Rolandt

Yes, you can call it the ‘[companyname]’ community.

There’s no major harm in that, but there’s not much benefit in it either.

Would your audience genuinely be proud to say they are in the ‘companyname’ community (and would you?) Maybe, but it’s far less likely than if you had given the community a proper name.

A great name can be more powerful than you imagine.

If you’re naming a community, begin with how your members talk to one another. What words do they use that sound unique? What would a collective of your audience look like and feel like? That’s where you can start fishing for interesting names that resonate.

Yet, a name isn’t just for your members, it’s also for your colleagues. You name all your products (and maybe plenty of your internal projects too).

Come up with a list of potential names, whittle them down to 3 good choices and let senior colleagues have input.

Many organisations have made a mistake in not properly naming their community. You don’t need to repeat their mistake.

I often refer to Purism as a company that sits on a three-legged stool of freedom, privacy and security. I’ve even written posts in the past about how those concepts all fit together. While Purism focuses on all of these categories at the same time, we have an incredibly diverse customer base from many different walks of life and often our customers care more about one of the categories than the others. This means that sometimes we offer features or advancements that appeal only to a segment of our overall customer base.

For instance, customers who prioritize freedom might buy a Librem laptop because of the FSF endorsement of PureOS, the coreboot firmware, or our careful selection of hardware that can run on free software drivers. Customers who prioritize privacy might buy a Librem laptop because of the hardware kill switches or our commitment to privacy in our Social Purpose Corporation charter. Customers who prioritize security might pick us for our hardware kill switches, the fact we disable and neutralize the Management Engine by default, because of our PureBoot tamper-evident firmware, how we protect our supply chain, or because of how well our hardware runs QubesOS.

In this post I’m going to elaborate on a service we’ve offered for quite some time, but haven’t publicized much, that will be of particular interest to security-focused customers–our anti-interdiction service. This is a custom add-on service we have provided in the past to high-risk customers who are especially concerned about detecting any tampering with their hardware during shipment. Up until now you had to request this service explicitly to get details but starting today we are listing it as an additional upgrade you can add to any laptop order.

What is Interdiction?

The word interdiction in our context refers to a laptop being intercepted between the time it leaves our fulfillment center and the time you receive and open the box. The goal of the attacker is to implant malicious hardware or software, often to give them a remote backdoor into the system, without the recipient knowing. While this may seem far-fetched, and it’s certainly not something every Purism customer needs to worry about, there is precedent for these concerns for certain high-risk customers. While the most famous example might be the NSA interdiction of network hardware as part of the Snowden revelations, there are similar concerns for other governments as well.

Of course you don’t have to be targeted by a nation state to be at risk of interdiction. Hardware kill switches don’t just protect you from a nation state that might snoop on your webcam and microphone, but also a random hacker or a vengeful ex who might install a Remote Access Trojan on your system to snoop on and extort you. Likewise, anyone along the shipping route from a customs official to a delivery person or even someone at the destination like a malicious neighbor or vindictive ex might be motivated to install spyware on your system.

How Our Anti-interdiction Services Work

The goal with our anti-interdiction services isn’t to make it impossible for any adversary regardless of their capabilities from interdicting your laptop, and we don’t claim to prevent interdiction. What we offer instead is a way to detect interdiction–a set of measures custom-tailored to you and your threat that should make the job of interdicting your laptop without your knowledge much more difficult and your laptop much safer than with the normal shipping process. While some of the individual measures have countermeasures, the idea is that in aggregate (and customized for each individual) these measures become increasingly more difficult to defeat. A customs official who isn’t looking to implant anything may not care about arousing suspicion–they may just cut through tamper-evident seals–but someone who wants to modify your laptop does care about leaving a trace. For them, failure to defeat all of the measures risks alerting you to the tampering.

Because the anti-interdiction services aim to detect tampering, not prevent tampering, we don’t offer a refund if someone does tamper with your laptop in shipment since that’s something outside of our control. If a shipment is tampered with, however, the anti-interdiction process will help us determine what was tampered with and we can work with you to bring the laptop back to a from-the-factory state.

Our anti-interdiction process started relatively simply at first and continues to evolve and improve over time. As I mentioned, we customize the process for each customer based on their risk and their own capabilities, and this service ends up requiring a lot of back-and-forth between us and a customer as we pick which measures we’ll use and which we won’t. Some options include:

• Customized tamper-evident tape on the sealed plastic bag surrounding the laptop itself
• Customized tamper-evident tape on the internal, branded box
• Glitter nail polish covering the center (or all) screws on the bottom of the laptop
• Pictures of all of the above plus pictures of the inside of the laptop before sealing the bottom case
• All pictures sent to the customer out-of-band, signed by Purism and encrypted against the customer’s GPG key
• All coordination occurring over GPG-protected email

Integration with PureBoot Bundle

While the above measures are focused on detecting hardware tampering, now that we offer the PureBoot Bundle which configures a laptop and Librem Key with our tamper-evident PureBoot firmware at the factory, we now add some advanced software-based tamper-detection to anti-interdiction including:

• Shipping the laptop and Librem Key to separate addresses
• Postponing shipment of the laptop until the Librem Key is delivered
• Configuring the Librem Key and PureBoot with custom, user-provided GPG keys and/or PINs

Could You Offer This By Default?

It would be great to offer this kind of protection to each order, but as you can see these anti-interdiction measures require a lot of customization and additional work at our fulfillment center as well as a lot of back-and-forth coordination with each customer so it’s not feasible to make it the default at this point. For the customers who face these kinds of threats the extra protection, effort and cost is worth it. Even if you don’t face threats at these levels, you may still be interested in the PureBoot Bundle which offers some of the protection without the additional effort and cost of full anti-interdiction services.

How Do I Get It?

To add anti-interdiction to your laptop order, select PureBoot Bundle Anti-Interdiction for your firmware option when you customize your Librem 13, Librem 15 or Librem Mini order. As we get feedback from customers and the state of the art with tamper detection improves, we will continue to adjust and add new measures to our anti-interdiction service. If you have ideas on how to enhance our anti-interdiction measures even further please let us know!

edited 2020-03-19 to add Librem Mini

The post Anti-interdiction Services appeared first on Purism.

Some time ago I did some examples of querying DBPedia to find related music genres (Mapping Related Musical Genres on Wikipedia/DBPedia With Gephi) as well as other sorts of influence networks (eg programming languages).

After visiting the Black Sabbath exhibition in Birmingham recently (following the awesome Dawn After Dark gig supporting Balaam and the Angel) which had the most dubious of “metal” relationship maps on display in the shop, I thought I’d see how Wikipedia, via DBpedia, mapped that area out.

Gephi’s getting a bit long in the tooth now (netwulf is starting to look handy as a tool for styling networkx graphs; works in Jupyter notebooks too… more on this in another post…) and my original recipe seems to have broken (plus WordPress keeps crapping on the code, removing angle brackets etc), so I started scribbling notes around a recipe for trying to map band genres; it’s ages since I’ve had to try writing SPARQL querues, the notes are very scrappy / fragmentary, and some of the queries are quite possibly nonsense; but FWIW, you can find the notes here: Linked Data bands. I’ll try revisit them and produce some tidier recipes at some point…

I still used Gephi to render the network, though (this was before I found netwulf…). As an example, here’s a map of genres related to Heavey metal music [original svg].

I also started wondering about that other live music related things I might be able to dredge up out of DBPedia queries. One of the categories used to tag entities in DBPedia is Music_venues_in_England, and from that music venues in other, smaller locales; venues are also tagged with geo-co-ordinates (latitude and longitude values) so we can quite easily run a query for music venues in England and from that generate a map.

An example notebook is here: Venues – Linked Data.ipynb. A preview of the map can be found rendered from the gist here.

As I’ve noted previously, (an insight I think Martin Hawksey first made me grok fully), visualisations like this can be great for spotting errors, or gaps, in datasets. For example, Southampton has several other excellent venues aside from the Joiners Arms, and on the Isle of Wight, we have Strings as our local indie venue. [Actually, that might be the wrong version of the map; several venues that I thought were in the map I recall arenlt on that map…]

PS this is neat, from Terence Eden / @edent, a semantic take on the London Tube Map using data from Wikidata, with lines relating topical categories and stations to people’s names: The Great(er) Bear – using Wikidata to generate better artwork. [Picking up on that, some notes on transit mapping.]

My ‘on this day’ widget tells me it is exactly 10 years ago I asked the question in the title, then for my 40th birthday.

By coincidence, yesterday I opened a new note to gather notions and thoughts about if and how to do an unconference next year for my 50th, and Elmine’s 42nd (a nerd number even more worthy of celebration than my 50). I had created the note for discussion with Elmine, but prompted by my post of 10 years ago, I’ll ask the questions I jotted down here too.

Make Stuff That Matters, in 2014, still has a special vibe for us both. Also in comparison with last year’s edition (which was loads of fun and inspiring and deeply awesome in a personal sense, but in some ways it felt like less of a ‘high’ for us somehow). It was such a leap from the one before in 2010 mainly I think. It had a collective process to get everyone to make something, and the thrill of having the FabLab truck parked out front (we had it too last year, but it played less of a role). What would be something to top that? What would be ‘leveling up’ from our previous editions? Should we want to? We feel we want to.

What can we take on, topic wise, that has a real sense of urgency? Yet, can still be tied to all participants everyday lives? How are global things like the SDG’s relevant to our daily routines for instance?

Would we want to change the 1 day unconference and 1 day party format? We quite liked Peter’s 1 day discussion, 1 day doing unconference format last June, as it created space to not just be inspired but also build on that inspiration together within the same event, and return with something more tangible than just inspiration to take forward. Or maybe even longer than one or two days, more a festival than an event. Or fringe events around the one/two days?

Would we want to change the venue? I’m attached to doing it at home, as it provides such a different and personal context. Yet that also maybe limits what you can do content-wise. And it places the work of organising on our own shoulders only (although I could also mobilise more assistance probably).

Would we want to change the party format? Do something different, to make it more attractive on its own? Or maybe incorporate more of the party in the unconference? Live music e.g.

Would a longer build-up of the theme (whatever it would be) be fun? Like me and Elmine taking on a theme for the months in the run-up to the event, and write, blog, videopost about it. With an open invitation to others to also contribute their perspectives and thoughts. So that the event is not only a starting point, but a celebration or confirmation of things hat happened in the run-up?

Would it be fun and possible to network the event with other things happening or movements? Build alliances with local groups, national events, international communities? Grow deeper roots locally, allow more catalysis across our global network?

In short, everything is open and up for discussion and different ideas.

What do you think, feel, suggest? I look forward to hear your thoughts, and welcome your advice! (any channel is fine, e-mail, comments here, or a post on your own blog)

Apple’s recently announced AirPods Pro are officially available in-store and online.

The $329 CAD high-end wireless, Bluetooth earbuds feature noise-cancelling, water-resistance and a new, in-ear fit. Three sizes of tips are included in the AirPods Pro box, along with a Lightning-to-USB-C cable.

The new wireless earbuds’ noise-cancellation is powered by built-in microphones that detect external sound that the AirPods Pro then cancels out. Apple says that the earbuds’ noise-cancellation adjusts audio up to 200 times per second.

Other features include Apple’s H1 chip, Bluetooth 5.0, ‘Hey Siri’ integration and a Qi wireless charging case.

Battery life measures in at 4.5 hours of listening time on one charge, and up to five hours with noise-cancellation turned off. The charging case is capable of 24 hours of listening time, and more than 18 hours of talk time.

MobileSyrup will have more on Apple’s new high-end AirPods Pro earbuds in the coming days.

The post Apple’s AirPods Pro are now available in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Ich habe ja gestern für heise aufgeschrieben, was die neuen AirPods wie machen. Aber das ist nur ein Teil der Geschichte. Ich finde sie noch besser als ich da beschrieben habe.

Das fängt mit Sitz und Bequemlichkeit an. Ich spüre sie praktisch gar nicht. Nach viereinhalb Stunden muss ich sie rausnehmen und aufladen. Sonst würde ich sie wahrscheinlich 24h tragen. Da die Stummel nicht mehr so weit aus dem Ohr rausschauen, stehen sie bei mir auch nicht mehr ab und sehen weniger komisch aus.

Geradezu unglaublich ist der Tragekomfort für ohrverschließende In-Ears. Diese Bauweise hat nämlich unangehme Nebenwirkungen. Erhöhter Innendruck im Ohr, eigene Stimme "von innen", komische Geräusche, wenn man läuft. Alles weg bei den AirPods Pro, geregelt von einem halben Dutzend Sensoren und Mikros sowie dem H1 Chipset.

Kurz quetschen ist Start/Stop (1x), Next (2x), Previous (3x). Lange quetschen ruft Siri (links) und schaltet zwischen Transparenz und ANC on (rechts) um. ANC off brauche ich nicht. Im Transparenzmodus klingt das so wie komplett ohne AirPods Pro, ggfls. mit etwas Musik im Hintergrund. Haue ich das ANC rein, sind er Laubbläser oder der Staubsauger einfach weg.

Sagte ich schon, wie bequem die Dinger sind? Hach.

More >

Today’s question concerns what “public information” really means — and there’s a lot at stake for a victim of abuse. Dear Dr. Wobs: I am a victim of domestic violence. At 10 years healing I am ready to write my book. I’ve hit brick walls over and over while seeking the answer to what should … Continued

The post Ask Dr Wobs — Can I publish police information? appeared first on without bullshit.

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

(via RBYN)

I got the news today, oh boy! On December 20th our co-working space in Fredericksburg, CoWork, will be closing down. I’m posting the full announcement below for posterity, but this does mark a moment for Reclaim Hosting. We started CoWork when there were 3 of us two and a half years ago, but with our latest hire last week we are now 9 and we find we need more dedicated space for our growing team. On top of that, the overhead of running a growing CoWork required additional responsibilities from our staff. It was never meant to be a money maker, and while it offset some of our office costs it also has meant giving up access to parts of our office more and more. That said, we didn’t take on another 2500 square feet in the strip mall to start downsizing, rather we will be we’re re-imagining this space for a brave new purpose with the idea of bringing something a little more exciting to the Burg In fact, our renovation of CoWork in early 2017 laid the foundation for the new project we’ll be announcing shortly, and reinforces the fact Tim and I are not afraid to experiment with new ideas, even if they are old ones …

Greetings,

You are receiving this email because at some point past or present you have been a customer of CoWork Fredericksburg. We are reaching out to everyone today to regretfully inform you that CoWork will be closing operations at the end of the year. Our last day of operation is December 20th, 2019.

When we began CoWork in the Spring of 2017, our primary company, Reclaim Hosting, was a very small business with just two employees needing office space. CoWork was a way for us to realize the dream of building a space where people could work in common spaces together. Two and a half years later we have seen so many people come through the space and made quite a few friends along the way. But as CoWork has grown over the years so has Reclaim Hosting and the need for private office space for our company along with further development of new business plans has led us to this very difficult decision.

So, as we write this email to you, we do have some things we’d like everyone to be aware of as we prepare for closing: 

• Starting today no new memberships will be available for signup.

• Existing members will not be charged for the month of December

• All memberships will automatically be canceled on December 20th which will be the last day of access for all members.

• All Conference Room, Private Office, and Event rental bookings will be available until December 13th.

• If you have a mailbox membership:

  • Please be sure to pick up any existing mail at CoWork.

  • Set up a forwarding address by December 20th. All mail received after that date will be returned to sender.

  • For our mailbox memberships through Opus Virtual Offices you will receive further communication from them on alternative options for having your business address changed to a different location or cancellation instructions.

• All personal items stored at CoWork need to be removed by Dec 1. After that date personal belongings not claimed will be donated to Goodwill.

Decisions like these are never easy. It’s been a privilege and joy to operate CoWork for two and a half years and we appreciate the support of the community. We look forward to continuing to build and be a part of the Fredericksburg community for many years to come as we close this chapter and start the next.

All the best,

Reclaim Hosting and CoWork Staff

Via the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects Tara Culham comes this gem from SAAQ, the Societe de l’Assurance Automobile du Quebec. The province’s automobile insurer protects all Quebecers for injuries that happen in a traffic accident anywhere in the world regardless if they are at fault or not.

With no fault coverage individuals and companies cannot commence legal proceedings in an accident. Avoiding accidents and prompting better driver behaviour has been a hallmark of the SAAQ. They produce videos that get their point across, as does this video which has now gone viral. This video literally flips the courtesy stop at a crosswalk in favour of pedestrians and has over one million views.

Another of my favourites from the SAAQ is this short video reminding drivers to drive as if every pedestrian could be their mom. Released earlier this month, the video already has over 100,000 views.

The messaging here is short and to the point~be alert for pedestrians and value them as equal road users.

Way back when, I was a social-issues reporter at The Vancouver Sun. No one really knew what that meant. It wasn’t supposed to be traditional social issues, but more like trends and social-science research.

I can’t remember how I got started on this talking through computers network thing. I believe it might have been Larry Kuehn of the B.C. Teachers Federation who got me interested in it.

At any rate, I worked for a couple of weeks on a feature in the fall/winter of 1992 that was hundreds of words long. My editors clearly thought I was embroiled in one of my kooky obsessions with the obscure. They cut it down considerably and finally ran it in January 1993, just to humour me, I think.

That was my first dip into the world of the internet. Interesting now to see how it seemed like such a force for good back then. I thought of it again when I heard the radio interviews and read the stories yesterday about the Internet’s “birthday.”

One of the biggest challenges of the mobile developer community at Dropbox in 2018 was our custom build system. Our build system was slow, hard to use, and didn’t support some use cases which were out of scope of the original design. After 4 months of work by our Mobile Platform team, we were able to remove our unicorn implementation for something much more modern and easy to maintain.

In our new build system, we wanted to improve on a couple of things that our current build system was hindering:

• Make it easy to create new modules
• Allow developers to easily modify the build files
• Improve on build times for local development
• Industry standard approaches and tooling, so an engineer can easily Google their way out of problems
• Low barrier of entry, familiar to new hires
• Integration with Android Studio

History

At Dropbox, we have a repository for all mobile development, called Xplat. One of the benefits is to easily share source code between our different mobile applications and across platforms. For a while, Dropbox invested heavily in cross-platform development via C++ that worked well for the apps that were developed at that time. We even open-sourced Djinni in 2014 to interface cross-platform C++ library code with platform-specific Java and Objective-C on Android and iOS. Most recently in early 2019, we made the decision to move away from C++ development, read more about why here. However, some of our mission critical libraries will remain on C++ e.g. DocScanner which uses OpenCV.

Since December 2016, Dropbox used a meta-build system to build our two mobile apps: Dropbox and Paper. It was a meta-build system in the sense that, for most of our modules, we didn’t write the Gradle build files by hand. These build files were autogenerated using an in-house system called BMBF. Additionally, BMBF would generate Java source code for our analytics, feature gating, and other common libraries written in C++.

What is BMBF?
BMBF (Buildy McBuildface Basic Modular Build Format) was a tool written in Python to help modularize our mobile code base.

BMBF provided guaranteed layered dependency order and reduced boilerplate in build files.

BMBF used a structured and opinionated file system layout. Then it was able to generate build.gradle and wire in those modules into settings.gradle. This made it ‘easy’ to create new modules or re-use an existing module without sacrificing the benefits that come from using the official tools for each platform.

The following module config file:

device.bmbf.yaml

dependencies:
  - dbx/base/async

java:
  src_maven_dependencies:
    - dagger
    - dagger_compiler
  jvm_test_maven_dependencies:
    - junit

Link to gist

Would get parsed by BMBF’s build system and output a build.gradle file

apply plugin: 'com.android.library'
apply plugin: 'kotlin-kapt'

android {
    sourceSets {
        main {
            manifest.srcFile 'AndroidManifest.xml'
            java.srcDirs = ['java/src']
            test.srcDirs = ['jvm_test/src']
            androidTest.srcDirs = ['android_test/src']
        }
    }
}
dependencies {
    implementation project(':dbx:base:async')
    implementation project(':dbx:base:oxygen')
    implementation commonlibs.dagger2
    kapt annotationprocessors.dagger2_compiler
    api commonlibs.kotlinstdlib
    testImplementation testlibs.junit
}

Link to gist

How did BMBF not meet our needs?
BMBF was opinionated, it made it difficult to add functionality to our Gradle scripts that were not built into BMBF. If BMBF didn’t support a workflow that a product engineer required, they would either file a ticket on Mobile Platform, or tried to add the functionality themselves.

BMBF had numerous gotchas and a steep learning curve. BMBF required a very specific file and folder structure. BMBF was not compatible with Gradle incremental builds because build.gradle files were being re-created every time a developer built the app. It was not uncommon for engineers who had been with the company for 6+ months to still had no idea how to create a new module using BMBF. Our Slack channels and help forums were bombarded with questions on how to resolve errors that BMBF presents.

BMBF was initially built to help facilitate modularization and sharing code between iOS and Android. Over the years, the original maintainers that created BMBF moved on to other projects or left the company. Our current engineers were not eager to maintain a legacy meta build system and were more in favor of leveraging a standardized build system. Since we started using BMBF, we stopped writing cross-platform modules and even wanted to rewrite C++ modules into platform-specific iOS and Android code. The time had come to revamp our build system.

The planning

Our team worked for several weeks on evaluating and analyzing our options to review:

1. Gradle + BMBF (status quo)
2. Gradle only
3. Bazel
4. Buck

Our team created a sandbox environment to accurately compare different build systems.

Gradle Only
No work was needed for Gradle, as it was our baseline.

Bazel
While Bazel was widely used at Dropbox, its use didn’t propagate to our mobile teams. An engineer from Developer Infrastructure worked on generating all the BUILD.bzl files required for all our modules in order to successfully build an APK.

Buck
We did not evaluate Buck because it was not well supported by the community at the time and did not support Kotlin. Also, we did not have any in-house expertise in Buck at the time. We would have needed to dedicate 1-2 mobile engineers full time to work on Buck.

Build times

Using the prototypes, we compared the three different build systems’ build times and developer experience.

What are the major decisions, their options, and their tradeoffs?

Bazel Build System:

• Decision: Invest heavily in Bazel now and move C++ and Java/Kotlin development to Bazel.
• Options: This will require upfront investment in a Bazel MVP, as well as continued support to make up for new/missing features that are only released in Gradle by Google. As of December 2018, Google is still working on open sourcing some missing critical pieces of Bazel Android from the internal version, Blaze. For example, App Bundles, which was released on May 2018, is still not available on Bazel as of Dec 2018.
• Pros ▲
  • Tool chain managed by Dropbox Developer Platform team
  • Bazel is widely used in Dropbox
  • Tool built and maintained externally
  • Unified build system for C++ and Java/Kotlin
  • Scales to larger code bases in terms of performance
• Cons ▼
  • Not an industry standard for mobile
  • Latest and greatest features and libraries are not available
  • Requires a bigger upfront investment than migrating to Gradle
  • Requires continuous long term support from Dropbox Developer Platform team until Bazel becomes mobile industry standard (Currently we know only of Google as a user of Blaze for Android)
  • The Android Studio team at Google is focusing on Gradle, at the expense of Bazel
  • The Bazel team at Google is working on adding support for Android and open to feedback but will always be trailing Gradle by 1-2 quarters

Gradle Build System:

• Decision: Make a smaller, strategic, investment to move Java/Kotlin development to Gradle by checking in the project files and removing BMBF from Gradle model management.
• Options: Code generation and C++ development will continue to be done by BMBF. Invest in some guardrails (lint, Herald, templating) to make working with Gradle easy for developers.
• Pros ▲
  • Industry standard for mobile
  • Latest and greatest features and libraries are available
  • Tool built and maintained externally
  • Low migration cost
  • Low maintenance cost
• Cons ▼
  • Poor support for cross platform C++ development. Building xplat C++ code is delegated to BUCK via BMBF
  • Will require some support from Mobile platform over time (e.g version bumps, guardrails, maintenance)

BMBF Build System

• Decision: Keep and maintain BMBF as the mobile build tool
• Pros ▲
  • Good support for cross platform C++ code
  • Harder to break Gradle configurations through developer error
  • New features can be made available by prioritizing work on them in-house
• Cons ▼
  • (Unenthusiastically) managed and maintained by our team, rather than a separate build team
  • Tool is not built and maintained externally
  • Not an industry standard for mobile
  • Will require continuous long term support. New features will require in-house investment

Why not Buck as a build tool

• Decision: Buck is an optional build tool however we didn’t evaluate it as a serious option do to its clear lack of community support and drawbacks.
• Options: Buck is designed to address massively modularized code bases (100+ modules). It also would require significant expertise to maintain and support. As an example Uber has a 3 person team dedicated to Buck support, one of whom is the author of OkBuck which allows using Buck with Gradle projects.
• Pros ▲
  • Good support for cross platform C++ code and caching
• Cons ▼
  • Managed by mobile engineers
  • Not well supported by the community and Facebook (at least for external users)
  • Not an industry standard for mobile

Full Trade-offs Table

Decision

We decided to move forward last year with the Gradle Build System, and we will soon be revisiting Bazel. The cheap migration cost from BMBF to the underlying Gradle lead to the decision to first deprecate BMBF.

Although Bazel was extremely fast with regard to the the build time, we were concerned about deteriorating the local developer experience. At the time of our evaluation, Bazel was not very mature. Gradle is the industry standard for building Android apps. Tooling and libraries available for Gradle will take time for it to become available for Bazel.

Find out how we implemented our new Android build system in part II of this post. If you are an Android or iOS engineer who gets excited about solving problems at scale and sharing your findings with the community we’d love for you to come join the team!

brucesterling:

*I first saw this cartoon years ago, and it’s still obvious that they have no “plan” whatsoever for anything that they’re doing to themselves or others

Priceless.

If you’ve ever scrambled out the door with your phone’s battery in the red, you know that power is precious, and the faster you can get it, the better. Anker’s PowerPort III Nano and Aukey’s Minima 18W PD Charger (PA-Y18) are the best options for charging any phone fast: They’re tiny and inexpensive, and they’ll get a fully drained phone battery up to 50 percent in half an hour.

Twitterrific (left) and Twitter (right).

This fall has been a significant season for the iPad. While new hardware has been limited to an updated entry-level iPad, the software changes have more than made up for the dirth of hardware updates. September brought iPadOS, the new branch of iOS that packs advancements like multiwindowing, an upgraded Home screen, and more. Mere weeks after iPadOS launched, macOS Catalina enabled a host of iPad apps to be brought to the Mac, which in some cases meant those iPad apps became more Mac-like as a result.

Thanks to these recent software changes, a couple of key Twitter apps for iPad have been updated to offer key new functionality. Twitterrific has become the first Twitter client to add multiwindow support, enabling creating separate windows for different accounts or different views within the same account. The first-party Twitter app, meanwhile, has recently added extensive support for external keyboards, likely as a side benefit of the app making its way to the Mac. In both cases, the Twitter experience on iPad has been meaningfully improved in ways that power users will appreciate.

Multiwindow in Twitterrific

I have to admit, when Apple first announced that the iPad would gain multiwindow support, it didn’t cross my mind that a Twitter app could benefit from that functionality. Multiwindow makes a lot of sense for document-based apps like Ulysses and GoodNotes, but I wouldn’t have expected the feature in a Twitter app. I’m happy to report, however, that the team at The Iconfactory knew something I didn’t: that multiwindow can be a fantastic addition to a Twitter client.

Timeline on the left, mentions on the right.

One common complaint about Twitter clients on iPad is that many of them don’t make great use of the device’s large display, preferring instead to show nothing more than a single view on-screen at once – whether that be your timeline, mentions, DMs, and so on. Multiwindow makes that a complete non-issue for Twitterrific, because now you can open separate windows for different views and pair those windows in Split View to create, essentially, your own custom interface. If you always want your timeline and mentions on-screen next to each other, you can do that with separate windows paired in Split View; the same works with DMs and likes, or your profile, or a specific list, or any other view inside the app. I’ve also enjoyed keeping a separate window open in Slide Over that’s dedicated solely to drafting tweets in the compose view. One of my common frustrations with Twitter clients on iPad is that you almost never can compose a tweet while still viewing your timeline, and multiwindow in Twitterrific fixes that.

To create new windows in Twitterrific you’ll need to use the standard system options for that: either drag the app’s icon from your dock to spawn a new window, or use the Show All Windows action from the app icon’s long-press menu to enter Exposé, where the + button in the top-right corner will create a new window. If you’d like, you can also drag away your profile picture from inside the app and move it to a part of the screen where it will become a new window, but I’ve found that a little finicky since there are only a few areas of the screen where dropping the picture causes a new window to spawn.

One key functionality I haven’t mentioned yet, but that multiwindow enables, is managing different accounts without having to constantly switch back and forth between them. If you have more than one Twitter account, such as one for personal use and another for business, multiwindow is a compelling way to avoid needing to switch back and forth between them constantly. If you’d like, you can pair the timeline for your personal account with the timeline for your business account in a single Split View, enabling both to be accessible at the same time.

Keyboard Navigation in Twitter

Though once it was a major source of frustration, the first-party Twitter app has received a lot of meaningful improvements in recent years, and while it’s certainly still not for everyone, I’ve grown to enjoy a lot of what the app offers, including one recent addition: extensive support for keyboard navigation.

Keyboard shortcuts in Twitter.

Timed alongside the Mac Catalyst version of Twitter for Mac debuting, Twitter’s iPad app can now be navigated almost entirely via an external keyboard. When viewing your timeline, tapping the up or down arrow keys will highlight the currently selected tweet, so you can easily move from tweet to tweet using just the arrow keys, interacting with each tweet as you go. When a tweet is highlighted you can hit R to reply to it, T to retweet it, L to like it, and B to bookmark it; Command + 1-4 will jump you between the app’s four main navigation tabs; a new tweet can be composed by hitting Command + N; and you can even toggle between light and dark modes or adjust the app’s text size via the keyboard. But the most surprising keyboard shortcuts to me were the ones that let you copy the full text of a tweet to your clipboard (directly from your timeline view) or copy a link to that tweet. Keyboard shortcuts are a power user feature as it is, but Twitter’s app goes all-out providing more functionality than I even would have thought to ask for.

In testing Twitter’s keyboard navigation I’ve also been impressed by how rarely it falls flat in places and requires tapping the screen to complete an action. Often when an iPad app adopts keyboard shortcuts, they only get you part of the way to keeping your hands on the keyboard; for example, the keyboard might load a specific menu, but once you’re in that menu you often can’t navigate via keyboard anymore. Twitter’s team, on the other hand, has done an excellent job ensuring that almost every area of the app can be navigated by keyboard. When you’re composing a tweet, for example, you can hit Command + Return to send it, or Command + W to dismiss the screen, after which a menu will appear with options to delete or save the draft – in most apps, this menu would be where keyboard navigation was forgotten, but in Twitter you can use the arrow keys and Return to make your selection without touching the screen. The only part of the app that oddly doesn’t support navigation is the sidebar menu, which in all honesty I don’t go to often, but it’s the one spot I found could stand improving.

This fall’s software releases have made the iPad a more powerful tool for productivity, and who’s to say that Twitter use can’t fall under the category of “productivity”? Even in cases where there’s clearly no business use in mind, the new functionality found in Twitterrific and the official Twitter client makes the iPad Twitter experience more flexible than ever before, and that’s a good thing.

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The latest update to our easy-to-use audio editor Fission is now available. Fission 2.5 can be downloaded directly from our site, as well as in the Mac App Store. This update brings full support for MacOS 10.15 (Catalina), along with additional updates and improvements.

Full Dark Mode Support

Fission has long offered a choice between two themes, dark and light. However, it has not previously supported MacOS’s “Dark Mode”, introduced in MacOS 10.14 (Mojave). With Fission 2.5, there’s now full support for Dark Mode throughout the app.

Fission’s updated Appearance preference

You can adjust Fission’s appearance right from the Preferences window. The “Match System” setting will cause Fission to follow your OS-wide appearance.¹ If you prefer, you can instead force Fission to use the “Light” or “Dark” theme, regardless of your system-wide settings.

Keep Rocking With Custom Ringtones

Readers may recall that the 2017 release of iTunes 12.7 changed and broke many things. At the time, Fission needed a major update to continue helping you make custom ringtones for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. With the release of Catalina, iTunes has ceased to be entirely, with its functions now spread across multiple applications. As a result, another update for Fission is needed for Catalina.

The update to Fission 2.5 brings full support for making custom ringtones on Catalina. We’ve also updated our helpful support article about making custom ringtones, to include instructions for users on Catalina, as well as older operating systems. With Fission 2.5, you can continue to set custom tones to play when you receive a phone call or text message, as well as when an alarm or timer goes off.

Update to Fission 2.5 Today

If you’re already a Fission user, just select “Check for Update” from the Fission menu to move up to version 2.5, or click “Free Download” below to download it directly.

If you’re new to Fission, visit the product page to learn more about fast and easy-to-use audio editor.

Footnotes:

1. The “Match System” option follows the General System Preference. On MacOS 10.14 and up, it follows the “Appearance” setting, while MacOS 10.13 and 10.12 use the older “Use dark menu bar and Dock” setting. ↩︎

Apparently Google loved my story about Burnaby, Vancouver’s beloved neighbour that has served as its bedroom community for decades, is going to create a downtown at the mega-fortress-mall of Metrotown. (Full text attached below)

Burnaby did originally have a kind of town centre at Edmonds, but that sort of disappeared in the 1970s, as the city moved to a “four town centres” approach to planning as part of the big strategy to develop a set of interlinked regional town centres so that everyone wouldn’t have to jam into downtown.

As I discovered when I wrote the story, there were dreams back then, though, that Metrotown would be more than just a sprawling mall when it was redeveloped from what it had been, an industrial area of grocery warehouse and distribution buildings like those of Kelly Douglas. See this lovely report from Norm Hotson, back in the day.

It’s going to take 40 years or more for this re-make of Metrotown to be completed, so not holding my breath for an instant transformation, but it will be a pleasant difference to see more effort go into making an attractive public area in and around there over the years.

It was always puzzling to me and others how Burnaby seemed to require nothing from developers, who put up towers next to Lougheed or around Metrotown with apparently zero requirement to try to make the immediate precinct attractive or walkable. Gilmore Station, gah. Former mayor Derek Corrigan, who could be so assertive (ahem) on other issues, didn’t appear to want to push them on it. And, of course, developers loved it, talking about how easy it was to do business in Burnaby.

But, as this report approved Monday by council demonstrates, it looks as though there’s going to be a different approach now.

The Vancouver suburb with no downtown is about to get one through one of the largest mall transformations in North America.

Burnaby, the huge city that is about four-fifths the geographic size of neighbouring Vancouver, has been for decades a place with three large malls surrounded by some apartments and no discernible centre.

That’s set to change in the coming years, after Burnaby City Council finalized a plan this week transform Metropolis at Metrotown, one of Canada’s largest and most successful malls, into a completely new kind of city centre.

The idea is to break down the huge site – 18 hectares, or the size of City Place in Toronto – from what it is now, a fortress of a mall surrounded by 8,000 parking spots and one of the busiest SkyTrain stations in the region, into a walkable city centre with public gardens and plazas, new interior streets, thousands of new residents in apartment towers and possibly a new performing arts centre.

It will also mark a new, more assertive approach by Burnaby to demanding city benefits from developers, after decades of taking a timid or hands-off attitude.

“We need to be more firm and more visionary with respect to public open space here,” said Burnaby’s relatively new director of planning and building, Ed Kozak.

Burnaby recently instituted a strong policy on rental apartments that would mean 20 per cent of all the units built on the site would need to be rentals. It also means that the city will be asking the developer to meet sustainability requirements that include energy-efficient buildings, as well as rain gardens and 40-per-cent tree coverage on the now asphalt-dominated site.

Former Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan, ousted last year by newcomer Mike Hurley, had always said that Burnaby couldn’t ask for the same benefits from developers as Vancouver planners did because it wasn’t in the same position.

Many towers went up around Metrotown and along the Lougheed Highway in the past couple of decades, but there was almost nothing done at the street level to create a neighbourhood feel.

Only with massive new redevelopments at the Brentwood and Lougheed malls in more recent years did the city start making more forceful demands for public space and other amenities.

“We’re taking the lessons we learned from that,” said Mr. Kozak, appointed director by the new mayor in April.

Planners will also look at how to connect the new downtown neighbourhood better with an apartment area just to the south, which is currently cut off from easy access to the mall because of the SkyTrain guideway and road between the two sides. Mr. Kozak said planners are considering whether to severely constrain traffic on that road, Central Boulevard, or maybe even close it.

While there are obvious advantages to the city in redoing Metropolis, it’s a dicier proposition for the mall owner, Ivanhoé Cambridge.

The current redevelopment of a former Ivanhoé Cambridge mall in another part of the region, Oakridge Centre, is demonstrating how awkward it can be to build condos around an existing busy centre. There have been problems with parking jams and at least one long-time retailer was forced out in the first phase of construction.

“We learned our lessons from Oakridge,” said Graeme Silvera, the vice-president for development and retail at Ivanhoé Cambridge. “Here, we can phase this in small, bite-sized chunks.”

He said the first phase in the next decade will be in the parking lots facing Kingsway. The redevelopment of the current buildings that form Metropolis will take much longer and will depend on lease arrangements.

But it’s worth doing, he said. Malls need to adapt all the time; they can’t stay still no matter how successful they are.

“Retail is the only asset group that is constantly changing. So we’re taking a single-purpose site and adding diversity. This is what the mall needs to remain relevant.”

On Twitter, Molly Lambert writes:

RIP blogging we all tried real hard to make the internet good and then corporations and rich idiots destroyed everything a generation of writers tried to build

Charlie Warzel re-tweeted her with this comment:

there’s almost no space for writing anymore that’s joyful or an attempt to be creative. hardly anyone is playing around with form or even just trying to entertain. so much of the joy has been sucked out of the internet unless its crowdsourced by platforms from ppl who aren’t paid

They’re both right.

But I’d also note: fuck that shit.

Here’s the thing: there are good blogs to read. Some old ones are gone, but new good ones are created all the time.

And there are good RSS readers which you can use instead of (or in addition) to Twitter and Facebook.

And — most importantly — nothing is stopping you from writing joyfully and creatively for the web! You can entertain, you can have fun, you can push the boundaries of the form, if you want to. Or you can just write about cats as you develop your voice. Whatever you want!

There are plenty of great places for it. (I quite like Micro.blog, personally.)

* * *

You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.

A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.

Again: you choose.

Sebastiaan de With, part of the team behind the camera app Halide has published part 1 of a multi-part breakdown of the iPhone 11 camera. It’s a fantastic analysis of what makes the new camera different from past versions and goes into great depth while remaining accessible, even if you have only a passing familiarity with photography.

To put this year’s camera into perspective, de With recaps what Apple did with last year’s iPhone cameras explaining how Smart HDR works and its shortcomings. The iPhone 11 features Smart HDR too, but as de With explains, Apple has significantly improved how it handles the dynamic range of an image.

Another aspect of the improvement is in the camera sensor hardware. Despite its diminutive size, the iPhone 11’s image sensor can resolve more detail than any iPhone camera before it.

However, many of the iPhone 11’s camera improvements come down to better software. The new camera post-processes each component of an image differently, applying different noise reduction to the sky, a face, hair, and clothing, for example. Apple calls the feature Photo Segmentation, and it’s aided by machine learning.

One of my favorite features of the new camera is Night Mode. As de With notes:

In the iPhone 11 Night Mode, you can also see detail vanish in some areas. Except that it really seems to only affect parts of the image that you don’t really care that much about. Night Mode has a remarkable if not uncanny ability to extract an image that is sometimes even sharper than the regular mode, with strong sharpening and detail retention occurring in areas that are selected by the camera during processing.

The iPhone 11’s camera is also the first one de With thinks rivals standalone cameras:

In the past, iPhones made great photos for sharing on social media, but blown up on a big screen, the shots didn’t hold up. It’s why I frequently still pack a ‘big’ camera with me on trips.

With these huge improvements in processing, the iPhone 11 is the first iPhone that legitimately challenges a dedicated camera.

There are many more details in de With’s article, including a close look at the iPhone 11’s ultra wide lens. Every section of the post has photos and side-by-side comparisons that illustrate the analysis too, which makes the full post a must-read].

→ Source: blog.halide.cam

Apples AirPods Pro können Nebengeräusche aktiv unterdrücken und sollen besser klingen. Wie gut das funktioniert, haben wir ausprobiert.

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Like the mighty Colorado River, Mount Edward Road in Charlottetown starts out gently and without much fanfare. From its source at St. Peters Road it flows northwest; as it progresses, the road builds up steam and changes character from a modest commercial street to a modest residential street and, finally, once it crosses the bypass, becomes a busy industrial chaos populated by all manner of cement trucks, courier trucks, lumber trucks, and pickup trucks. In these upper regions, as I discovered today, it is kind of the perfect opposite of “bicycle friendly,” sporting only the barest of pockmarked paved shoulders, and driven by drivers from whom bicycles are simply not expected.

I was on Mount Edward Road this afternoon on my way to Pure EV, the city’s nascent used electric vehicle dealership.

It is vehicle registration renewal season for our 2000 Jetta, and I’m doing my due diligence to determine whether our money and effort are better placed in keeping the Jetta on the road or transitioning to an electric vehicle. Being a family of modest means, Mike Kenny’s scheme to import used EVs from Lower Canada and resell them here on PEI is the ideal solution for us, as purchasing new would be beyond our reach.

It seemed wrong to go EV shopping in the Jetta, so I put my bicycle on the bus up to the Charlottetown Mall, rode out the back to the Confederation Trail, on the trail until it emerged on Mount Edward, then along to Sherwood Road and just up past Brown’s VW to Mike’s dealership.

I arrived on a good day, as Mike had two Nissan Leafs, a Kia Soul and a Tesla on the lot. We had a good chat about the challenges and opportunities of EV ownership, and then Mike put me in the drivers seat of the Soul, and then the Leaf, and we went for test drives together.

As I discovered when I drove my friend Trudy’s Chevy Bolt for the first time in May, after about 15 minutes the “E” part of driving an EV recedes into the background, and it’s “just a car.” Achieving this state in the Leaf and the Soul was helpful, as it gave me a chance to compare their fit and finish and their respective user interfaces, as well as their essential driveability. Although my test drives were quick, I’d say the Kia emerged the winner, perhaps because it’s tuned somewhat tighter than the Nissan, so the drive was closer to the tightly-wound Jetta that I’ve been driving for 19 years.

I came to no definitive conclusions as to the way forward, but evidence was added to the pile.

Mike, by the way, welcomes test drives from all and curious; if you are one of those “my next car will be an electric car” people, you will find no better maître d’ at the entrance to this new world than he.

Along the way to Pure EV I stopped at Gallant’s & Co., the weekday outpost of the folks who’ve been selling us our smoked salmon bagels at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market in recent years. I enjoyed an order of fresh spring rolls and a tomato soup, followed by a solid cappuccino (espresso, north of the bypass: who ever thought!).

The hearty lunch fortified me for navigation up and back on the outer stretches of Mount Edward. I managed to emerge unharmed; I was, however, very happy to cross the bypass and get back on the quiet, peaceful  Confederation Trail for the ride back downtown.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

Motordom 1.0 is the impact on cities of rail and streetcar technology – the DNA of Vancouver.  Motordom 2.0 is domination by the vehicle, and the design of post-war urban regions.  Motordom 3.0 is the reaction and the reshaping of cities to accommodate more transport choices, including walking and cycling – Vancouverism for transportation.

Motordom 4.0 is the era we are entering: transportation impacted by information technologies.  Ride-sharing and hailing, for instance.  Since transport and land-use are intimately connected, one affecting the other, we should expect that urban spaces will become contested spaces.

And sure enough …

… to deliver Amazon orders and countless others from businesses that sell over the internet, the very fabric of major urban areas around the world is being transformed. And New York City, where more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily, shows the impact that this push for convenience is having on gridlock, roadway safety and pollution. …

The immense changes in New York have been driven by tech giants, other private businesses and, increasingly, by independent couriers, often without the city’s involvement, oversight or even its awareness …  And it could be just the beginning. Just 10 percent of all retail transactions in the United States during the first quarter of 2019 were made online, up from 4 percent a decade ago, according to the Census Bureau. …

“In this period of tremendous growth in the city’s population, jobs, tourism and e-commerce, our congested streets are seeing ever more trucks,” said Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner. “The city is experimenting with enforcement and creative curb management initiatives to address this growing challenge.” …

Images and videos of delivery trucks blocking bike lanes, sidewalks and crosswalks are easy to find on social media. In some neighborhoods, Amazon’s ubiquitous boxes are stacked and sorted on the sidewalk, sometimes on top of coverings spread out like picnic blankets.

“They are using public space as their private warehouse,” said Christine Berthet, who lives in Midtown Manhattan. “That is not acceptable. That is not what the sidewalk is for.” …

In Paris, freight trucks enter the city at night and deliver packages to smaller warehouses near homes. In the morning, bikes and electric vans haul them to people’s doorsteps. Some neighborhood convenience stores and flower shops double as pickup spots for packages. In Hamburg, Germany, trucks deliver containers full of packages to a drop-off site. From there, fleets of electric tricycles carry the packages to homes. UPS uses electric delivery vans in London.

New York has sought to shift more truck deliveries to nights and weekends, when streets are emptier. About 500 companies, including pharmacies and grocery stores, deliver goods from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., under a voluntary city program. …

More far-reaching measures were needed,  Ms. Kaufman of New York University said, such as applying additional charges for same-day deliveries and even creating a system of “congestion pricing for online deliveries,” in which large apartment or office buildings would have designated delivery days. To get packages sooner, residents and companies would have to pay extra.

“We’ve entered an entirely new way of buying goods and services, but our infrastructure is only adapting incrementally,” Ms. Kaufman said. “We need to completely rethink how we use our streets if we want to maintain our current shopping and delivery habits.”

Full story here in the New York Times.

The CRTC’s review on the state of the mobile wireless market and whether further action is required to improve choice and affordability for Canadians, has been pushed to February 2020.

A notice on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) website indicated that the revised public hearing date will begin on February 18th, 2020. The deadline for further comments is now November 22nd, 2019. The deadline for parties to reply to the Commissioner of Competition’s economic studies is January 13th, 2020, and the revised deadline for final submissions is March 23rd, 2020.

The Competition Bureau currently is doing an economic study of the state of the wireless market in Canada. The commissioner requested an extension of 30 days for further comments to come in from carriers. This was backed by carriers that also felt an extension was necessary.

Carriers requested that they also have an opportunity to respond to the commissioner’s studies and said that “being able to comment before the hearing is a matter of procedural fairness, particularly since the commissioner will be filing his expert report well after other parties file their own expert reports.”

The carriers requested this additional reply phase be added to the schedule so they can “engage their own experts to respond directly” to the study. The CRTC felt there was merit to this and felt six weeks for parties to evaluate and respond to the commissioner would be enough.

Because of the commissioner’s 30-day extension and the request and the new reply phase, carriers requested the hearing be rescheduled.

“The [CRTC] considers that delaying the hearing by approximately five weeks would be reasonable since it would accommodate the 30-day extension and the new reply phase and provide sufficient time for parties to prepare for the hearing, but would not significantly extend the length of the proceeding overall,” the CRTC wrote in its notice.

The hearing would look into whether or not Wi-Fi first MVNOs should have mandated access to the networks of the Big Three. It will also look at whether or not regulatory measures are needed when 5G is deployed in the Canadian market.

The post CRTC review of mobile wireless market pushed to February 2020 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

NordVPN, a private network provider that recently disclosed that it faced a data breach, has announced a number of measures that it will take to become secure.

The data breach occurred in March 2018 after a hacker gained access to NordVPN’s server.

It says that it has now partnered with VerSprite, a cybersecurity consulting firm to prevent another breach from occurring. It will also introduce a ‘bug bounty program’ that rewards cybersecurity experts for catching vulnerabilities.

The network provider says it will also complete a full-scale third-party security audit in 2020. Further, it will ensure that its data centres have a high level of security.

Lastly, NordVPN says it will upgrade all of its 5100 servers to RAM servers so that nothing is stored locally.

Source: NordVPN 

The post NordVPN outlines security plan following recent data breach appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Netflix responded to backlash over its recent playback speed experiment.

The experiment, which began appearing on a limited number of Android phones last week, allowed users to adjust the playback speed of video content. Speeds included 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x (normal), 1.25x and 1.5x options.

Despite the limited and experimental nature of the feature, several content creators took to social media to bash Netflix. Judd Apatow, Aaron Paul and Brad Bird all criticized the company over the decision.

No @Netflix no. Don’t make me have to call every director and show creator on Earth to fight you on this. Save me the time. I will win but it will take a ton of time. Don’t fuck with our timing. We give you nice things. Leave them as they were intended to be seen. https://t.co/xkprLM44oC

— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) October 28, 2019

In a recent blog post, Netflix says it was “sensitive to creator concerns” and hasn’t brought the feature to bigger screens like TVs. Additionally, it said it automatically corrects the pitch of audio when sped up or slowed down. Finally, users can’t set a default playback speed. Instead, those with access to the feature have to change playback every time they start new content.

Netflix argued the feature could help users watching a foreign-language title, or those who want to rewatch favourite scenes to catch every detail. On top of that, the company says that DVD players have offered variable playback speed for some time.

Further, Netflix says its subscribers have requested the feature for a long time.

Ultimately, the controversy seems rather overblown. While on the one side, it’s understandable that content creators want people to experience it as intended (say, at regular playback speed), offering variable playback speeds could open up content to many more people. Plus, other platforms provide variable playback speed options.

For those who really don’t like the feature, don’t use it. Netflix isn’t forcing anyone to activate it.

You can read more about Netflix’s response on the blog post here.

Source: Netflix Via: Variety

The post Netflix says fans want variable playback speeds, creators call it a travesty appeared first on MobileSyrup.

VSCO has added a new ‘Clarity’ feature to its photo editing app on Android that lets users add depth and detail to images.

With Clarity, users can enhance their images with texture, defined edges and patterns and extra sharpness. This can all be managed using a slider in the editing toolkit.

VSCO says Clarity is a “highly requested” feature from its community and “one in a series of tools” that it’s bringing to Android.

It’s unclear if and when Clarity will come to iOS.

The post VSCO launches Clarity photo detailing feature on Android appeared first on MobileSyrup.