OSnews

Google's developer tools are an ever-evolving and changing set of utensils that allow the folks building our apps to tie into Google's services while making things we want to install and use every day. They're free, and while they are powerful, some of the finer points of great design have been tricky for devs to handle, and the IDE itself - that's the program that developers use to write the code and build their apps - can be clunky when you stray outside the "hello world" box and get into the nitty-gritty of coding. And testing apps has been a nightmare. Google has addressed these three issues in a big way.Nice overview of some of the things Google has done to make Android development - a pain point for many developers - a little easier. The new testing initiative is pretty rad.

Google has just released a new tool to manage your privacy and information. Here's some of the things the new My Account tool can do:Take the Privacy Checkup and Security Checkup, our simple, step-by-step guides through your most important privacy and security settings.Manage the information that can be used from Search, Maps, YouTube and other products to enhance your experience on Google. For example, you can turn on and off settings such as Web and App Activity, which gets you more relevant, faster search results, or Location History, which enables Google Maps and Now to give you tips for a faster commute back home.Use the Ads Settings tool to control ads based on your interests and the searches you've done.Control which apps and sites are connected to your account.Google has always been at the forefront of providing its user insight into and control over the information it has on you, and this tool fits right into that. It'd be great if the other tech giants - who collect the same information on you but act secretive and deceptive about it - were to follow in its footsteps.Good thing this stuff isn't tied to Android updates, though, or we wouldn't be able to use it until 2034.Anywho, in the same blogpost, the company also introduced a site where it answers questions regarding your information and privacy. In it, the company dispels a persistent myth - namely, that the company sells your information.No. We do not sell your personal information.We do use certain information, such as the searches you have done and your location, to make the ads we show more relevant and useful. Ads are what enable us to make our services like Search, Gmail, and Maps free for everyone. We do not share information with advertisers in a way that personally identifies you, unless you gave us permission. With our Ads Settings tool, you can control ads based on your interests and the searches you have done.When you think about it, it makes zero sense for Google to "sell" or otherwise reveal your personal information to third parties. The information Google has on you is the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's the very reason Google can earn so much money through advertising - it knows more about you than other advertisers do, and is better at inferring patterns and connecting the dots to show you more relevant ads.In the end, though, the question is one of trust. Do your trust Google with your data? Do you trust Apple with that same data? Microsoft? Facebook? Personally, I have zero trust in any of these companies, and thus, anything that I do not want other people to know will not find its way onto my computers or devices. I have a very simple test for this: if I wouldn't yell something loudly in a crowded restaurant or mall or something, it's not going to be input in a computer or device.As for 'regular' information that I have no issues with if companies know it, I personally definitely "trust" Google more than Apple or Microsoft, if only because Google is under a lot more scrutiny than others. Apple is incredibly secretive and deceptive about the information it collects on you, and provides far less insight into and control over it than Google does. Microsoft, meanwhile, has a proven history of questionable behaviour that's well-documented - new Microsoft or no. Let's not even talk about Facebook.In the end, all these companies have virtually the same privacy policies, and you give them the same rights to your stuff if you upload it to them. I choose to use the one under the closest and most scrutiny and which gives me the most insight into and control over my data. Your choice might be different, but don't delude yourself into thinking your data is safe at Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook.When it comes to privacy on the web, just assume everybody can see every bit you send - just like how everyone can hear you when you talk loudly in a crowded place. Do not trust any company, no matter how nice the PR sites look or how vicious its blogger attack dogs are.

Microsoft has just officially announced that it will release Windows 10 on 29 July.Familiar, yet better than ever, Windows 10 brings back the Start menu you know and love. Windows 10 is faster than ever before, with quick startup and resume. And Windows 10 provides the most secure platform ever, including Windows Defender for free anti-malware protection, and being the only platform with a commitment to deliver free ongoing security updates for the supported lifetime of the device.Marketing blabber aside, the update will be free for the first year for all Windows 7 and 8 users. You'll get a notification in your notification area which will allow you to reserve your Windows 10 upgrade.

Project Vault is a secure computer contained entirely on a micro SD sized device. Google's ATAP said the micro SD format made sense because there's already advanced security features on your phone, contained in the SIM card, which protects the things important to carriers. Vault is designed to be an equivalent, but designed to project a user's important content.Would be fun to play with on my Google Nexus 5.Oh wait.

The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together. The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! - Esperanto for the imperative "learn!" - is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it's stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto's culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it's conducted in - or even tangentially related to - Esperanto.But there's hope that the internet can give the language new life. Wikipedia and its 215,000 pages was a first step, and yesterday, Esperanto debuted on Duolingo, a virtual learning app with 20 million active users - far more people than have ever spoken Esperanto since its invention.This article is the perfect mix between two of my favourite subjects - technology, and language. A highly recommended read.

While Apple's WWDC is of little interest to hard-core Android customers, Google I/O can and often is of significant interest to Apple customers. It's where Google shows off its big new initiatives and previews updates for its existing services. Some years, those are blips on the radar, here for a moment, gone the next. Other years their scope and implications shake the world. This year, for me, fell somewhere in the middle. Google was restrained, relatively speaking, and focused. Yet as much as they acknowledged the need to shore up what came before, the company's focus is clearly on what's coming next. And that's worth a deeper discussion.How iMore's Rene Ritchie perceived the Google I/O accouncements.

The Verge has a long and detailed profile of and interview with Sundar Pichai, the man at Google responsible for just about anything you use.We sat down with Pichai to hear his vision for the Google of the future. He laid out a plan to improve Google's products through machine learning - but more importantly, he sketched out a grand effort to deliver computing capabilities to billions of people around the world. Both in the way he manages his internal teams, and in his belief that technology can change people's lives for the better, Pichai advocates an egalitarian ethos.If there's one thing that stood out during the I/O keynote yesterday, it was that Google was really hammering on the fact that it wants to create products for everyone. It wasn't said with so many words, but the clear implication was "unlike Apple, which only builds products for rich people in the west".This egalitarian view permeated every aspect of the keynote, including the people on stage - instead of the usual procession of western, white 40-something men, almost half of all the presenters were women (I think there were three, like a VP of engineering), and a few people weren't even western to begin with. This is unprecedented for technology companies - Apple, for instance, hasn't ever had a woman present on stage (although Tim Cook did interview a supermodel on stage once).We need this. Technology needs this. We need people from "new" economies, as well as women, to play a big part in the development of our technology to ensure that technology isn't just designed for rich white people, but for everyone. Pichai knows this, and it was drop-dead obvious throughout the entire keynote.Say what you want about Google - and there's a lot to say - but in this aspect, they are so far ahead of the competition it's not really a competition to begin with.

This is the first Mono release that contains code from Microsoft's open sourced .NET code.We are only getting started with this work. We are swiftly moving ahead in mono/master much more code that is being replaced and ported.This version also is the first one to ship with C# 6.0 enabled by default. Learn all about C# 6.0 in only eight minutes on this presentation.The release notes will tell you more.

Google's Android operating system is set to give users more detailed choices over what apps can access, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter remains private. That could include photos, contacts or location. An announcement of the change, which would put Android closer in line with Apple Inc.âs iOS, is expected for Googleâs developerâs conference in San Francisco this month, one of the people said.If there's ever been a use case for 'finally', this is it. iOS gains Android features, Android gains iOS features. They pressure each other into becoming better, and we, all, benefit.The Apples and Googles of this world might rather not have to deal with it, but isn't competition beautiful?

"Right now weâre releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, weâre all still working on Windows 10." That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist speaking at the company's Ignite conference this week. Nixon was explaining how Microsoft was launching Windows 8.1 last year, but in the background it was developing Windows 10. Now, Microsoft employees can talk freely about future updates to Windows 10 because there's no secret update in the works coming next. It's all just Windows 10. While it immediately sounds like Microsoft is killing off Windows and not doing future versions, the reality is a little more complex. The future is "Windows as a service."Call me a convert. Instead of having to buy several copies of Office every few years for multiple computers (I require Office for my translation company), I now have a â¬99/year Office subscription allowing me to install Office on 5 PCs and 5 mobile devices. I know most of our readers are not a fan of this model, but I, personally, am all for it.

Still, for those who have taken the plunge, Amazon continues providing software updates. Fire OS 4.6.1 includes a fair number of changes, but the largest is one Amazon doesn't mention - it updates the underlying version of Android from 4.2 Jelly Bean to 4.4 KitKat. KitKat is still a year-and-a-half old at this point, but that's a year newer than Jelly Bean, and it's still the most-used version of Android according to Google's developer dashboard.Why anyone would buy these outdated Amazon frankendroid devices is beyond me.

My dislike for application stores, the race to the bottom they enabled, and the myth of it being a great way for small developers to make it big is well-documented at OSNews, so yeah, I couldn't pass up this story (don't click the link yet!). Developer Sam Soffes released an interesting application on the Mac App Store, and when he looked at how well his application as doing later that day, he was in for a shock.For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!This sounds amazing, right? Surely, this is a story of an indie developer making it big, becoming a millionaire overnight. Good feels were had all around, right?Now read the post.

Federico Viticci's iOS 9 wishlist contains my number one gamebreakinig missing feature in iOS:Seven years into the App Store, I struggle to find a reasonable motivation for not allowing users to set different default apps on iOS. I believe Apple should accept that they can't make the perfect email client or web browser for all kinds of users, and, just like custom keyboards, they should let users choose their favorite app for a specific set of core tasks. If personalization of a user's iOS device has truly become a priority at Apple, then it should be extended to activities that users frequently perform on an iPhone or iPad.If Apple were to finally make this possible, there's going to be a whole lot of Google iPhones and Google iPads out there.

As always, AnandTech has the only review of the new Surface 3 that really matters.So with those caveats aside, we can finally get to the conclusion that you have likely guessed already. The Surface 3 is a great device. The build quality is really at the top level of any OEM out there. The form factor is finally the right one after two previous generations that got it slightly wrong. The weight is lighter than any previous Surface, and just as balanced. Performance of the x7 Atom CPU is great for light tasks, and if you need more than light tasks then this is not the device for you. As a tablet, it is great to use in either orientation, with the portrait mode being especially good now for browsing the web. The kickstand is improved, they keyboard is improved, the base tier steps up to 64 GB of storage, making it actually useful without immediately adding micro SD to the mix.When I was weighing the pros and cons of the retina MacBook Pro vs. the Surface, I eventually ended up not going with the Surface because of the keyboard and trackpad. As nice as the Surface hardware is, its detachable keyboard and trackpad (whether it's the Pro or the regular) are several orders of magnitude worse than those on the MacBook Pro, which are best-in-class (well, the trackpad at least). Those are the primary input methods for my kind of use, so the MBP won out in the end.The point: Microsoft should just make a Surface laptop. Keep the detachable model as well if you want, but also offer a proper Surface laptop that can compete with actual laptops.

Hugo Barra, currently Xiamoi's vice president of international and formerly VP of Google's Android vision, on SD cards in an interview with Engadget:"For high performance devices, we are fundamentally against an SD card slot."Barra backed up his statement by pointing out that his team didn't want to sacrifice battery capacity, ergonomics, appearance and, in the case of the new Mi 4i, the second Micro SIM slot for the sake of letting users add a storage card. More importantly, microSD cards "are incredibly prone to failure and malfunctioning of various different sorts," and the fact that there are a lot of fake cards out there - and we've seen it ourselves - doesn't help, either.In case you disagree with him, The Verge's review of the LG G4 states it's a pretty decent phone.

After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie.Screenshots and a screencast are available.

It used to be that the only way to make money from a mod was a) make a standalone sequel or remake b) use it as a portfolio to get hired by a studio or c) back in the pre-broadband days, shovel it onto a dodgy CD-ROM (and even then, it almost certainly wasn't the devs who profited). As of last night, that changed. Mod-makers can now charge for their work, via Steam.It's far too soon to know the long-term outcome of Valve offering the option for mod creators to charge for their work, which went live yesterday using Skyrim as a test case. Everyone has an opinion, and I'll try to cover the main angles below, but first I simply want to express simple sadness. Not fatalistic sadness - I'm genuinely curious as to how this will play out, and there's high potential for excitement - but End Of An Era sadness.The backlash Valve is facing over this whole thing is immense. Every gaming website, and sites like Reddit, are swamped with people lashing out against this new Valve policy. This kind of universal backlash is incredibly rare, and it's kind of interesting to see it unfold. Whatever goodwill Valve had with PC gamer - they managed to throw it all away in a day. Absolutely amazing.As for my personal opinion on this matter - I'm used to mods being free, but considering some of the insane amounts of work people have put into incredibly complex, vast, and terrific mods for games like Skyrim, it does seem more than reasonable to give mod makers the possibility to charge for their work. And let's be absolutely clear here: Valve is forcing nobody to charge for their mods - mod makers choose to make their mods for-pay themselves.That being said, introducing money into an previously pretty much money-less scene is bound to have a lot of negative results - for instance, free mods from Nexus are being offered for sale on Steam; not by their authors, but by pirates. As a result, mod makers are removing their content from Nexus to prevent others from profiting off their work.It's a huge mess right now, and it'll be hard for Valve to regain all the goodwill they threw away in just a day.

Ubuntu Desktop will eventually switch to Snappy packages by default, while continuing to provide deb-based images as an alternative, at least for a while. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise for some of you, but further details regarding this have been revealed today.They're slowly moving away more and more from Debian packages.

The European Union's decision to take on Google last week stems from official complaints by 19 companies in Europe and the United States, including Microsoft and a number of small firms, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.Microsoft is actually twice on the list; first as Microsoft-proper, but also as part of a lobby group also on the list. There's also a complaint from a party who remains anonymous.

Good news for Pebble and iOS users: Pebble has just posted on Reddit that it is working with Apple to make sure that rejections like this will no longer happen.Still a work-in-progress, but we're working with Apple to clear up any misunderstandings to make sure rejections like the handful of recent ones don't happen again - they're being super responsive the concerns that bubbled up (much appreciated!). Apps are still getting approved with mentions of Pebble support in the description or metadata (e.g. RunKeeper). For now, developers should continue with their iOS app update plans and approval submissions to the iTunes store as normal (i.e. include Pebble support in your app info if that was your original intent).

As mentioned earlier, in film photography, color balance has a lot to do with the chemical composition of the film. For many decades, color film in the United States was calibrated to highlight Caucasian skin tones. This was the most fundamental problem. With an unusual degree of skill and attention, a photographer could compensate for the biases in most stages of production. But there was nothing they could do about the filmâs color balance. When the famous New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was commissioned to make a film about Mozambique, he reportedly refused to use Kodachrome film - the most popular color film at the time. He complained the film, developed for a predominantly white market, was "racist."Positively fascinating story.

An update for an actual alternative operating system from the good old days of yore. Yes, it still happens. MenuetOS 0.99.98 has been released, with "MediaPlayer demo, Updated 3DS viewer, Midiplayer, FTP". Here's some of the settings to help you on your way in VirtualBox, an in case you'r eunfamiliar with MenuetOS:MenuetOS is a real-time and multiprocessor Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language. Menuet64 is released under License and Menuet32 under GPL. Menuet supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after meeting with opposition from U.S. regulators.Comcastâs board will meet to finalize the decision on Thursday, and an announcement may come as soon as Friday, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.Great news for American consumers.

I missed this when reports first came out last week: with iOS 8.3, file managers such as iMazing and iExplorer can no longer access the document libraries of iOS apps over a USB connection.Stop hitting yourself and start using a platform that actually fits your needs.

Microsoft's launch of Windows 10 will likely take place in late July, according to AMD. During AMD's latest earnings call last week, president and CEO Lisa Su revealed the launch timing for Microsoftâs Windows 10 operating system. Answering a question on inventory plans, Su said, "With the Windows 10 launch at the end of July, we are watching sort of the impact of that on the back-to-school season, and expect that it might have a bit of a delay to the normal back-to-school season inventory build-up."That seems awfully early considering the stories you hear on Twitter about Windows 10's current state.

Chrome 42 addresses this dilemma by allowing users to engage more deeply with the mobile web experiences that are important to them, by both opting in to receive push notifications directly from websites and easily adding regularly-visited high-quality sites to their home screen.Push notifications from websites to Android devices.I'm sure nothing will go wrong with this one.

Android Wear is getting a new update today that's easily its biggest yet. Google's introducing several new features that change how we use our watches, from Wi-Fi support to hand gestures and hand-drawn emoji. Individually, these changes are small, but collectively, they promise to make even year-old hardware seem new. They also ensure that Android Wear keeps up (and in some cases surpasses) the Apple Watch from a pure features perspective. That could become important down the line should Googleâs plans to release Android Wear for the iPhone come to fruition.I kind of like the wrist-flick gestures, but the rest seems more fluff that only makes Wear more complicated (and thus, more like the Apple Watch), instead of the opposite.

Sortix is a small self-hosting Unix-like operating system developed since 2011 aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation. There's a lot of technical debt that needs to be paid, but it's getting better. Traditional design mistakes are avoided or aggressively deprecated by updating the base system and ports as needed. The Sortix kernel, standard libraries, and most utilities were written entirely from scratch. The system is halfway through becoming multi-user and while security vulnerabilities are recognized as bugs, it should be considered insecure at this time.Sortix 0.9 was released on December 30, 2014. It is a very considerable improvement upon Sortix 0.8 and contains significant improvements all over the base system and ports. The previous release made Sortix self-building and this release works hard towards becoming fully self-hosting and installable. Several real-life prototype self-hosting installations of Sortix exists right now, I expect the following 1.0 release to make real Sortix installations available to the general public.

The Vintage Computer Festival East is a once-a-year museum exhibit in Wall, New Jersey that shows off vacuum tube and transistor computers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. While our own John Timmer visited the museum several years ago, we were long overdue to check back on the exhibition. VCF's newest addition made the trip well-worth it.The incredible piece of big iron you see in the first picture above arrived yesterday. It's a one-of-a-kind analog computer built for MIT, so it doesn't really have a name or model number. Built by George A. Philbrick Researches in 1958, the volunteers at the science center have just taken to calling it "George."Fascinating.

While you may have to give up some creature comforts doing so, it's relatively easy and straightforward to run an (almost - damn binary driver blobs and firmware) open source Android phone, with nothing but open source applications, through F-Droid, one of my major complaints with F-Droid is that it's about as user friendly as trying to cut down a tree with a used toothbrush. There's no popularity lists, every category is clogged up with nonsensical packages (to the average user, that is), and the presentation leaves much to be desired.Fossdroid changes that, and presents all these open source applications in a much clearer and nicer fashion. It also adds popularity and what's new lists, making it just a little easier to find the open source application you're looking for. There's still some things to be addressed, it's a well-done website.

Windows Phone fans pining for the days of Metro panoramas and integrated experiences have had a tough couple of years, with Microsoft steadily removing many of the platform's user experience differentiators. But as I've argued, there's reason behind this madness. And now an ex-Microsoft design lead who actually worked on Windows Phone has gone public and agreed with this assessment. You may have loved Windows Phone and Metro, but it had to change.A different theory for Microsoft moving Windows Phone closer to Android's UI design, from former Windows Phone executive Charlie Kindel (who now works at Amazon).

AnandTech has its usual in-depth review up for the HTC One M9, and it comes in two

Google's Chrome is the best web browser for my needs. Apple's MacBooks are the best computers for my needs. So why is the combination of the two such a wretched and chronically compromised situation? Almost every advice column on how to improve MacBook battery life begins with the suggestion to avoid using Chrome in favor of Apple's more efficient Safari browser. The idea that Chrome is a big and profligate battery drain on MacBooks has existed almost as long as the browser has been available, and most benchmarks reiterate it by showing Chrome's gluttonous consumption of system resources for seemingly basic tasks.Does the same apply to Chrome for Windows or Linux? I don't have a laptop, so I have no way of testing it out.

The folks over at WindowsMania.pl have gotten their hands on a new build of Windows 10 for phones; this latest build comes with a set of UI changes and enhancements; mainly a revamped multitasking screen. The new multitasking screen shown above displays open/recent apps in a card like manner, similar to how Meego or BB10 showed them, allowing you to quickly view all your open apps at once, while presumably still swiping them away (or simply pressing "x") to close them.Those screenshots remind me of this.

Some folks like to call it fragmentation, others call it choice, but by any name there are certainly a lot of different Android phones. Building applications that need to work with all of them is no easy task. You have wildly different hardware configurations that make for a big difference in performance, and even though one apk file can work on every one of them, there's still the issue of needing an app to run smoothly on low-end devices without sacrificing features on high-end devices. When you're talking about an app as popular as Facebook, this can quickly become a nightmare for the folks doing the coding.Facebook showed everyone at the Big Android Meat and Greet a new solution that's simple - the Device Year Class component.A clever method for developers to tailor their applications for specific Android phones - and it's open source.

Apple has released updates for both OS X and iOS today. OS X 10.10.3 adds Photos as a replacement for iPhoto, while iOS 8.3 updates and adds a whole bunch of emoji.

The day Mariina Hallikainen received a communique detailing first day sales stats for Cities: Skylines, she was very happy.The numbers were wildly ahead of all projections. She decided to splurge on a decadent and indulgent treat.She ordered a strawberry cream cake.It's amazing that a small team from Finland managed to build the SimCity EA could not. Cities: Skylines is completely and utterly worth it, and the best city builder currently available, by a huge margin.On a related note, an artist who used to work on SimCity for Maxis/EA is currently earning a decent buck through donations because he's designing a lot of additional buildings for Cities: Skyines and releasing them to the community for free. Amazing.

As of April 7th 2015, there are no IBM PC emulators in the world that can run the demo properly. Unless you have the exact hardware required (see below), this demo won't run properly; in fact, it hangs or crashes emulators before it is finished. To see what 8088 MPH looks like, I direct you to the video+audio capture of the demo running on real hardware.Impressive.

The first Apple Watch reviews are coming out right now. The Verge's review is incredibly detailed, and also, brutally honest: the Apple Watch has major issues right now, but it does have a lot of potential. The biggest issue highlighted by The Verge is performance, and the video review shows stuttering, loading screens, and unregistered taps on the screen.But right now, it's disappointing to see the Watch struggle with performance. What good is a watch that makes you wait? Rendering notifications can slow everything down to a crawl. Buttons can take a couple taps to register. It feels like the Apple Watch has been deliberately pulled back in order to guarantee a full day of battery life. Improving performance is Apple's biggest challenge with the Watch, and it's clear that the company knows it.These seem like the same issues the Moto 360 had when it first came out. Android Wear updates eventually addressed most of these issues, while also increasing its battery life, so I'm sure Apple Watch updates will do the same. Still, it's disappointing that such an expensive, high-profile device suffers from performance issues, especially since it leads to a huge problem for the Apple Watch, highlighted perfectly by Nilay Patel: "there's virtually nothing I can't do faster or better with access to a laptop or a phone".The other major issue is one I also highlighted in my Moto 360 review and other smartwatch articles: smartwatches make you look like a jerk, and the Apple Watch is no exception.It turns out that checking your watch over and over again is a gesture that carries a lot of cultural weight. Eventually, Sonia asks me if I need to be somewhere else. We're both embarrassed, and I've mostly just ignored everyone. This is a little too much future all at once.I worded this in the form of the funeral test (or wedding test if you're not a cynical bastard), and it's a crucial flaw in the entire concept of a smartwatch. It is a major weakness of Android Wear, and also of the Apple Watch, made worse by the fact that, according to The Verge, notification settings simply aren't granular enough.The Verge also discussed the Apple Watch with their fashion-focussed sister site Racked, and the responses weren't particularly positive - it looks way too much like a gadget and computer, and too little like an actual fashion accessory. Of course, there are many people who have zero issues with that (I'm assuming the majority of OSNews readers do not care), but I personally do. I have enough computers and gadgets in my life, and I want my watch to look like a watch - not a computer.The Verge eventually concludes:There's no question that the Apple Watch is the most capable smartwatch available today. It is one of the most ambitious products I've ever seen; it wants to do and change so much about how we interact with technology. But that ambition robs it of focus: it can do tiny bits of everything, instead of a few things extraordinarily well. For all of its technological marvel, the Apple Watch is still a smartwatch, and it's not clear that anyone's yet figured out what smartwatches are actually for.It turns out that virtually everything I've said about smartwatches in the past - in my Moto 360 review as well as other smartwatch articles - remains accurate even with the introduction of the Apple Watch. It's important to note that I am not saying smartwatches are a bad idea - just that their current incarnations - be they Wear, Pebble, or Apple Watch - are the wrong answer to the wrong question. Nobody seems to have found out yet what a smartwatch is actually supposed to be.

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter Grace lost her iPhone. Grace is a 15-year-old with a diagnosis of autism and a severe speech delay. Some people would call her "non-verbal" but she can say a few words and if people don't understand she shows them a picture.When Gracie was small, she used to have to carry a big book around to hold these pictures, but then the iPhone was invented and a very kind person gave us one to try. I was able to transfer all her pictures onto a folder on that phone and whenever we didn't have a picture, we could take a photograph and add that to her collection. Grace is considered to have an intellectual disability but she had no trouble navigating that iPhone, and she carried it around with her everywhere in an especially strong cover to protect against accidents.With the help of a young Irish gaming developer called Steve Troughton-Smith, I was able to create an App to store and sort those pictures and in honour of my daughter, he called it Grace App.The start of a lovely initiative to donate old iPhones to children with autism. The organisation restores any iOS 6-capable iPhone or iPad to factory settings, loads the Grace application, puts them a tough, donated case, and gives them to a child who uses it to greatly expand his or her communication abilities. It shows just how important technology like smartphones has become for people with disabilities or other problems. It can enable some of them to lead much richer lives, and that really puts a huge smile on my face.The application Grace is available for both iOS and Android, so if you know someone who could benefit from it - let them know.

If you've got a Windows Phone, today is your lucky day. On April 1, Microsoft released DOS for mobile: "All the productivity youâve come to expect from Microsoft in the simplest OS yet." Update: There's also a video ad.

Google has unveiled a whole lot of new Chrome OS devices today - mostly laptops - but there's also a small Chromecast-like dongle that you can slip into any HDMI port and turn that display into a full-on Chrome OS machine. It's only $99, which puts it right into impulse-buy territory.One of the laptops is a convertible with a touchscreen, which seems odd at first because Chrome OS isn't really built with touch in mind. It starts to make more sense, however, when you combine with the news that Google is opening up the App Runtime for Chrome to all Android developers, allowing them to get their Android applications ready for Chrome OS.It seems Google's vision for Chrome OS and Android is becoming clear. A few years from now, Chrome OS or Android will be a distinction without a difference for most people.

The result is Surface 3, as well as a mobile-broadband version, Surface 3 (4G LTE). It's the thinnest and lightest Surface we've ever shipped. It runs full Windows, including desktop applications. It includes a one-year subscription to Office 365 to help you really get down to work. And it starts at just $499.I was genuinely excited when I read about this Surface 3. I actually really like the Surface concept, but the Surface Pro 3 is simply too powerful (and thus, too expensive) for my specific workload (minor translation work, proofreading, watching some videos, some browsing, that sort of thing). A quad-core Intel Atom Surface with proper Windows (x86-64!) seems like a perfect machine for me, and the price, too, looked great: $499 for the basic model, and another $129 for the keyboard (even if Microsoft does not know how to red).And then I saw the European prices. Oh boy. The basic model is a whopping â¬609, and the keyboard is another â¬155. That's insane, and utterly ruins the value proposition for the Surface 3 in Europe.Great device, terrible, terrible pricing.

The reviews of the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are starting to roll in. The Verge seems first.But design at this deeper level matters. And it's something Samsung has chosen - or been forced - to contend with. The Galaxy S6 is the first time I've felt like Samsung might finally be grappling with the idea of what a smartphone ought to be on an ontological level. No, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge don't fully tick off every single box in that checklist. But they've done something better: become phones that are more than the collection of their parts.Samsung finally copied the right thing: caring about design.Basically, a good-looking phone that feels great in the hand, crazy fast, good, fast camera, and toned-down TouchWiz.

Since the release of build 10041 for PCs we've continued to make steady progress, and as I said in the blog post with that one weâre working to bring you builds to the Fast ring faster than before. Builds last week were BIG ones for us as well, since "Project Spartan" was integrated into our flighting branch for the first time. That's right, this means that today's release includes the new Project Spartan browser and you'll get to use it for the first time on PCs as it begins to show up across the Windows 10 device family.This is the first Windows 10 preview build with Microsoft's new browser.

A Senate panel plans to investigate whether the White House inappropriately derailed a federal investigation into accusations that Google was stifling online competition.Sen. Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary's Antitrust Subcommittee, plans to contact the Federal Trade Commission, Google, and other online companies to discuss the issue, Emily Long, a spokeswoman for the Utah Republican, said Monday. The subcommittee has no plans yet to hold a hearing on the issue, she said.If this is a genuine inquiry - and not just party politics, Democrats vs. Republicans or vice versa - then I'm all for it. This whole thing looks incredibly shady.

HEVC Advance, another patent licensing group, completely independent from MPEG LA, has announced its existence, but not its licensing fees. The uncertainty and potential costs may hinder acceptance of MPEG's next generation HEVC coding format, also known as h.265.This is good news for Google, who has just released another RC for their VP9 codec and for Xiph.org, who are finalizing their Daala.

I'm not a huge fan of Tim Cook professionally (personally, on the other hand, he seems like a nice guy), but on this one, he's 100% right.There's something very dangerous happening in states across the country.A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors. Some, such as the bill enacted in Indiana last week that drew a national outcry and one passed in Arkansas, say individuals can cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state nondiscrimination law.Others are more transparent in their effort to discriminate. Legislation being considered in Texas would strip the salaries and pensions of clerks who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples - even if the Supreme Court strikes down Texas' marriage ban later this year. In total, there are nearly 100 bills designed to enshrine discrimination in state law.America is the land of opportunity. Just don't be black, gay, or transgender.

Texas representative John Carter, chairman of the subcommittee on Homeland Security appropriations, and who sits on various other defense-related subcommittees, is hearing about cyber a lot these days. As he put it, "cyber is just pounding me from every direction." That's just the first few seconds of the very entertaining video, where Carter tries to find the right words to express his concern over new encryption standards from Apple and others.You may laugh about this, but... These are the people running the most powerful military of the world.

GNOME 3.16 brings a brand new notification system and updated calendar design, which helps you to easily keep track of whatâs happened, and includes useful information like world times and event reminders. Other features include overlaid scrollbars, updated visuals, improved content views in Files, and a redesigned image viewer.Major additions have also been made to the GNOME developer experience: GTK+ support for OpenGL now allows GTK+ apps to support 3D natively, a new GLib reference counting feature will help with debugging, and GTK+ Inspector has also had a major update.Also released: GNOME Builder, an IDE for GNOME.