch alongside Hey! Pikmin and Miitopia, two of the 3DS line’s major 2017 game releases.

The new handheld is set to be available in black and turquoise colour variants and features the same larger screen found in Nintendo’s New 3DS XL console. As the name of the 2DS XL implies, however, visuals are only displayed in 2D, though the system is lighter and is compatible with games specifically designed specifically to run on the New 3DS.

The 2DS XL also features built-in NFC support for amiibo compatibility. With the Switch, Nintendo’s recently released handheld-home console hybrid system, largely replicating the functionality of the 3DS, many assumed the company would slowly stop supporting its dedicated handheld line of products. With this new announcement of the 2DS XL, however, that does not seem to be the case.

Nintendo recently revealed its fiscal 2016 earnings, indicating that the consistently out-of-stock Nintendo Switch is off to a “promising start” and has shipped 2.74 million units. The Switch version of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, sold 2.76 million units.

The post Nintendo announces 2DS XL and reveals the handheld’s July 28 release date appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Nintendo has released its earnings report for the fiscal year running from March 31st 2016 to March 31st 2017.

The Japanese gaming giant experienced net sales of $489.1 billion yen (about $60 million CAD), with a three percent decrease on a year-on-year basis, while also having an operating profit of $29.4 billion yen (approximately $3.7 million CAD), a 10.7 percent decrease year-over-year.

The consistently out-of-stock Nintendo Switch, initially released on March 3rd, is off to a “promising start” according to Nintendo, and has shipped 2.74 million units. The Switch version of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, sold 2.76 million units.

It’s actually quite telling that Breath of the Wild sold slightly better than the Switch’s hardware, as it could indicate that consumers are still buying Zelda despite the fact that the Nintendo Switch is out of stock at most retailers. Additionally, the Wii U’s iteration of Breath of the Wild sold 1.08 million copies. 1-2-Switch, one of the few other games available for the Switch at launch, sold 2.7 million units. Furthermore, as expected, Pokemon Sun and Moon has sold more than 15 million units worldwide.

Nintendo plans to follow-up the release of Breath of the Wild and 1-2 Switch with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, ARMS and Splatoon 2.  The company’s earnings report did not mention Super Mario Odyssey, however, but does bring hope for more games being announced at this year’s E3.

Within the earnings report Nintendo touches upon the sales of its iOS and Android games, Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes, emphasizing that the company plans to continue working in the mobile gaming space.

Additionally, the Nintendo 3DS experienced a seven percent sales increase on a year-over-year basis, amounting to 7.27 million units. While software sales for the 3DS produced a 14 percent increase on a year-over-year basis, selling 55.08 million units, mostly due to the release of Pokemon Sun and Moon.

Nintendo also plans on releasing few notable titles for the Nintendo 3DS over the course of the next year, such as Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Hey! Pikmin and a new multiplayer action game in celebration of Kirby’s 25th anniversary.

Although Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold 1.08 million units for the Wii U, the console’s sales are not looking great. Hardware and software sales show a 77 percent and 46 percent decrease respectively.

Although this is to be expected when a video game console is being phased out following the release of its successor.

Source: Nintendo

The post Zelda: Breath of the Wild outsells Nintendo Switch consoles appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I've long been using Prizmo to quickly extract text contained in photos using the iPhone's camera. Developed by Creaceed, Prizmo has always stood out among iOS scanner apps thanks to its accurate and fast OCR. While most scanner apps focus on digitizing documents and exporting PDFs, Prizmo complemented that functionality with the ability to recognize and share text with just a couple of taps. Prizmo could be used as a scanner app for paperless workflows, but I preferred to keep it on my devices as a dedicated utility to effortlessly extract and share text.

With Prizmo Go, released today on the App Store, Creaceed is doubling down on Prizmo's best feature with a separate app that's been entirely designed with OCR and sharing text in mind. While OCR was a feature of Prizmo, it becomes the cornerstone of the experience in Prizmo Go, which takes advantage of impressive new OCR technologies to make character recognition smarter, faster, and better integrated with other iOS apps.

I've been using Prizmo Go for the past couple of weeks, and it's one of the most intriguing apps I've tried in a while because it genuinely offers something new. Unlike its predecessor, Prizmo Go implements Microsoft's Cognitive Services tech to perform cloud-based OCR. Local, on-device character recognition built on Creaceed's engine still exists with support for 10 languages, offline mode, and automatic language detection, but Cloud OCR (how the feature is called in the app) is what differentiates Prizmo Go from Prizmo.

By relying on Microsoft's Computer Vision API, Cloud OCR in Prizmo Go can automatically detect text in 22 languages, including ones that aren't supported by the built-in, non-cloud OCR such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. To make Cloud OCR work in the app, Creaceed had to cleverly optimize the app's engine for additional options: for instance, Prizmo Go supports both horizontal and vertical lines of text in Japanese via Cloud OCR – which required adjusting the app's document layout engine to make the camera and API work together. Furthermore, there are other fascinating technical bits under the hood for both local and Cloud OCR: Prizmo Go offers image stabilization through sharpness tracking, and it pre-processes an image as you're holding the iPhone's camera to capture a document by doing perspective correction and a dynamic rescale to ensure the app is properly tracking the text you've meant to identify.

All of this results in an innovative text scanner where Cloud OCR has been seamlessly integrated with iOS hardware. As soon as you point the camera to something that has text in it (a document, a business card, another screen – whatever you want), you'll get real-time text highlights directly in the camera view. Even with Cloud OCR enabled (which you can confirm with the cloud icon at the top of the screen), it only takes a second for text to be processed and highlighted inside the camera.

The visual effect is remarkable: it feels like the iPhone's camera is capable of parsing entire paragraphs of text in less than two seconds, which is even more impressive when you consider that OCR is happening in the cloud. I've never seen anything like Prizmo Go's real-time OCR in the camera before.

There are some options you can test in the camera view. You can enable the camera flash and image stabilization, or import an image from Photos or other document providers if you don't want to take a new picture using Prizmo Go. If you already have an image in your clipboard, tapping the Image button in the lower left corner will offer a shortcut to import the image you've copied – useful for extracting text out of images you've copied from Safari or other apps.

In addition, you can disable Cloud OCR at any time and switch to the app's built-in recognition, or you can open the Settings and tweak a few other preferences. These include a special low power mode to disable visual effects like the real-time text overlay to save on battery (though low power mode does not affect the quality of text recognition), and a toggle to enable QR code detection in the camera.

What happens after taking a picture in Prizmo Go is equally innovative and unique. After the real-time preview, Prizmo Go will perform its final processing and bring up a split-screen view with the image at the top and recognized text in the lower half of the display. Recognized text is highlighted in blue over the original image, and you can select the extracted plain text at the bottom. However, you can also tweak the selection of text by swiping over the highlights and choosing different bits of text to extract. As you swipe across underlined words to select them, subtle haptic feedback will confirm your selection and put words in the text card underneath the image. Want to extract two non-contiguous sentences from a scanned photo? Just tap & hold the screen until the crosshair loupe appears, select what you need, and you'll get extracted text at the bottom, ready to be shared.

This combination of iOS interface conventions (blue text highlights, magnification loupe) with new technologies such as haptic feedback and Cloud OCR in such an intuitive experience is what makes Prizmo Go one of my favorite app debuts from the past few months. Once text has been extracted, it can also be shared with extensions or copied – it couldn't be easier.

Prizmo Go's Accessibility options.

There's an important accessibility angle to Prizmo Go, too: a Reader option is prominently featured among actions for extracted text, which will speak the captured text in the associated language. Words are highlighted in yellow as they're spoken by iOS' VoiceOver; these are the same voices that you can find in Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Voices, including their enhanced variants. There are even playback controls to pause and resume text-to-speech and a slider to tweak the voice's speed. I can only imagine the potential of Prizmo Go for visually impaired users or people who simply can't read fine print and other small text labels; now, using the iPhone's camera, any image can be transformed in a matter of seconds to text that can be spoken aloud, copied, and shared.

Prizmo Go doesn't disappoint from an automation standpoint either. In this first release, the folks at Creaceed have included an x-callback-url compliant URL scheme that enables integration with other apps to pass images and receive extracted text as output. In a nutshell: you can launch Prizmo Go in two modes (take a new picture or use a picture from the clipboard) and specify what you want to do once text has been recognized and extracted. Text can be sent back to another app via x-callback-url, allowing you to set up powerful chains of automations between multiple apps and Prizmo Go.

I've put together a workflow that demonstrates how Prizmo Go can be integrated with third-party apps and other iOS features. First, the workflow will ask you to pick a mode – whether you want to take a new image in Prizmo Go, or if you want to send a previously copied image to the app; if you choose the Clipboard option, you'll be presented with a native photo picker, and the image you select will be copied to the clipboard. Then, the workflow will ask you to choose a type of OCR – I left cloud, en, and it as options; all of these flags are documented in the app's automation page. Finally, I added a menu that lets you save extracted text into the clipboard or as a new note in DEVONthink using the app's new automation features I detailed earlier today.

After choosing these options, Prizmo Go will launch, it'll extract text and let you validate it, and then it'll either copy text to the clipboard or send it to DEVONthink – all in a single automation flow that can even be triggered from the Workflow widget.

I've been using this workflow several times a week to quickly extract bits of text from images I want to archive in DEVONthink. You can get it here.¹

I've been using Prizmo Go for a couple of weeks to extract text from a variety of sources: business cards and others pamphlets², prescriptions for our new puppies, and even screenshots of apps that don't let you select text (I'm looking at you, App Store app descriptions). In my experience, Cloud OCR has been fast and reliable, with an overall superior quality than Prizmo's built-in OCR. Cloud OCR isn't perfect – it gets the occasional accented character wrong, or it can't recognize an uppercase letter for certain typefaces – but its minor issues don't impact an otherwise incredible integration with an app that can scan text in over 20 languages within a couple of seconds.

Prizmo Go is also based on a novel business model, and I'm a fan of what Creaceed is attempting here. Prizmo Go is free to download on the App Store, and there are two kinds of In-App Purchases in the app. The first one is a one-time $4.99 In-App Purchase to unlock Export options; these are clipboard and share operations for extracted text, plus interactions with data detectors such as links and phone numbers. The Export Pack does not include VoiceOver, which is always unlocked for Accessibility purposes.

Cloud OCR units are the second type of In-App Purchases in Prizmo Go. Essentially, extracting text through Cloud OCR consumes a unit. Units can be refilled with packs: a 100-unit pack is $0.99, while 1000 units are $4.99. These consumable In-App Purchases are synced across devices with iCloud (so you won't have to buy multiple packs on all your devices), and there's a free 10-unit In-App "Purchase" you can unlock to test Cloud OCR before committing to a paid pack. Microsoft's Cognitive Services APIs are not free for developers, and I think Creaceed found a good compromise: instead of forcing users to pay a recurring subscription, they're treating successful cloud conversions as consumable units that can be easily refilled over time, which is smart.

On the first episode of AppStories, I asked John whether the App Store could still surprise us today. Prizmo Go is the perfect example of how an app category can be reinvented with fresh approaches and modern tech. Neither OCR nor scanning through the iPhone's camera are new ideas; highlighting recognized text in real-time through a Cloud OCR engine that supports 22 languages, however, is an experience I never had on iOS before.

Despite the complex technologies they're using, Creaceed shipped a polished, intuitive app that feels like having a superpower inside the iPhone's camera. Prizmo Go is an excellent implementation of computer vision and iOS Camera features, and it's gained a permanent spot on my iPhone and iPad.

Prizmo Go is available for free on the App Store.

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Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this new revised thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find. Please DO NOT send me your work. I do not take submissions.

Today’s featured artist: Kevin Arnold

A Farrier’s Craft – Artist Statement from Kevin Arnold

I’ve always loved to shoot people engrossed in an activity. I like the raw emotion that I can capture. When I was younger I was drawn to shooting adventure sports for this very reason: there was always an opportunity to capture a variety of genuine human feelings. Whether determination, fear, joy, contemplation, exhaustion or something more ephemeral, I found that these emotions lived close to the surface when people were stretching themselves mentally and physically.

Over time I’ve become more interested in finding this emotion in other facets of life, as well. The key, for me, is that the person I’m shooting is fully invested in what they are doing. And no one is more devoted to his or her movement than a truly skilled craftsperson. You can see the depth of their expertise, their skill and the years they have invested in their craft not only on their face, but also in the efficiency of their body and the movement of their hands. I love the challenge of trying to capture that deeply instilled choreography in a photographic image.

My eldest daughter has been riding horses for many years, and we now own our own horses and barn. But I can still remember the first time I watched the farrier at work. At the time, I didn’t even know what a farrier was, and I was astounded at the timelessness of his craft. The horseshoes, the wooden bench and leather chaps, the tools, the kiln – the anvil! It’s Old World, having stood the test of centuries of technological revolutions. Working by hand with each horse to sculpt their feet and shape each shoe to complement their stance and gait is still the way to get the job done. It is a craft that is as needed today as ever, yet is refreshingly untouched by modern technology. Dave wears his experience in his hands and face, and I knew the first time I saw him at work that I would need to photograph him.

I did the shoot in the winter – it happen to be one of the coldest days – because I knew that the steam from the hot shoes and the horse’s breath would add a quality that just wouldn’t be there on a warm summer day. There is a sense of dedication and old world charm in the black and white moody imagery, that for me matches the farrier craft so well.

To see more of the personal project click here
APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s. After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty. Follow her at @SuzanneSease.

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Lisa Tolin, NBC News, Apr 29, 2017

I thought at first that this might be a venture like Huffington Post, but when you follow from the press release  to the online course pages  you will see that it's hosted on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link to a free preview, but don't. Just don't. LinkedIn Learning is really expensive, and a one-hour Arianna Huffington course on 'discovering meditation and sleep' does not increase its value by any appreciable amount. LinkedIn also owns Lynda, another expensive monthly-subscription course site. Both are owned by Microsoft.

Eugen Rochko, Medoum, Apr 29, 2017

The developer of Mastodon,  Eugen Rochko, offers this update following  an exciting month that found the distributed social network software suddenly discovered and (it seems) accepted by people around the world. How accepted? "At the time of writing, the Mastodon network includes more than 486,767 users spread out among more than a 1,212 instances." Now we have to expect that a certain number of users are just test users, but his Patreon support also went from $700 to $3000 a month in April, which is significant as well. 

Lawrie Phipps, JISC, Apr 29, 2017

It could be that I was working on personal learning environments a decade too early. Take this as a description of the next generation learning environment, for example: "The business school’ s intention is to create an online space that is less like a content repository and that becomes a dynamic, adaptive space where students take control of their own learning." Or from the OU: "It won’ t look like anything. Instead, it’ ll be a series of spaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) so that it won’ t be a thing in itself."

Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, Apr 30, 2017

Tony Bates is in the process of running a national survey about online and distance education (which launched today) and in the process resorted to some arbitrary definitions of key terms, which he shares here. It really raises some concerns for me. First of all, it's all about courses, nothing else. Despite the headline we don't learn what 'online learning' really is. And the institutional perspective is deep (not surprising since only institutions (specifically, their provosts or VPs education) are surveyed). This shows in the very odd definition of MOOC, given as "No fee (except possibly for an end of course certificate); the courses are open to anyone: there is no requirement for prior academic qualifications in order to take the course; the courses are not for credit." The third point is especially irrelevant to the definition of a MOOC.

Just received this nifty 1930 book by Edgar Lee Masters, author of Spoon River Anthology. Three verse plays.

It caught my eye because I’ve been to Acoma. A memorable bit of dialogue from that day:

YOUNG WOMAN: Good morning!

OLD WOMAN: It looks like rain.

YOUNG WOMAN: Oh! I hope so!

OLD WOMAN: Yes!

Yes: that’s why they call it a desert.

This slipcover volume was printed in an edition of 375 copies (350 for sale), signed by the author. It’s astonishing to think that this could once have been a paying proposition, especially in the teeth of the Great Depression.

It’s also astonishing that you can easily pick up a copy for $30 or $40 dollars.

Along with the release of its reasonably positive earnings report today, Nintendo has announced that Genyo Takeda, the company’s long-serving director, is stepping down in June.

Holding the position of ‘technology fellow’ alongside visionary video game creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Takeda has played a significant role in defining Nintendo’s hardware and software.

Takeda has worked for Nintendo for a total of 46 years and played a significant role in the development of classic games like Punch-Out and Pilotwings 64. He also worked on the design of the Nintendo 64’s analogue stick. While the system’s joystick seems primitive by today’s standards, when the N64’s controller was first released back in 1996, it fundamentally changed the video game industry and helped usher in the modern era of three-dimensional games.

He was also behind Nintendo’s move towards motion-controlled gaming with 2006’s Wii. It’s currently unclear if Takeda is retiring completely or just stepping down from his role as director and to take on a smaller role at the company.

Ko Shiota, the current head of Nintendo’s platform technology development division and hardware lead on the Wii U, will be taking over his position.

The post The man behind many of Nintendo’s most iconic consoles is stepping down appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Annotable, an image annotation app from developer Ling Wang, received a major update yesterday. Version 2.0 of the app is all about customization. From the tools that appear when you open the app, to the formatting of text added to an image, Annotable gives you precise control over how you use the app and the look of marked up images, making it my hands-down favorite app for image annotations.

It’s important to understand what Annotable is not. Annotable is not a Pixelmator competitor. The difference between the two is that Pixelmator is an image editor that alters the image itself, while Annotable is for making annotations on top of an image like adding text, call-outs, shapes, and arrows.

If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to highlight a detail in an image or add some text before sharing it, Annotable is worth a look. I use it regularly in my work at MacStories to create screenshots that call out small user interface details that might be hard for readers to spot otherwise. For the same reasons, Annotable is also excellent for commenting on the design of app interfaces and mobile website layouts.

When Annotable was first released, it filled a hole left by Skitch for iOS, which was abandoned by Evernote in late 2015. At the time, Annotable was like a breath of fresh air. Skitch for iOS was notoriously buggy, so it was just nice to have a tool that did something similar and worked.

Annotable has grown up a lot since version, 1.0 adding tools that make it much more than a Skitch for iOS replacement. Last year, Federico called Annotable the most versatile image annotation tool on iOS, which still holds true today. If you’re not familiar with Annotable, its tools fall into six categories:

• Shapes: You can add rectangles, rounded rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, and freehand drawings to any image.
• Text: There are five text styles, five pointer types, and dozens of fonts from which to choose.
• Blur: You can obscure personal information in a screenshot or other image by blurring it, overlaying multiple types of pixelation, or blacking it out with opaque rectangles.
• Spotlight: Dimming all but the portion of an image that you want to call attention to is a great way to highlight image details.
• Magnification: One of my favorite tools is the loupe that lets me call out a detail from an image with one of five pointer styles by magnifying a circular region of an image.
• Highlighter: Annotable has a set of highlighters that can be used with text in screenshots, which is an excellent way to call out a specific passage from a wall of text.

Annotable lets you customize things like arrow heads, colors, and even which tools appear in the app.

That’s a lot of tools, which is why Annotable’s new tool customization feature is a welcome addition to version 2.0. Now, if there’s a tool you don’t use often, you can hide it. Long pressing the tool button displays all of the tools in the lower right-hand corner of the screen along with a gear button in the lower left-hand corner. Tapping on the gear triggers editing mode, transforming the gear button into a checkmark button. In editing mode, there are blue checkmarks next to each of Annotable’s tools that are currently active. You can toggle tools off and on by tapping their icons and save the changes by tapping the checkmark button.

Version 2.0 also adds color customization. All default colors, some of which were unlockable as part of an In-App Purchase in prior versions of Annotable, are now free. Customers who previously paid for the expanded color palette get the new color customization feature for free; for everyone else, it’s an In-App Purchase. Color customization allows users to define colors and to reorder the list of colors that appear when you tap the color button. The color picker interface is accessible by swiping left on the row of colors that appear along the bottom of the screen when you tap the color tool.

Text annotations also received a major update. Customers who buy the In-App Purchase can now choose from dozens of fonts, five label styles, and four different pointers. With so many possible combinations, it’s easy to create text annotations that suit your personal taste.

Line widths for shapes are now customizable too. When you tap the color button, a vertical slider appears that lets you pick the exact line width of the shapes you draw. You can also define three pre-set widths, which makes it fast to jump between your favorites and ensure uniform line widths when making multiple annotations.

A couple of other changes worth noting include a new way arrow styles are picked. Tapping the head of an arrow displays a pop-up menu for choosing from among four types. In addition, the Blur tool added the option to use opaque rectangles to obscure information instead of pixelation so your textshots can look like redacted government documents.

With all the new features added to Annotable, I appreciate the tips that it displays the first time you try something new. However, a couple features, like the color picker and pointer style customizations, are a little hard to discover if you miss the tip and would benefit from a dedicated in-app help document.

Annotable has grown into a rich tool for annotating images. Before Annotable, I used several different apps that each did some of what I can now accomplish in one integrated package. That alone makes Annotable extremely valuable. Combined with the powerful new customization tools in version 2.0, Annotable offers a depth of features that is hard to beat.

Advanced features are available individually as In-App Purchases for $1.99 each or as a set for $9.99, which gives customers the choice to pick and choose the tools they need or buy the whole set for less than the à la carte price.

Annotable is available on the App Store.

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Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

Reader Kelly found herself in a common consumer dilemma: She was confused about the marketing language on some detergent labels. Why did some bottles of Tide that were the exact same size as others on the shelf proclaim that they will wash “20% more loads”?

When Kelly looked at the shelf to pick up a new bottle of Tide Sport, here’s what she saw. While a reasonable person could assume that the detergent is now more concentrated, there were a lot of numbers and a reference to a separate fragrance that just confused her.

Here’s a close-up of what that cap says.

The larger bottles had the same “more loads” labeling, too.

The extra label on the cap is similar, but with the numbers adjusted for the larger bottle size.

Kelly sent these pictures to Consumerist, describing the identical bottle sizes and the extra labels on the cap.

“In very small print, the cap label explains what they mean, but, honestly, I can’t figure out what they’re talking about,” she writes. “What do various sizes of ‘Spring Renewal’ have to do with Tide Sport?”

What was the connection? Maybe these bottles had the wrong label on their caps. We took Kelly’s photos and confused email and sent them over to the laundry-loving people at Procter & Gamble, maker of Tide.

The “20% more loads” thing, it turns out, is exactly what you might guess if you’ve been buying detergent for a while. A spokesperson from the company’s fabric care division told Consumerist that the product was reformulated, and the dosing per load changed. The label on the cap (P&G calls it a “capwrap,” which is our new favorite word) is meant to call your attention to that before you dump the same old amount of detergent in the washer.

She laid out what the numbers on the cap mean in plain English:

• 16 loads vs. 13 loads (25 ounce bottle)

• 24 loads vs. 19 loads (37 ounce bottle)

• 44 loads vs. 36 loads (69 ounce bottle)

• 59 loads vs. 48 loads (92 ounce bottle)

• 74 loads vs. 60 loads (115 ounce bottle)

Okay, but what’s with those numbers and the Spring Renewal thing? Kelly’s favorite Tide Sport is part of a special line that P&G calls the “Tide + Collection.” The products have some extra features, like Febreze to fight gym clothes stank, additives for cold-water washing to save money, or fabric softener added to the formula.

Some of these products were recently rebranded. Tide Sport is now Tide Plus Febreze Odor Defense, and some other products changed formulas. The odor-fighting products with Febreze were what the Spring Renewal referred to on the capwrap, since that was the only scent available before.

The goal is to compare the rebranded products to a similar-strength product that had been on the shelf before and that customers might have used, but they just ended up confusing some shoppers more.

mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

Sandwich chain has begun advertising in jobcentres and on social media as it faces up to potential staff shortage after Brexit

Pret a Manger has embarked on a charm offensive to attract more British workers as it faces up to potential staff shortages after Brexit.

“Traditionally at Pret we just had our recruitment centre and everybody just came to us,” said its chief executive, Clive Schlee. “Now we are preparing for the future by reaching out ourselves.”

Sony’s Xperia XA1 is set to launch in Canada on May 5th 2017, first through Vidéotron, followed by Freedom Mobile on May 12th.

The company says the Xperia XA1 Ultra is also coming to Canada through Freedom Mobile and Vidéotron starting on June 22nd. Unfortunately, specific pricing remains unannounced, though Sony notes that “pricing will be available though carriers” in the near future.

Both the XA1 and XA1 Ultra were originally announced at Mobile World Congress 2017 and are successors to last years mid-range XA Sony smartphones. The Xperia XA1 and XA1 Ultra are set to be available in white and black with colour variant availability based on each carrier.

The Xperia XA1 features a MediaTek Helio P20 octa-core 64bit processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a 5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel display. The other device, the Xperia XA1 Ultra, includes the same processor as the XA1, but instead features a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel display and 4GB of RAM.

MobileSyrup went hands-on with the XA1 and the Xperia XA1 Ultra back in February. It’s still unclear when Sony’s more premium 4K offering, the Xperia XZ Premium, as well as the Sony Xperia XZs will launch in Canada.

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Did you hate how Snapchat placed an ugly white border around your Memories uploads? It looks like Snapchat did too.

Snapchat has now removed the annoying white border around old Memories that are uploaded to the company’s social media platform.

In the past, Snapchat placed the white border around images, videos, or old snaps that have been saved and then uploaded to the Memories feature, as a way of identifying old content. For many, the glaring white border took away from the content being uploaded and was distracting. So Snapchat has decided to drop the feature in exchange for a simple date stamp at the top of the screen.

This hasn’t, however, changed how Snapchat displays content from the camera roll vs. old snaps you’ve captured with Memories. Photos and video from your phone’s camera roll will still have that super annoying white space.

I guess the lesson here is, if Instagram does it one way, just copy that.

Source: TechCrunch

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Microsoft has released its Q3 fiscal 2017 earnings report, revealing that the company has made $4.8 billion USD in net income on $22.1 billion in revenue.

Both the company’s revenue and profit are up over the same period last year, with Microsoft’s Office and Cloud products driving the overall increase in revenue.

Surface revenue is unsurprisingly down this quarter, in part because Microsoft has not released a significant refresh to its Surface Pro or Surface Book line in a number of years. In total, Surface revenue dove 26 percent to $831 million. Windows-related revenue is up five percent year-over-year and the company’s commercial products and cloud services revenue have also increased by six percent over last year.

Microsoft, however, isn’t revealing anything regarding its future plans for Windows 10 Mobile, despite the fact that its revenue in the area dipped $730 million this quarter. LinkedIn, the company’s most recent acquisition, is responsible for $975 million in revenue. Office products and cloud services are up seven percent year-over-year and even Office’s consumer products and cloud services have increased by a total of 15 percent.

Microsoft says it now has a total of 26.2 million Office 365 subscribers. Server and cloud revenue increased by 15 percent, with Azure revenue growing by 93 percent.

Source: Microsoft

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A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on the need to hire a tech lead when you consider outsourcing your engineering. This article sparked some interesting conversation and one was about pull requests(PR) and code reviews(CR) and how it should be approached. Today, I will try to talk about code reviews and some of its inherent problems amongst team members, and I’ll also highlight possible ways to overcome some of these problems.

For context, I’ll love to explain what pull request and code reviews are and for the sake of this article, I’ll be using both terms interchangeably.

A pull request(PR) is a method of submitting contributions to a software development project. It is often the preferred way of submitting contributions to a project using a distributed version control system (DVCS) such as Git. A pull request occurs when a developer asks for changes committed to an external repository to be considered for inclusion in a project’s main repository. Source - OSS Watch

Code review is a systematic examination (sometimes referred to as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving the overall quality of software. Source - Wikipedia

The problem that I see with most pull request/code review session is when reviewers nitpick on seemingly inconsequential issues and often neglecting the elephant in the room. This does not only degrade the entire reviewing experience, it leads to unnecessary bike shading. This, in my opinion, is one of the few causes of strife within technical teams and it’s unhealthy.

The bike shed story tells of a management committee’s decision to approve a nuclear power plant, which it does so with little argument or deliberation. The story contrasts this with another decision on choosing the color of the bike shed where the management gets into a nit-picking debate and expends far more time and energy than on the nuclear power plant decision.

A pull request should be a learning experience, it’s an opportunity to get good feedback from trusted team members. This feedback could range anywhere from writing more structured and succinct code to better optimisation of algorithms, queries, etc. It’s the time to be open minded and not become unnecessarily defensive.

One issue that I find quite worrying is the fact that most authors come with girded loins when they submit their PRs. You can’t tell them otherwise, after all, they have spent a significant portion of their day solving this complex problem and all they need is your approval and a merge to the base branch. And this is a big problem.

But, as an author of a PR, before you put on your armour, take a second and think through the opinions of your reviewers, and look at the issue from their own lens. Your reviewers are here to uncover your blind spot, they check those things that must have slipped through the cracks, they are meant to guide and help you become better. When authors approach their PR/CR session with the way they would approach an editor, they become aware of things they must have overlooked, uncover new paradigms and fundamentally gain new knowledge. Your reviewers, like editors, are your third eyes.

Are your reviewers always right? Far from it. Your reviewers, like every human, aren’t infallible. They will make mistakes, and it’s your place as the author to help guide them to the obvious and help them understand your thought process to the problem and what led to your solution. One of the problems I have seen with PR sessions is when reviewers are in haste to prove a point without first, understanding the problem domain. They make hasty conclusions and in most cases, miss the main point by a stretch.

As a reviewer, your first task is to understand the problem domain and offer suggestions as opposed to calling people out. This is one of the reasons most authors become defensive. Don’t do that, you don’t want to be that guy. While reviewing, If it helps and where possible, move over to the author’s desk or get on a call and share screen, then you can ask questions as to why the author made some design choice. This does not only reduce any unforeseen tension, it allows you to understand the problem and solution a lot better, see things from author’s perspective thereby giving you an opportunity to give constructive feedback. The other advantage to this approach is that it create’s the sort of bond that will make people more receptive to your ideas.

Authors become defensive when comments left on their PRs make them look stupid. There’s an ego in every human, never forget that. A code review session is a win-win for everyone. The reviewer(s) and author both learn and benefit from the experience. Put extra thought and care into crafting your feedback, they should be suggestive and also offer a better way of solving a problem.

Remember, when a code review session degenerates into a pissing contest, its essence is lost and everybody, both the reviewer(s) and the author loses out big time.

One of the many joys of OER17 was catching up with Bryan Mathers in person. We were chatting before one of the sessions about re-designing the default splash page for new accounts on Reclaim Hosting—the final hold-out from our original design. 

We talked about the possibility of have a few images rotating through in the splash page, but as usually happens the conversation just found its own way and after talking about memory, archiving, and the web Bryan starting talking about a Salvador Dalí-inspired vision of web-based memory and persistence:

Not sure if this will be our new default splash page, but I have no doubts we will find something to do with it. First and foremost a blog post featuring the awesome and soon after framed poster in the new Reclaim offices

Angela Cochran, The Scholarly Kitchen, Apr 30, 2017

I get the feeling that publishers really dislike crowd-sourced and post-publication peer review.  Angela Cochran writes that "one thing became clear:   crowdsourced peer review = post publication peer review = online commenting." She then tags these forms of peer review with all the baggage of internet commenting: anonymity, trolls, irrelevance, and more. Part of it is a little bit justified: "Crowdsourced means open to all. Peer review means restricted to peers. We already have a problem with the concept." Fair enough. But the list of reviewers can be limited by any number of means (if I started a journal, the reviewers would be those people who have previously published in the journal (beginning with me)). And beyond that, no, review is  not the same as commenting.

Tuesday, May 2

7-8:30 PM

SFU Vancouver – Room 1900, Harbour Centre

Admission is free, but advance registrations are required. Reserve.

Online Webcast: Can’t make it to the lecture? Register for the free live webcast.

While smartphone cameras have improved by leaps and bounds in the past several years, even the most recent devices, including the Pixel and Galaxy S8, still struggle to capture clean photos in less than ideal lighting conditions. However, that obstacle may soon fall thanks to the work of several Google engineers.

On the Google Research Blog, Florian Kainz, a software engineer with the company’s Daydream team, recounts how a photo he took with his Canon DX1 on a moonlight night led him to developing photography software that could allow smartphones to capture clean images even in the least optimal of lighting conditions.

One of Kainz’s colleagues from the Gcam team, the group within Google that developed the Pixel’s HDR+ mode, challenged him to take the same photo (seen above) he took with his professional level DSLR with a smartphone instead.

To tackle the challenge, Kainz took inspiration from an app called SeeInTheDark that was developed by one of his colleagues, fellow Google employee Marc Levoy. Using SeeInTheDark as a base, Kainz created a custom app that allows Nexus 6P and Pixel users to manually set the exposure time, ISO and focus distance at which they’ll shoot their next photo. The app then captures 64 photos in succession and saves them in DNG format, so that it’s possible to edit and stack the photos in an image post-processing program like Photoshop.

Using the app, his Nexus 6P and Pixel, a tripod and generous amounts of post-processing, Kainz was able to capture the photos you see throughout this piece.

While the resulting images are stunning, Kainz notes that his low light solution still has limitations. The most practical concern is that stacking the photos requires a level of photoshop wizardry that most people simply do not possess. Kainz, however, hopes that he’ll be able to automate the process with additional development.

Moreover, the smartphone, whether its the Nexus 6P or Pixel, still needs to be stabilized with a tripod or against the ground during the 64-frame burst. The approach also doesn’t work well if the subject is moving.

Still, neither of those restrictions have stopped Android users from demanding that Google integrate Kainz’s software in the stock Android camera app.

Source: Google

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