OSnews

For a long time, iOS apps have been able to open links as web views. When you tap a link in a Twitter client, an RSS reader, or a bookmark utility, it usually opens in a mini browser that doesn't leave the app, providing you with the convenience of not having to switch between Safari and the app. For years, in spite of some security concerns, this worked well and became the de-facto standard among third-party iOS apps.With iOS 9, Apple wants this to change - and they're bringing the power of Safari to any app that wants to take advantage of it.

I took a little time out today to watch WWDC Session 511 to learn about how Safari Content Blocking will work in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. After an hour, I had a little concept app running. I wont really explain the technical details of how the extensions work or how to create them, that is better done by watching the WWDC Session video directly, but I will say its frightfully easy and the code I used for the blocker detailed below is at the bottom of this page.I'm not complaining.

It is showing hidden files (that have names starting with a dot) when invoked by root and doesnât show them (as expected) when running as a normal user. This differs from what ls on Linux (the one coming from coreutils) does.Why does ls behave this way?Very interesting answer. I love stuff like this.

If you pay close enough attention to these things, you've probably seen Google Play Services updating from time to time on your Android devices. If you follow the more technical side of Android, you'll know it was announced a couple of years ago to introduce new APIs and features in a way that doesn't require a firmware update. You could be forgiven for dismissing it as a dry and technical part of the OS, but in reality it's a crucially important part of the way modern Android works.Play Services is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it makes the lives of developers easier and because it bypasses incompetent carriers and OEMs so that users get considerable updates. It's a curse because they're closed source - making it impossible to dig into the code. They make your device less your device, and that's always a bad thing, especially in today's world.So much of this could be addressed if Google opened up as much of it, but that's very unlikely to happen.

On my home forum Sysnative, a user (wavly) was being assisted with a WU issue, which was going well, aside from the fact that wavly's WU kept getting disabled randomly. It was figured out eventually after using auditpol.exe and registry security auditing that the program that was responsible for disabling WU was Disable_Windowsupdate.exe, which is part of Samsung's SW Update software.SW Update is your typical OEM updating software that will update your Samsung drivers, the bloatware that came on your Samsung machine, etc. The only difference between other OEM updating software is, Samsung's disables WU.No matter how much work Microsoft puts into cleaning up Windows, crappy OEMs like Samsung will undo all their work.How about that line of Surface laptops and desktops, Microsoft?

Over in Europe, things work a little differently. The carrier model still dominates, but it's just as easy to pick up unlocked, unbranded versions of Android phones big and small that work on just about any local operator (and often many not-so-local ones.)Nice overview of the situation in Europe, but to be honest, I haven't seen any carrier-specific models in The Netherlands in years. In fact, at least on my carrier, you can unlock your phone the moment you get it (a low fee may be charged), and after 12 months, the unlock process is always free (at least for T-Mobile - I'm guessing the same applies to the other two carriers).You can buy unlocked phones from major stores - both online and offline - everywhere, and nobody bats an eye. In fact, in the first quarter of 2014, almost half of all 'mobile connections' were SIM-only - i.e., the mobile phone contract is just the SIM card, without any "free" phone. When you do the maths, clever shopping for a SIM-only contract and an unlocked phone can be hundreds of euros cheaper in the total running time of the contract than going the traditional contract+phone route.Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure this explains why Android is so popular here. You can get unlocked Android flagship-quality phones or last year's flagships for a few hundreds euros, whereas unlocked iPhones are two to three times as expensive. When you give consumers an honest breakdown of what a contract+phone really costs, most people will opt to save hundreds of euros.

Google Inc.'s life sciences group has created a health-tracking wristband that could be used in clinical trials and drug tests, giving researchers or physicians minute-by-minute data on how patients are faring.The experimental device, developed within the company's Google X research division, can measure pulse, heart rhythm and skin temperature, and also environmental information like light exposure and noise levels. It won't be marketed as a consumer device, said Andy Conrad, head of the life sciences team at Google.Like Apple's ResearchKit, I'm really glad technology companies are actively trying to help advance medical research, treatments, and so on. Technology can have a huge impact here.

A new iOS 9 feature added in beta 1 was only discovered when users attempted to update to beta 2 earlier today. This new feature will allow the operating system to intelligently delete applications if you don't have enough free space to perform a software update. Once the update is complete, the apps will automatically be reinstalled and your data will remain intact.Clever feature. I would say 'something for Android to adopt', but then I remembered I'm an idiot.

Like all modern processors the Mega-processor is built from transistors. It's just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones like those below. Thousands of them. And loads of LEDs.Hand-built. Insane, but also very cool.

Apple's impulsive response to Swift stands in stark contrast to their treatment of indie app developers, who have been lobbying Apple for almost seven years, requesting Apple reform policies in the App Store to no effect. In particular, Cue's use of the word "indie" can only be described as a callous slap in the face given the circumstances that indie developers have been facing.iOS application developers are expendable, and have zero reach. Taylor Swift is unique, and has a quarter metric frickton of reach.Do the math.

Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to "we can do that".Remember how everyone used to make fun of people like Richard Stallman? Way back in 2012, we already reached the point where we had to acknolwedge Richard Stallman was right all along (useless sidenote: this is one of the three most popular OSNews articles of all time). In recent years, people have been putting stickers and tape on their laptops to cover up built-in webcams. The next step is, apparently, to rip out the built-in microphones, too. That's what you get when you entrust a major technology company with automatic updates.If it runs software from any of the major companies, your computer isn't yours. Handle it accordingly.

After being publicly smacked down by music's biggest star, Apple is changing its tune. Late Sunday night, Apple VP Eddy Cue responded to the open letter that Taylor Swift posted earlier in the day, revealing that Apple now plans to pay artists, labels, and publishers for streams during Apple Music's three-month free trial. The premium streaming service is due to launch on June 30th.Taylor Swift just outsmarted one of the biggest, richest, and most arrogant companies on earth. Impressive.The fact that Apple announced this sudden tail-between-its-legs change of heart in the middle of the night (might've been late Sunday night for US - I suck at timezones), via Twitter no less, is indicative of how badly thought-out this whole Apple Music thing seems to be. The presentation during WWDC was awkward, the three month trial period heavily criticised, and now this. Curious.

Nokia's CEO Rajeev Suri told Germany's Manager Magazin (in German, Reuters report in English) that they plan to start designing and licensing (but not manufacturing) phones again once their agreement with Microsoft expires in 2016. The license would include the use of the Nokia brand name. Does this open the door for Jolla goodness to eventually return to its roots?

One of the first computers in the world, EDSAC is being rebuilt at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Andrew Herbert takes us on a walk around inside the computer.The computer memory is pulses of sound waves in long tubes of mercury.

This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field... But will not get paid for a quarter of a year's worth of plays on his or her songs.I'm sure the web will be flooded with slightly differently worded but effectively the same this-isn't-Apple's-fault blog posts and comments shortly, but this whole saga does seem like a major punch in the stomach for small and/or upstart artists. They've already got it rough in this business, and along comes the hugely powerful Apple, who, despite the incredible riches it has stashed away in tax havens, wrangles even that little bit of coin from them.Stay classy, Apple.We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.I don't know much about Taylor Swift other than that she's really popular in the US, but that is one wicked burn.

I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

There's been a lot of chatter lately about BlackBerry working on a device running Android, and at first, the rumour was that the portrait slider - yes, with a keyboard - the company briefly flashed before our eyes early this year was going to run Android. I got excited over this one, because I've been wanting a modern smartphone with a keyboard for a long time now. The Passport is a good example, but it's quite expensive for entry into a platform with dubious longevity (I did actually try to buy one when I was in Canada late last year, but Canadian stores were afraid of my money). So, the prospect of an Android slider from BlackBerry surely had my wallet rumbling.Too bad. A new rumour today suggests that while BlackBerry is indeed working on an Android device, it's not the slider device, but a lower-end, Android One-like device. Still interesting, of course, but not nearly as interest-piquing as a device with a hardware keyboard.Assuming the rumours don't change tomorrow, those of us hoping for a modern Android smartphone with a hardware keyboard will have to wait a little longer.

But the people calling for a bytecode for the browser never went away, and they were never entirely wrong about the perceived advantages. And now they're going to get their wish. WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web.WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js. Like, for example, .NET bytecode, wasm instructions operate on native machine types such as 32-bit integers, enabling efficient compilation. It's also designed to be extensible, to make it easy to add, say, support for SIMD instruction sets like SSE and AVX.

Based on the MINIX 3 microkernel, we have constructed a system that to the user looks a great deal like NetBSD. It uses pkgsrc, NetBSD headers and libraries, and passes over 80% of the KYUA tests). However, inside, the system is completely different. At the bottom is a small (about 13,000 lines of code) microkernel that handles interrupts, message passing, low-level scheduling, and hardware related details. Nearly all of the actual operating system, including memory management, the file system(s), paging, and all the device drivers run as user-mode processes protected by the MMU. As a consequence, failures or security issues in one component cannot spread to other ones. In some cases a failed component can be replaced automatically and on the fly, while the system is running, and without user processes noticing it. The talk will discuss the history, goals, technology, and status of the project.

Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is leaving Microsoft as part of a fresh reorganization. "We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an email to employees today. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."And not a single tear was shed.

DuckDuckGo has exploded in popularity since the federal governmentâs surveillance program came to light two years ago. Remember the privacy-minded search engineâs best week ever?The service has grown 600 percent since then, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said on CNBC.And deservedly so.

Windows is an old and complex operating system. It's been around for a very long time, and while it's been continuously updated and altered, and parts are removed or replaced all the time, the operating system still houses quite a few tools, utilities, and assets that haven't been updated or replaced in a long, long time. Most of these are hidden in deep nooks and crannies, and you rarely encounter them, unless you start hunting for them.Most. But not all.There's one utility that I need to use quite often that, seemingly, hasn't been updated - at least, not considerably - since at least Windows 95, or possibly even Windows 3.x. Using this utility is an exercise in pure frustration, riddled as it is with terrible user interface design and behaviour that never should have shipped as part of any serious software product.This is the story of the dreaded Character Map. I'll first explain just how bad it really is, after which I'll dive into the little application's history, to try and find out why, exactly, it is as bad as it is. It turns out that the Character Map - or charmap.exe - seems to exist in a sort-of Windows build limbo, and has been stuck there since the days Microsoft scrapped Longhorn, and started over. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Sailfish OS 1.1.6 has been released. The biggest new feature is probably the private browsing mode, but it's also got a host of other new features, bug fixes, and improvements. I would guess this is one of the last 1.x releases, since the tablet, whicvh ships with Sailfish OS 2.x, should be shipping this month.

Thomas van Linge's colorful, detailed maps showing which parties control which parts of Iraq, Libya and Syria are a hit whenever he posts them on Twitter. They have been cited on news stories in the Huffington Post, Lebanon's Daily Star and Vox, as well as on the University of Texas at Austin's website. But van Linge isn't a policy expert and he's never been to the region: In fact, heâs just a Dutch high school student who tracks the war on social media.Quite amazing (van Linge's work, obviously - not the subject matter!).

Looking across the updates in El Capitan, the story is clear: Apple is making life way better for people who live in its ecosystem. But if you don't live in Apple's garden, the benefits are less clear. Yes, it's faster and there are bugfixes all around, but to take advantage of Apple's updates you really need to use Apple's apps.I just want El Capitan's Metal and Aero Snap. That name is horrible, though.

It's Day 0 of E3 2015. This is the time when all the giants of popular gaming make their big announcements, competing for your attention and future gaming dollars. Today is also a big day for YouTube, which doesn't make games, but will soon be introducing a dedicated YouTube Gaming service. It too will be competing for the attention of millions.The goals of YouTube Gaming are as grand as YouTube itself. Google wants its new website and app to become "the biggest community of gamers on the web" and the destination for live-streamed game video, whether it comes from professional tournaments or amateurs playing just for fun. If that sounds exactly like Twitch, that's because it is. Having lost out to Amazon in the pursuit to acquire Twitch last summer, Google has spent the past year building up its own alternative, and that's what we have to look forward to in the coming weeks.YouTube is well-positioned to compete with Twitch, since most streamers upload the VODs to YouTube anyway. Why not have it all in one place?In any event, yet another case of competition breeding product improvements.

One of the big complaints about Chrome currently is that it's a battery hog, especially on Mac where Safari seems to do better.The team has been working on addressing this; here are some cases that have recently been improved on trunk.I'm glad Google is taking this matter seriously.

A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools.The Commodore Amiga was new to GRPS in the early 1980s and it has been working tirelessly ever since. GRPS Maintenance Supervisor Tim Hopkins said that the computer was purchased with money from an energy bond in the 1980s. It replaced a computer that was "about the size of a refrigerator."Either 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', or, 'why is a school in the US not using newer, more modern technology?'.

When Android Wear came out over the course of last year, Google promised that the young, new platform would receive updates "early and often". While it wasn't said with so many words, it's easy to read between the lines: Google was going to make sure Android Wear users wouldn't face the same headaches as Android users when it comes to updates. Wear would be a more tightly controlled platform, built in such a way that updates could go straight to users' devices without meddling from carriers or roadblocks thrown up by crappy customisations.Fast forward to June 2015, and Google has recently released Android Wear 5.1.1, which, despite its humble version number increase over 5.0.1, is a pretty significant update to the smartwatch platform. It enables WiFi on devices that support it, adds new ways to interact with your watch, and makes it easier to launch applications. All in all, it looks like a great update.Sadly, I can only go by what others have told me, despite owning the poster Android Wear device - the Moto 360. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I tend not to link to podcasts - I don't like podcasts and prefer good ol' text - but this one is pretty great.Recorded in front of a live audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco, John Gruber is joined by Phil Schiller to discuss the news from WWDC: OS X 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 9, the new native app SDK for Apple Watch, Apple Music, and the 2004 American League Championship series.It's a bit feelgood, of course, but it's still totally worth it. Schiller and Gruber hit it off on this one, and there's some great stories in there.

But internally, Android One was seen as an attempt to avoid another China, where Android is popular but comes without Google's services. It was also a hedge against the rising power of Facebook, which is becoming, in many parts of the developing world, the gateway to the Web.So far, it has done neither. And the audacious hardware program has been anything but.

Most web users tolerate ads; many web users hate advertising with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. There are many good reasons that users dislike ads (theyâre bad for performance, security, and privacy) as well as less universal, more arguable grievances (e.g. annoyance factor, disagreement about the value exchange for ad-funded services, etc).Apple, a company that makes ~80%ish of their revenue from iOS-based products, recently announced that iOS 9 will ship with a compelling ad-filtering API for the Safari browser.A brilliant move by Apple to force news providers (the rich ones, at least) to move to creating applications or join its Flipboard clone.Apple's Flipboard clone uses Apple's own iAds, of course, which cannot be blocked at all.

Users of DOS or older versions of Windows will have invariably stumbled upon a quirk of Windows' handling of file names at some point. File names which are longer than 8 characters, have an extension other than 3 character long, or aren't upper-case and alphanumeric, are (in some situations) truncated to an ugly shorter version which contains a tilde (~) in it somewhere. For example, 5+6 June Report.doc will be turned into 5_6JUN~1.DOC. This is relic of the limitations brought about by older versions of FAT used in DOS and older versions of pre-NT Windows.So far, nothing new. This article, however, delves deeper into a special aspect of this relic: a built-in checksum function that, up until now, was undocumented.

A detailed article about how Google transformed itself from scoffing at design, to embracing it.Such attention to detail used to be Apple's thing. Today, that distinction falls to Google. Unveiled last year, Material Design - Google's evolving design language for phones, tablets, and desktop - offers relentless consistency in interactions; invisible rules that govern everything, so that every app feels familiar; and beauty in the service of function. It's why so many designers will tell you, as they've told me, "I just like Android better." Whereas iOS is still inching along without improving much, Google is creating a coherent, unified language that easily scales across phones, with enough flexibility to jump to watches and cars. "It's not even about composing a UI in one place," says Nicholas Jitkoff, who helped lead the creation of Material Design. "It's about composing interactions from one device to the next."Most of OSNews' readers will scoff at this article, because they consider "design" to be a dirty word. They're Pine.This was Google. And this was Larry Page, a man who, when asked by one designer what Google's aesthetic was, responded, "Pine." That is, a command-line email system common during Page's college years, whose main draw was its speed.Page's answer spoke to a philosophy that still dominates in the minds of many engineers: That the best design is no design at all, because speed is the only metric that matters. Adding anything charming to a computer interface simply slowed down. For many years, that made sense. In the dawn of computing, and the dawn of the internet, it didnât matter of the computer spat out something ugly, so long as it spat out something as soon as you asked. This was a version of the so-called two second rule, formulated in the 1970s: If a computer didn't respond within that time frame, humans naturally drifted away. For a computer to actually augment your mind, it had to respond almost instantaneously.As far as design languages go, Material Design is quite minimalist, yet still retains the depth and the kind of information required to easily grasp what things do, where things go, and where things are coming from. It borrows heavily from Metro - as does every modern design - but improves upon it by the heavier use of the Z-axis and subtle animations to understand where things are going and where they're coming from. The clear colours make it easy to identify what you're doing and where you are. It's welcoming, without being overbearing.Contrast this with the Aero-like iOS 7/8 design, with its are-these-buttons-or-just-labels-or-perhaps-an-input-field, endless use of transparency and blurriness for no particular reason, and just an overall sense of chaos, and the differences couldn't be more stark. I find iOS overwhelming, unclear, unfocused, messy, inconsistent; every application is different and implements its own rules, buttons, and design. On Android 5.x, thanks to Material Design, I never feel lost. I never have to learn yet another new set of icons or interactions.Matias Duarte is, quite clearly, the leading voice in UI design right now. Microsoft set the current trend, Google perfected it, and Apple just made stuff flat and blurry with no sense of purpose or direction. Before Material Design, I could've easily been swayed towards iOS. Now, though?No way.

An important bit of news from WWDC that deserves its own news item: you no longer need to be a licensed developer (i.e., paying) to test your applications on your own devices.Xcode 7 and Swift now make it easier for everyone to build apps and run them directly on their Apple devices. Simply sign in with your Apple ID, and turn your idea into an app that you can touch on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch. Download Xcode 7 beta and try it yourself today. Program membership is not required.Of course, to distribute them, you still need to pay up.

Seconds later, deGrasse Tyson turned out to be the least of the problem. Apple also trots out McKinsey's James Manyika in the video, who starts off his quote with a phrase that should never be heard at tech conferences: "If you think the industrial revolution was transformational..."I wasn't in San Francisco for WWDC, but I can only imagine the crowd at the keynote either fell silent or started howling uncontrollably as he finished that sentence: "...the App Store is way bigger."It requires a special kind of chutzpah to compare any innovation to the industrial revolution. But to actually suggest that a collection of apps - a million or so fart soundboards, greedy casual games, and programs that help you get through you email a fraction faster - is anywhere close to the industrial revolution is beyond delusional.I'm glad I wasn't the only one who did a triple-take when this was said in Apple's App Store video last night. If this is truly how Apple feels about its contributions to the world - and everything points in the direction that it does - then the company has lost all sense of perspective and has transcended its usual playful arrogance towards full-on insanity.Very disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson, too, for making similarly outrageous claims in this video.

TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums.This combination of TempleOS's amateurish approach and Terry's unfortunate outbursts have resulted in TempleOS being often regarded as something to be mocked, ignored, or forgotten. Many people have done some or all of those things, and it's understandable why.You really have no excuse to not read this article.

With WWDC still underway, there's a lot more news than what made it in yesterday's article. First and foremost, Apple announced watchOS 2.0, which will bring native applications to the platform, as well as a feature called Time Travel that works much the same way as the timeline UI on the new Pebbles. It allows you to scroll into the future to see the upcoming appointments, the weather, and so on.Apple is also merging its various developer programs. Instead of having to buy access to iOS and OS X separately, a single $99 fee will now net you access to iOS, OS X, and watchOS. Tangentially related: CarPlay now allows car makers to create applications that expand what CarPlay can do; e.g. control the climate control, radio, and other in-car features.Apple also announced its new music streaming service, called Apple Music, which will be available for iOS, Windows, and Android. Speaking of Android - Apple has also made an Android application to help switchers move from Android to iOS.

Over the past few weeks - following an important-but-barbed talk from Apple CEO Tim Cook - the rhetoric has turned to privacy and security and data and how only products you pay for are good and any sort of free services are inherently bad and basically whore out what's left of your post-Snowden soul.It's an important discussion to have. And one we'll continue to have. But it's not one-sided. It's not binary.And, actually, it's interesting to see how the rhetoric has changed recently.Ouch.

It's time for Apple's WWDC, and its keynote. It's currently underway, and much like Google's I/O keynote and the introduction of Android M, we're looking at a lot of catch-up. Both the new OS X and iOS releases are getting new features taken directly from the competition.OS X 10.11 will be named El Capitan, and among its major new features are the ability to snap windows side-by-side, and in case you're wondering how it works, just look at Windows 7 and later. It's a direct copy of the Aero Snap functionality, and I'm really glad Apple finally got around to copying this excellent Windows feature. I use it so often on Windows, I really, really miss it on any platform that doesn't have it.Safari, too, fired up the photocopier, and this time around, Chrome's the obvious target. Safari in El Capitan is getting pinned sites, which is a useful Chrome feature that allows you to keep your favourite sites open all the time. Safari is also copying another great Chrome feature: the little indicator that tells you which tab is producing audio. As a Safari user on my retina MacBook Pro (Chrome is a battery hog on OS X), I am incredibly happy with these new features.Apple is also bringing its Metal graphics API to from iOS to OS X, and Apple really focused on gaming when it comes to this one. I'm still not entirely sure who uses or even cares about gaming on OS X, but for those of you that do - this is surely great news. As has become the norm for OS X, El Capitan will be free, and will ship this fall. A public beta will be released in July.Moving on, the major new features in OS 9 are also catch-up features, this time to Android, of course. The biggest one is Proactive, Apple's Google Now competitor. It offers similar functionality to Google Now, including reading your email to notify you of invitations and the like. Unlike Google, however, all the 'intelligent' stuff happens on the device itself - not on Apple's servers.We'll have to see how well it works - if Proactive works just as well as Google Now, without requiring the kind of information Google claims it needs, Apple's got a winner on its hands. If it sucks, it will be a validation of Google's approach.As a sidenote, I've never actualy really used Google Now. It does not work for me at all because my GMail account is a Google Apps account, which Google Now doesn't work with (yes, paying Google customers cannot use Google Now). It led to a fun situation when my friends and I were on vacation in the US, in October 2014. Google Now on their iPhones worked perfectly fine, bringing up boarding passes and relevant travel information, whereas my Nexus 5, a Google phone running Google software on a Google operating system, just showed me the weather back home. When I found out why, I turned off Google Now.The keyboard has also been improved - and now does what every other smartphone platform has done for years: when you press shift, the keycaps will reflect the state. If you put two fingers on the keyboard, you can user them to move the selection cursor - a great feature that appears to be iPad-only for now. Apple is also introducing a new news application to iOS, which is basically a Flipboard copy.The big new iOS feature is iPad-only: multitasking. If you've ever used Windows 8 on a tablet, you know how this works. Swiping in from the side, splitscreen view - we've all been here before. It literally works and looks exactly like Windows 8. Again - this is great. A lot was wrong with Windows 8's Metro UI for tablets, but its tablet multitasking is absolutely great and fantastic. I'm really glad Apple copied it, and it's high-time Android will do the same (in fact, there's early support for it in Android M).So, much like Google's I/O keynote and Android M specifically, OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 are all about catching up to a number of stand-out features from the competition, so I can repeat here what I said then: another example of how competition between the major platforms makes both of them better - consumers, win.Unlike Android, though, there's no update elephant in the room here. In fact, Apple has heard the complaints about the iOS 8 update being too big for iPhones with little storage, so iOS 9 is only 1.4GB in size. A great move, and it will ensure that every eligible device will be getting iOS 9. In addition, Apple isn't dropping any device with iOS 9 - if it runs iOS 8, it'll run iOS 9.All in all, a great keynote with lots of awesome new features, but nothing we haven't seen before. Every single day, iOS and Android become ever more interchangeable. As consumers, the more these companies copy each other's great ideas, the more awesome features our platforms of choice will get.I'll leave you with two final notes. First, Swift will be released as open source. Second, Apple had women up on stage to present new features for the very first time. It was about time.

But it's also super depressing, because it's just another example of how the rise of streaming media has brought crazy digital rights management back into our lives. We've completely traded convenience for ecosystem lock-in, and it sucks.Right now, the Echo can play music from Amazon's Prime Music service, Pandora, and whatever random music I've uploaded to my Amazon cloud locker. This means that the music selection is pretty bad! I stopped buying music around the time I started using Spotify, so I don't have much new stuff to upload, and Prime Music has a fairly thin catalog compared to Spotify. Basically this thing can play my 2000s-era iTunes collection at me, which means I'm listening Wilco and The Clash way more than I have in the past few years. Is that good? It might be good.Patel has a point - the rise of all these streaming music services has completely undone the end of DRM in the music industry. It's most likely entirely unrelated, but Steve Jobs' scathing letter condemning the use of DRM is no longer available on Apple's website - just as Apple is rumoured to launch its own streaming music service.The same has happened in IM, chat, messaging, or whatever you want to call it. It's 2015, and I have five messaging applications on my smartphone - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Skype - and I also use iMessage occasionally (on OS X) because some of my friends are locked into it and don't want to use something else. These companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook - are actively and consciously making the choice to make the lives of their customers as difficult as possible.If these companies really cared about their customers - as they always claim they do - they would've come together and used or developed a proper open standard for messaging. Instead, we get Facebook (through WhatsApp) banning users for using 3rd party WhatsApp clients on Sailfish, or we have Apple making grandiose promises about turning FaceTime into an open standard, but then backtracking once they realise they can frustrate and lock-in consumers by keeping it closed. Google, meanwhile, seems to have no idea what it's doing at all, flipflopping left and right (Hangouts? Messenger? What's it going to be, Google?). Skype is Skype.Now that iOS and Android (and to a lesser degree, Windows Phone) are entirely and wholly interchangeable, companies are looking for other ways to lock their consumers into their platforms - and much like in music, the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.

The real issue that Apple is trying to address is not really privacy, but rather security. Though Google has all of my data, it is still private. Google does not sell access to my data; it sells access to my attention. Advertisers do not get my information from Google. So as long as I trust Google's employees, the only two potential breaches of my privacy are from the government or from a hacker. If we accept this as a fact, the fundamental privacy question changes from, "Do you respect my privacy?" to "Is the user experience improvement worth the security risk to my private information?"Dustin Curtis hits the nail on the head so hard the nail's on its way to Fiji.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Most normal, non-tech-obsessed people don't really need a smartwatch.You can read the entire article if you want, but this opening line is all you need to know. Smartwatches are, right now, useless crap.

In June of last year, I finally decided to commit to an Android device. I had carried every flagship iPhone up through that point from the original iPhone to the 5S. To the world around me, I heaped the praise into a life transforming device, but in my tech circles, and on my blog, I frequently posted about my frustration, mostly with shackles and intentional limitations imposed. So last year, why I decided to make the jump to Android. I outlined 10 reasons why I was finally ready to make the jump to Androidâs 4.4 release, KitKat. A year has passed. It's time to revisit my original assertions and complaints with some follow up and see where I stand one year later. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The first wave of Steam Machines, console-like computers designed to run Valve's Steam software and its thousands of PC games, will be in some pre-order customers' hands on Oct. 16 and in stores on Nov. 10, Valve announced today. The Steam Controller and Steam Link will also hit on Nov. 10.Not sure what to make of SteamOS at this point - it's just a Linux distribution that launches Steam, and you can even close Steam to go to a desktop... On your TV - but the Steam Link is definitely interesting, so I pre-ordered one straight away.

You see the problem. When white gamers are forced to play people not of their race, it's "forced politics;" when I'm forced into the same scenario, it's business as usual. When you complain, you're making a fuss and being political. The argument is a bit scary when you break it down: The only way games can avoid politics in this situation is to pretend that people of color don't exist.We should raise concerns about race, but it needs to be consistent. Race shouldn't only be an issue for gamers when some white gamers express concerns.Outstanding article.

The Pebble Time iPhone app, as we've all noticed, is not yet live on the iTunes AppStore. It remains "in review." This unexpected circumstance pains us as much it does backers with watches ready to set up. We're doing all we can to mitigate the delay and make Pebble Time Watch for iPhone available for download.A complete coincidence, I'm sure.Meanwhile, to ensure the future usability of your Pebble device, it's highly suggested to switch to Android.

I don't really care much about the voice search and recognition stuff in Now, Siri, and Cortana - but this video demonstrating the capabilities of Hound - an alternative to those three for Android - is mind-blowing. The recognition speed, the talkback, the way it manages to get accurate results for even relatively vague and quite complex compound questions is amazing.I smell an acquisition incoming.

PicoC is a very small C interpreter for scripting. It was originally written as a script language for a UAV's on-board flight system. It's also very suitable for other robotic, embedded and non-embedded applications.The core C source code is around 3500 lines of code. It's not intended to be a complete implementation of ISO C but it has all the essentials. When compiled it only takes a few k of code space and is also very sparing of data space. This means it can work well in small embedded devices. It's also a fun example of how to create a very small language implementation while still keeping the code readable.