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Samsung unveils the Galaxy S 4's software tricks: camera modes, Story Album, S Voice Drive and more
Samsung is revealing what Smart software additions the Galaxy S 4 will bring to the table, and they're well beyond what's been rumored. The camera is one of the biggest focuses, borrowing much from the Galaxy Camera: Cinema Photo captures still images with moving backgrounds, a Drama Shot burst mode that creates animated GIFs, an Eraser mode to remove unwanted background subjects, and a Sound & Shot mode that puts audio in the background of still images. A Story Album automatically creates photo albums (including ones you can print via Blurb) based on common details such as location and time. And did we mention that it can shoot photos and video from both the front and back cameras at the same time? That's just the start. AirView now works with your finger, rather than a pen, and is effective right from the lock screen. Adapt Display and Adapt Sound automatically tune the picture and speakers for varying viewing conditions, and WatchOn uses a built-in IR blaster to tune your TV. S Translator, meanwhile, will take both spoken and written words and translate them through several languages, inside of multiple apps. S Voice has been upgraded to S Voice Drive to let drivers get navigation, find points of interest and otherwise interact with the phone without having to take any hands off the wheel. S Health, which Samsung initially mentioned last year, is around to track calories and steps through accessories such as S band, a body scale and a heart rate monitor. Like to do things that involve more than one person? There's more still. ChatOn has been upgraded to support video chat, and Group Play both allows for sharing songs in a surround mode or playing local multiplayer games -- when it's supported, that is. All told, there's a small deluge of new features that could amount to a lot, even excluding new hands-free elements like Smart Scroll. Check after the break for a quick preview video and the press release. %Gallery-182892% Check out our event hub for all the action from Samsung's Galaxy S 4 event.
Blurb and CGX partner for print-on-demand workflow
Ebooks are the current darlings of the publishing world, but there is still a huge demand for printed materials. Blurb, an online platform for designing, publishing, marketing, and selling pro-quality books, has partnered with commercial printing firm Consolidated Graphics, Inc (CGX) to produce an Adobe InDesign plug-in that works with a new service called Publish to allow print-on-demand books in runs as small as one. Publish lets designers use their familiar friend Adobe InDesign to prepare their projects. The plug-in has templates for four cover formats, five paper types, and eight trim sizes. The plug-in then moves projects to Blurb, where they can be proofed, given automated pre-flight checks, and then ordered via credit card. Blurb notes that the workflow speeds project completion times by about 75 percent. The small run size provided by Publish makes it cost-effective for companies to create high-quality projects and receive completed print materials in about a week.
Blurb app creates multimedia stories on iPhone
Blurb is best known for self-publishing books, but a new iPhone app expands the company's scope to mobile storytelling. Blurb Mobile for iPhone and iPod touch allows you to take photos, video and audio from the iPhone, including from apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and Photoshop Express, and turn them into a visual book that can be shared via email, Twitter or Facebook. Blurb is a free download and allows you to have up to eight images, a 30-second audio clip per image and a 10-second video clip per story with seven themes to choose from. An in-app purchase of US$1.99 will net you up to 15 photos, a 2-minute audio clip per image and three video clips up to 30 seconds each per story along with an additional eight themes. The app itself is easy to use, and it's very stable. After creating the slideshow, you can upload it to Blurb's site for sharing. A very nice feature is that you can make changes to the slideshow; the app will update it to the same location on Blurb's site for you, so you do not have to change any shared URLs. There are a few minor drawbacks, mainly that the text size for captions is much too big and obscures a good bit of the image when posted online. Check out this test slideshow from a recent trip to New York City to see the app in action.
Cataclysm: For Gnomeregan!
Our very own Michael Sacco actually got his hands on a copy of that PC Gamer full of Cataclysm details, and there was apparently one that we missed: Gnomes may be coming back to Gnomeregan. The little tidbit above is frustratingly vague, but it appears that as long rumored (and long hoped by the shorter denizens of Azeroth), Deathwing's return may break the whole war for the Gnomish capital wide open, and they might finally reclaim their mechanical homeland.We say "might," because, according to this blurb, it could be anything at this point -- a questline that begins a takeover, a questline that represents a failed takeover, a new phased experience that leads to a takeover, or some kind of questline that brings Gnomeregan up to Heroic status (we know Shadowfang and Deadmines are already getting that treatment, so it wouldn't be too far off to expect other old instances to come around in future content patches).Then again, let's not kill hope: maybe the Gnomes are finally heading back to Gnomeregan to have a capital city of their own, in all of its Gnomish engineering glory. We can dream, right?
