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Microsoft ends support for the Band wearable on May 31st
It's been over two years since Microsoft discontinued its Band fitness wearable and axed any future plans for it. Now, tech giant is putting the product line to rest: it's shutting down the Health Dashboard and pulling all Band apps from the iOS App Store, Google Play and the Microsoft Store on May 31st. It will also be deleting all the data users uploaded to the Health dashboard that day.
Instagram is reportedly developing a dedicated shopping app
Instagram has been rolling out various shopping-related features over the past few years, making it crystal that it sees a future in e-commerce. Now, it's reportedly going all in -- according to The Verge, the Facebook-owned company is building a standalone shopping application that may be called "IG Shopping." It will apparently give people a way to browse and purchase goods from the businesses they follow from within the app itself. The app has no release date yet, and it's possibly still very early in its development. While that means there's a chance that we won't even see it, the publication's sources said Instagram is "well-positioned to make a major expansion into e-commerce."
Gmail's 'Confidential Mode' arrives on mobile devices
Google's big Gmail redesign was revealed this past April (with G Suite customers getting the first look). It became default for everyone starting in July. One of the key features, Confidential Mode, is now available for mobile devices, though not everyone is as confident in its ability to keep your data private.
HQ Trivia is hosting a special game with 'The Voice'
HQ Trivia's game on Monday night will give you the chance to earn and withdraw more than a couple of bucks in earnings. The hit mobile game will give away $50,000 that evening -- and a trip for two to LA to see The Voice's live finale on May 21st. HQ Trivia has teamed up with the singing competition in what NBC describes as a "first-of-its-kind partnership."
A robot conductor led a live orchestra performance
Just a month after humanoid robot Pepper conducted a Buddhist burial ceremony, a robo-contemporary has conducted the world-renowned Lucca Philharmonic orchestra alongside opera great Andrea Bocelli. Do robots need a heart to complete tasks of passion? As shown by YuMi, the robotic maestro designed by Swiss Firm ABB, maybe not.
ICYMI: Electric surfboard, '80s video app and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496").style.display="none";}catch(e){} Today on In Case You Missed It: If Jaws has kept you out of the ocean, there's another way to experience surfing. Just pay $4,000 for the Onean Electric Surfboard and cruise lakes and rivers instead. And you can re-live the glory days of Saved by the Bell and Zumba pants with an iOS app that turns captured videos into vintage gems. And an art installation lets you sing to it and vibrates back with its own song.
ICYMI: Hypersonic plane, social connections app and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-184810{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-184810, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-184810{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-184810").style.display="none";}catch(e){} Today on In Case You Missed It: Germany is trying to revive a decades-old plan for a hypersonic commuting plane which would deliver people from Frankfurt to Australia in 90 minutes. A video for a social connection app called Knock Knock stars a couple celebs who will likely never ask to be connected to little ol' me at a party. And a custom drone builder is calling it what it is with a giant eyeball drone. Just to clear up any confusion.
Sharing app Droplr wants to woo you back with a 'free' tier
In case you dropped Droplr when the sharing app went from free to paid-only the company has a plan to potentially woo you back. How's that? It's going freemium starting tomorrow. Links and files you spread around with the free plan will have a week-long lifespan before evaporating. Should you want any long-term storage or whatnot, TechCrunch reports that you'll have to shell out basically double the price from before for Droplr Pro: $9.99 per month now versus the previous $4.99 action. Refreshed iOS and Mac apps are en route as well and the outfit has a few promotions going on to help take the sting out of the increased monthly price.
EVE Evolved: Fixing EVE's player activity
It's been a sort of running gag in EVE Online throughout the years that players spend inordinate amounts of time docked in stations and spinning their ships around in the hangar, but this is oddly close to the truth. Those of us who have been hooked to EVE for years know just how intense the game can get at its most frantic and how incredible it is to be present for historic events and important PvP battles, but those moments are rare, and there's typically a lot of downtime between periods of activity. For every PvP battle fought, incursion fleet formed or wormhole op organised, players often have to spend hours in stations or in space amusing themselves or doing busywork. With gamers now spreading their increasingly limited free time across a growing catalogue of online games, some EVE players log in for only a few minutes per day to queue skills, chat with corpmates, and see if anything interesting is happening. The recent announcement that the upcoming Phoebe release will contain infinite length skill queues has some players concerned that people will lose the motivation to pop their heads into New Eden each day and see what's going on. Since the best sandbox gameplay is emergent in nature, just getting players to log in so they're available to take part in something awesome when it happens is extremely important. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I ask whether EVE is in trouble due to its recent decline in player activity, look at the impact of people with just a few hours per week to play, and suggest a new app idea that could help solve all of those problems.
Uber adds surge pricing push notifications to its iOS app
A week after Uber CEO Travis Kalanick promised push notifications were on the way to help riders cope with surge pricing, the outfit has added the feature to its iOS app. With the latest update, those handset-based pop-ups alert you when the dreaded surge pricing window has passed and replace SMS messages for updates. For customers in the UK, PayPal integration has also been tacked on as an alternate payment option. No word on when Android users can expect the new alerts, but we'd surmise it's not too far out as add-ons have been quick to grace both OSes in the past. Update: Uber has just published a blog post announcing the new Surge Drop feature.
Singlemizer: The Duplicate Finder
A recent request on the Boston Mac User Group mail list sent me looking for an app that compares folders and seeks duplicate files across drives. Singlemizer: The Duplicate Finder by Konstantin Pavlikhin fits the bill. This US$19.99 one-trick pony was updated in mid-December to version 4.4.2 for OS X 10.8 and later. I had used it a few times over the summer, but abandoned it. Most of my complaints with Singlemizer were resolved with the recent updates, which include the ability to designate which files are the originals, a Quick Look Preview function, sorting and filtering by a variety of factors. Now, I like the app much better. I did all my new tests in OS X 10.8.4. You can use Singlemizer for free, but it will not remove any duplicate files until you purchase the app. How It Works You choose the folders in which to search for duplicates by dragging the folders into the Singlemizer main window and click Scan. Singlemizer instantaneously switches to the list window. How fast it locates duplicate files depends on the size of your drives or folders. The speed is impressive, though. You can scroll through your resulting duplicate file or folder list to show particular files and sort them by seven different categories, such as size, number of duplicates, or file name. Singlemizer searches for duplicates on any media connected to your Mac. When an item is checked for deletion and you select Remove Checked, the items are highlighted in red and you then have two dialogs in which to change your mind. You just click the magnifier icon to see the location of the file in a Finder window. Files can be moved to another location or the Trash, instead of deleting them or replacing the file with an alias to the original. After you dismiss the dialog below, yet another appears in which you can still cancel your choice. Minor Issues One minor complaint, shown in the dialog above, you cannot choose individual files to move. You either move the whole file list, alias it or delete it. When you delete the file it disappears -- it does not get deposited into the Trash unless you select Move to Trash, so make sure you really want to remove that particular file as you cannot recover it. There are some oddities in the Algorithm tab of the preferences and a trip to the Singlemizer Help file provided nothing useful. In fact, the help file only deals with information on different versions and license keys. If the program is designed to be used by only techies, it's fine. I'm guessing the everyday Mac user may not know what is a package, resource fork, hardlink, descendant directories, or a sensible system file. An explanation of terms would be helpful. A trip through Google yielded nothing useful on descendant directories. It probably means subdirectories, i.e. a folder inside another folder. I recommend you leave the Algorithm tab set to the defaults, unless you have a specific reason to change them. I think Singlemizer would benefit users more if it had a more complete help file. I found some minor issues still worthy of correction, but overall I recommend Singlemizer, especially if you do not have a strict file organization system. One note: in the File menu, the Open in External Editor commands seems to tell the file to open up in the program in which it was created. That command isn't clear and needs a new name, such as, Open in Original App, or some such. Good One-Trick Pony I knew Singlemizer could really help me clean out space when I found over 2 GB of duplicate photos inside of dissimilarly-named folders on a full backup drive. The recovered space was welcome. It also located all those annoying duplicate music files that are created every time I install an iTunes update. I recovered a few gigabytes of space on multiple drives, because Singlemizer found a few 700+ MB files with slightly different version numbers that I had saved into multiple folders.
Motorola wants you to tattoo a smartphone microphone onto your throat
Okay, where to start on this one? Simply put, Motorola has applied for a patent of a microphone with a tranceiver and power supply that is designed to be tattooed onto your throat. The idea is to capture vibrations directly from your larynx in order to cut out background noise -- while eliminating something else you could lose, we imagine. The skin-borne device could communicate with your handset or other portable device by Bluetooth, NFC or other wireless protocols and would pack a battery that "may or may not be rechargeable." The patent adds that the technology could also be applied to "other animals," so we're a bit concerned that Motorola is taking its wearable schemes in the wrong direction.
LFM: Massively seeks a new columnist and freelancers
Yes folks, it's that time again: the time when Massively hops into the hiring channel and says, "Looking for more!" We're looking to hire fresh meat a new staff member and a set of freelancers for the site: a new multipurpose columnist and West Coast freelancers. Here's the skinny on us: Massively is Joystiq's geeky MMO cousin. We're owned by AOL; we're all paid, remote contractors; and we uphold a strict set of ethical standards you won't find among our rivals. We focus on high-quality writing with fair sourcing and a mix of news and features. We employ actual copyediting and editorial oversight, so you won't see trainwreck English in every headline. In short, we are the MMO site the other sites use as an RSS feed. These positions would be an awesome chance to break into paid gaming journalism if you happen to have just the right blend of availability, excellent writing skills, and passion for the MMO genre. If that describes you, then read on and apply!
Aereo app finally arrives on Android
It's taken a while for Aereo's Android app to see the light of day, but it's finally hit Google Play today as promised. Subscribers to the service will now be able to watch live TV streamed to handsets and tablets running Android 4.2 or higher -- provided they live in one of the company's markets, of course. The software is currently in beta, so don't expect a bug-free experience. If your love of television outweighs your fear of software testing, hit the link below to grab the application.
Feedly for Android scores 300 percent faster start time, raft of refinements
Google Reader stand-in Feedly has picked up a bounty of tweaks and features in its latest version, which just hit Google Play. Now in its 17th iteration, the app starts up 300 percent faster, boasts smoother scrolling, a retooled widget and a new discover section to peruse stories. Design buffs will be pleased to see improved fonts and a refined visual design geared towards readability. In addition, pro users will now be able to use an enhanced search to scour the entirety of their feeds. The minds behind Feedly have also given their application some future-proofing as well -- particularly for an era that includes smartwatches -- with optimizations for the Samsung Galaxy Gear and Android Kitkat. Unfortunately, details on what was fine-tuned for Google's upcoming operating system are MIA. Faithful iOS users can't get ahold of the updates just yet, but that should change shortly as the app will embark on the App Store approval process Friday.
Twitter for Windows Phone update brings lockscreen tweets, theme options and notifications from favored accounts
Twitter is looking to nab its own spot on the lockscreen of Windows Phone users. Thanks to a new update for the micro-blogging app on Microsoft-friendly handsets, tweets can get cozy on the aforementioned screen for a quick peek. However, it appears that you can't choose what shows up in that space (at least for now) or do anything with it as it selects at random. A "customize lockscreen" option is situated in the settings, but it's currently greyed out. Users can also expect to toggle on notifications when closely followed accounts post, choice of a dark or light theme and the ability to pin keyword searches to the home screen for easy access. There's also improvements to search and tweet translation has been expanded to include 13 additional languages. Version 3.0.0.0 of the app is available now for both Windows Phone 8 and 7.5 at the source link that follows, just in case your trusty handset hasn't pinged you about it's arrival just yet.
Twitter #Music iOS app updated with discovery features, additional languages
Twitter's Music app for iOS just scored a few more features aimed at helping you discover new tracks, and, if you happen to hail from a handful of European countries, allowing you to navigate in your native tongue. Version 1.2 now lets you quickly jump to an artist's top tracks, locate similar tunes, and, as a pretty nifty affiliate perk, jump to the musicians that artists follow on Twitter. There's now also an option to scan your iPhone's music library in order to recommend relevant tracks, and you can quickly access a list of musical groups that you've tweeted about in the past. Finally, the pièce de résistance -- for foreign users, at least -- is an option to use the app in a variety of European languages, including French, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Italian. Molto Buono.
Apple seeks patent to control devices with audio 'hyperlinks'
Remember when Lady Gaga pinged smartphones and presumably alarmed dogs by transmitting inaudible, high-frequency audio at a concert with Sonic Notify tech? It turns out Apple's applying for a patent to do something similar, namely "audio hyperlinking" that can be contained within an audio stream. Cupertino's application says that such sound waves could be audible or outside the normal hearing range of 20Hz to 20KHz and "cause an effect in the user interface" of a receiving device. That could be useful during a podcast, for instance, to give users links to articles relevant to a discussion via sound waves alone. The application goes on to describe how such data could be encoded into an audio stream and read by the receiving device, and leaves wiggle room for a wide range of uses. Call us cynical, but we imagine that includes a way of sneaking in more ads.
Apple reportedly hiring new talent to solve iWatch design problems
Rumors, suggestions and trademark applications have been building a case for an wrist-worn Apple product for some time now -- an official iWatch to fulfill the wearable potential of the iPod Nano. Now, the Financial Times says the company is "aggressively" hiring to help it get the product ready for release. According to the usual sources familiar with the matter, the new staff might have been sought out to help Apple wrap its head around wearable computing, moving the project to the next stage of development. The timing of the hires might also imply that the iWatch won't be ready until late next year. Of course, if you can't wait that long, you can always just make your own.
Apple files application for 'iWatch' trademark in Japan
Evidence is mounting that Apple might out a smartwatch in the near future after Yahoo Japan noticed that the company applied for the "iWatch" trademark in Japan on June 3rd. Our Japanese editor noticed that several other companies have applied for that term as well, though this one (released on June 27th) is from Apple Inc. of Cupertino. That follows a patent application from Apple we saw earlier in the year for a watch-like AMOLED device that proposed a slap bracelet, kinetic energy charger and "end-detection" user sensor, among other features. In addition, other rumors from Bloomberg back in February suggested that 100 Apple employees were working on a smartwatch of some kind. If we don't see a device after all that, Cupertino's gone to a heck of a lot of trouble for nothing. Check after the break for a screen grab (in Japanese) of the trademark application. Update: As it turns out, Cook and Co. have applied for the "iWatch" trademark in Mexico and Taiwan too. A Russian newspaper claims that Apple has also filed for the trademark in the country, but the official paperwork hasn't surfaced quite yet.
