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The Daily Roundup for 05.16.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Google Glass rooted and hacked to run Ubuntu live at Google I/O
Today at Google I/O the company held a session entitled "Voiding your Warranty" where employees demonstrated how to root Google Glass and install Ubuntu on it. What you're seeing above is a screenshot from a laptop running a terminal window on top and showing the screencast output from Glass on the bottom -- here running the standard Android launcher instead of the familiar cards interface. The steps involve pushing some APKs (Launcher, Settings and Notepad) to the device using adb, then pairing Glass with a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. After this, it's possible to unlock the bootloader with fastboot and flash a new boot image to gain root access. From there you have full access to Glass -- just like that! Running Ubuntu requires a couple more apps to be installed, namely Android Terminal Emulator and Complete Linux Installer. The latter lets you download and boot your favorite linux distro (Ubuntu, in this case). You're then able to use SSH or VNC to access Ubuntu running right on Glass. We captured a few screenshots of the process in our gallery. Follow the links below for more info -- just be careful not to brick your Glass okay? %Gallery-188641%
Google Glass to get CNN, Elle, Twitter, Tumblr, Evernote and Facebook apps soon
The I/O news faucet hasn't quite dried up yet. During the San Francisco conference today, Google chatted up some new Glass apps. The new applications will come packaged as "Glassware," delivering CNN breaking news alerts, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook posts, Evernote reminders and articles from Elle Magazine. The New York Times and Path were the only two apps previously available to Explorers, making this new suite of products a very welcome addition indeed. More apps are no doubt on the way -- hundreds of developers are working to produce their own software for the Google-branded headgear, which is set to launch for consumers sometime next year.
Google announces Glass Developer Kit, will enable offline apps and direct hardware access
Google I/O 2013 is entering day two in San Francisco and a Google Glass developer session is happening right now. The focus is on the current Mirror API, which allows for online, web services-based apps that push simple content to the headset. This enables current apps like the New York Times. But, the Mirror API is quite limited, allowing only online apps and not providing any direct access to the Glass hardware. That's changing, though, with Google announcing the Glass Developer Kit, or GDK. This will allow for Android apps that run directly on the Glass hardware, providing much greater functionality and offline access. When is it coming? "Sometime in the future" is the best we're able to get.
The Daily Roundup for 05.14.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Living with Glass, Week Three: Apps, Updates and Apiarists
It's been a little while since I last checked in with Glass, but it's time to file another report and let you know how Glass is fitting in with my life -- or, increasingly, how it isn't. We're on the eve of Google I/O, where Glass, in its near-current state, was unveiled to the world last year. I figure that by the end of this week the Glass landscape will have shifted, so before anything tilts too drastically, let's take a final look at where we stand now.
Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen tries out Google Glass for real (video)
There's a good chance that you, like us, enjoyed a certain Saturday Night Live sketch recently in which Weekend Update's newly branded tech correspondent Randall Meeks gave his raw impressions of Google Glass -- using a prop made of plastic and attached to a pair of sunglasses. There was a lot of shouting, twitching and, for us at least, laughing. Meeks is played by the incredibly talented Fred Armisen, also well-known for IFC's surreally hilarious Portlandia. In reality, we learned, Armisen had never used Google Glass. That was a situation we were happy to fix.%Gallery-188167%
MedRef for Glass uses facial recognition to identify patients, keeps health records
We've seen a few interesting apps built specifically for Google's new headset but, to our knowledge MedRef for Glass is the first that recognize people's faces. The basic functions aren't anything terribly ground breaking: you can create and search patient files, and even add voice or photo notes. What makes Lance Nanek's creation unique is its support for facial recognition. A user can snap a picture of a subject and upload it to the cloud, where it will search patient records for a match using the Betaface API. All of this can be done, relatively hands-free leaving a doctors well-trained mitts available to perform other necessary medical duties. There's still a lot of work to do, and Nanek hopes that with more powerful hardware the facial recognition feature could be left running constantly, removing the need to snap and upload photos. In the meantime, if you're one of the lucky few to have an Explorer edition of Google Glass you can install the package at the source link. Otherwise, you'll have to make do with the demo video after the break.
Switched On: Three days without Google Glass
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. The television. The PC. The cellphone. We take the things in these sentence fragments for granted today, but they took many years to enter the mainstream. Could Google Glass herald the next great product that we will one day wonder how we lived without? Based on three days of not using the product, you may want to ask someone else.
Caption contest: Google Glass explorer takes virtual vision to a whole new level
What's better than a single pair of Glass Explorer Editions, you say? How about five? Well, that's exactly what Mr. Adib Towfiq has done, mounting a few of these bizarre frames to his head and, luckily for us, he took to Mountain View's social network to share it with the world. Now, he asks, "Am I doing it right?" If anything, we'd say this is certainly a step in the right direction. Edgar: "You stay Glassy, San Diego" Billy: "What? I'm just multi-tasking!" Brad: "This is the best way to solve the battery life problem." Ben Gilbert: "Adib Towfiq is ... THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN." Jamie: "Google Glass... Baller Edition" Tim: "Okay, Glass. Okay, Glass. Okay, Glass. Okay, Glass. Okay, Glass. Take a picture. Take a picture. Take a picture. Take a picture. Take a picture." Richard Lai: "I'm four times cooler than Tim Stevens." Jon Fingas: "Augment all the realities!" Andy: "Am I the man? Yes. Can I walk a straight line? Maybe." Darren: "Goooooooooogle Glass" Terrence: "So I says to myself, 'I can completely pay off my student loans or buy five Google Glass headsets.' I have no regrets." Mark: " I see dead people!" Myriam: "Google glass, now with 10 cores."
Google Glass Explorer Editions start receiving XE5 software update, new features
Google's cadre of Glass explorers only started receiving the headgear last month, but the folks in Mountain View are already pushing out an update. Named XE5, the fresh software carries a raft of tweaks and new features, ranging from crash reporting to Google+ notifications. Among the more notable upgrades are the ability to comment and +1 posts on the search titan's social network, alerts for incoming hangouts, improved battery life estimation and quicker transcription. One thing that may dampen spirits is a new charge to sync policy, which only allows background uploads when devices are plugged in to power sources and connected to WiFi. For the complete list of tweaks, hit the break for the changelog.
Google Glass snags unofficial Facebook photo sharing
Sure, Glass Explorers can post photos to Google+ with the high-tech headsets straight out of the box, but sharing to other sites requires additional glassware. While Facebook has yet to out its own app for Glass, an unofficial application dubbed Glass To Facebook has just arrived, allowing Google's adventurers to post images to the social network. Hooking up the the app appears to be an easy affair, consisting of granting the software access to a user's Google and Facebook accounts, and enabling it with Zuckerberg's crew. After that, Mountain View's headgear guinea pigs will be able to snap pictures and shoot them to Facebook. Count yourself as a lucky Google Glass owner? Hit the link below to grab Glass To Facebook.
Hidden sensors in Google Glass could enable AR apps
One of the bigger digs against Glass so far has been its rather limited feature set. In particular, there seemed to be no way to build full augmented reality applications for the wearable. (And it's not like Google has exactly been forthcoming about many of its specs.) But all hope is not lost. Programmer Lance Nanek was digging around in debug mode and managed to push an Android app to the head-mounted display that spit out a list of available sensors. Looks like Glass does in fact have all of the necessary components for full-fledged AR -- the official API just hasn't exposed those capabilities yet. Currently, third-party Glass apps are limited to updating your location once every 10 minutes, but with a little bit of hacking, we're sure that limitation could be overcome and the full suite of orientation sensors exposed to developers. Perhaps it won't be long before someone ports Yelp Monocle to Glass. Of course, it's probably only a matter of time before Google opens those features up to devs. For the full list of sensors and location providers head on after the break.
The Weekly Roundup for 04.29.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Fullscreen BEAM app sends Google Glass videos directly to YouTube
Sure, using Google Glass to record a video is a pretty neat trick, but how about uploading it to YouTube without a computer? Thanks to Fullscreen's BEAM video sharing app for Glass, you can do just that. After setting up an account with the company's website, Glass owners can use their high-tech eyewear to send clips to YouTube along with a tweet linking directly to the video. If you've managed to get hold of Google's modern-day monocle and would like give BEAM a try, you can register at the source link below. As for the rest of us, at least we can watch the demo video after the break.
Physics teacher adopts Google Glass, gives students a glance at CERN (video)
When Google asked what we'd do if we had Glass, it was no doubt hoping we'd produce some world-changing ideas. We now know at least a few exist, courtesy of physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel. He's long been hoping to use the wearable tech for remote teaching and one-on-one sessions, and the Glass Explorer program has given him the chance to do just that. His first stop? None other than CERN. Courtesy of a trip for Google's new Explorer Story video series, Vanden Heuvel is the first person to teach a science course while inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel, streaming his perspective to students thousands of miles away. While we don't know if other Explorer Stories will be quite as inspiring, we'll admit to being slightly jealous -- where was Glass when we were kids? [Thanks, Peter]
Editor's Letter: Welcome to May
In each issue of Distro, editor-in-chief Tim Stevens publishes a wrap-up of the week in news. A bit of a lull this week ahead of what is shaping up to be an insane May -- and perhaps an even crazier June. We have events stacked three-deep at times, with industry ones like Google I/O, BlackBerry World, CTIA and SID Display Week looming along with private ones like Microsoft's next-generation Xbox unveiling. Next month? WWDC and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, just to name a few. Giddyup. This week, we got what should be the final dredges of first-quarter earnings, with Facebook reporting $1.46 billion in revenue. That's a 38 percent increase over this quarter last year and a healthy $312 million in profit. Daily active users are also up, from 526 million to 665 million and, perhaps most importantly, Facebook managed to increase the performance of its mobile ads. That will be the key to its long-term success.
Daily Update for May 3, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Google Glass may gain iOS direction, text message support soon
Like it or hate it, Google Glass has recently been discussed on a lot of tech blogs. Tim Stevens at our sister site Engadget has been trying out his Glass around the house and on hot motorcycles, and a lot of other tech bloggers shelled out $1,500 to get the developer version of the device. One big negative for Apple fans has been that currently, only Android users get support for navigation and SMS text messaging. Now, Frederic Lardinois at our other sister site TechCrunch has news that iOS support may be coming soon. Lardinois was at the Google New York office yesterday picking up his own Glass and was told that turn-by-turn directions and SMS will soon be possible "independent of the device the user has paired it to." Right now, Glass will happily pair with your iPhone to get online (Glass doesn't contain its own cellular radio), but the higher functions need a Glass companion app running on an Android phone. Glass not only requires a mobile phone for connectivity while on the go, but location information as well. As Lardinois notes, "Glass is just another device that uses your phone's personal hotspot feature. This means Glass shouldn't have to depend on any application that runs on your phone, so the original restriction of making navigation and SMS dependent on the companion app was always a bit odd." The general public will most likely have to wait at least a year for widespread availability of Glass, so it's comforting to know that our Borg implant high-tech eyewear should work happily with iOS by that point.
Distro Issue 89: With Google Glass, is the future of wearable computing finally in sight?
Google has begun shipping the Explorer Edition of its high-tech headset to a select few over the past week. In a brand new edition of our e-magazine, Tim Stevens gives Google Glass the full review treatment, chronicles life behind the lens for a week and sits down with Google Ventures' Bill Maris for a chat on the device. We also get cozy with Google Now for iOS in Hands-On, ogle more of Mission Workshop's goods in Eyes-On and PlayJam CEO Jasper Smith tackles the Q&A. You can probably take it from here, but just in case, all of the download sources are down below for snatchin' up a copy. Distro Issue 89 PDF Distro in the iTunes App Store Distro in the Google Play Store Distro in the Windows Store Distro APK (for sideloading) Like Distro on Facebook Follow Distro on Twitter
