Finch
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'Finch' trailer sees man, machine and dog try to flee climate change
Apple has shared the first trailer for its upcoming Tom Hanks-led sci-fi film, Finch.
Apple TV's Tom Hanks sci-fi movie 'Finch' arrives November 5th
Apple is releasing Tom Hanks' sci-fi movie 'Finch' on its Apple TV+ streaming service on November 5th.
Apple TV+ snaps up another Tom Hanks movie
Apple TV+ has bought the rights to the Tom Hanks movie 'Finch,' a sci-fi title that might help Apple's chances of winning awards.
Finch usage tracker for OS X disappoints
For $8.99, Touch Studio's Finch app for OS X promises to to quietly track your computer usage as you work. With it, you should be able to monitor which apps and sites you spend the most time in, and adjust your workday accordingly. Finch runs in your menu bar, keeping track of your usage by monitoring window title bars. It offers instant reports showing the duration of window use per app. The problem is that Finch doesn't do this very well. Monitoring While The User is Absent If you leave a window open when you're rushing out to dinner, Finch records the entire time it's there. There doesn't seem to be any activity trigger beyond the fact that the window is on-screen. In my tests, that caused a lot of false-data which showed I spent more time at certain sites than I actually did. There really needs to be some kind of time-out on these. Incorrect Multiple Results What's more, Finch sometimes had problems keeping track of staying on the same page. While writing up this post, it reported dozens of visits, all to the same page, the one I'm typing into right now. Nothing changed as far as I can tell in my title bar, even when I hit the "Save" button at regular intervals. No Application-by-Application Results Finch doesn't group its results by application because it only looks at titles, I couldn't build up usage stats for "How long was I in Email? How long in Firefox? In Safari? In Echofon?" You'd imagine that would be a big part of analyzing usage patterns, but it's not part of the app. No Sessions Nor can you create regular sessions to automatically monitor your workday. I'm only interested in usage between 7:30 AM and 3:30 PM. Finch provides no support for this kind of regular monitoring and no way to do session-by-session trend analysis. Stalking Finally, there's one more thing. And it's totally not Finch's fault. The app is creepy. It's like an electronic stalker looking over your shoulder. Every window you visit. Every website, no matter how stupid or crazy or embarrassing is listed in the results. There's no way to filter with Finch to only look at the usage patterns that are relevant to you. If you click a RickRoll link in your business e-mail, that site is going to be added to your Finch history. Summary All in all, I like the idea behind Finch better than the implementation. I hope Touch Studio continues developing the product but does so in a way that better lends itself to business use and "Getting Things Done" (GTD) analysis. As is, I cannot recommend it.
ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro and ViewPad 7x hands-on redux (video)
We've already fiddled with ViewSonic's two new tablets at Computex's pre-show event, but we decided to hit the booth earlier today to get a closer look at the ViewPad 10Pro's BlueStacks Android virtualization on Windows 7, as well as the ViewPad 7x's funky UI. Starting off with the bigger slate, you'll see in the above video that the Android implementation isn't as good as it sounds -- ViewSonic says it wants to offer an Android experience "similar" to that of actual Android devices, but alas, we beg to differ with the virtual Android's laggy performance plus its odd bugs. The reps assured us that the final product will be much smoother, but then we were further let down by the fact that Android Market is absent. The reason? It's simply because from ViewSonic's point of view the 10Pro's focus is on Windows 7, so the company decided that it wasn't worth all the hassle to obtain a Google Mobile Services license. To sum it up, this whole Android "feature" is very much just a gimmick, and it doesn't look like running native Android on Oak Trail soon will do much good, either. On a brighter note, the dual-core ViewPad 7x fared way better than its bloated brother. This world's first 7-inch Honeycomb tablet ran surprisingly smooth, and we were glad to see SPB's contribution here with its Shell 3D Android launcher (which we reviewed with much praise a little while back). We managed to get ViewSonic director Max Liu to give us a brief demo of the 7x after the break, and to be frank, the more we look at it, the more we want it. Here's hoping that this tablet will be priced right. Oh, and did we mention that ViewSonic had a few real Gouldian finches on the show floor? Check out them birds after the break.
