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Microsoft boosts Teams with new presenter tools and PowerPoint integration
At its Ignite conference today, the company announced a slew of updates for its video chat tool, as well as new made-for-Teams speakers.
Google's Pixel Buds translation will change the world
Google's Pixel 2 event in San Francisco on Wednesday had a lot of stuff to show off and most of it was more of the same: the next iteration of the flagship smartphone, new Home speakers and various ways of entwining them more deeply into your smart home, a new laptop that's basically a Yoga running ChromeOS and a body camera that I'm sure we've seen somewhere before. Yawn. We saw stuff like this last time and are sure to see more of it again at next year's event.
AI is already beating us at our own game
Although modern AI systems still have trouble deciding whether or not to flip that stranded tortoise in their path, they're already outpacing the intellectual capabilities of their creators in a wide variety of fields. From beating grandmaster Go players to outguessing cardiac surgeons, lipreading to audio transcription, neural networks and machine learning have already surpassed humans -- and that list is only going to grow longer.
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Update 14.3.4
In case you haven't launched Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 in the past few days, there's an update for the office suite that became available on May 7. The 14.3.4 update of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is considered to be a "critical" update, and includes a number of fixes. Most of the fixes appear to be for Outlook for Mac and PowerPoint for Mac, although there is one issue with saving files to SkyDrive and SharePoint in Microsoft Word for Mac that has been fixed as well. Microsoft also took the opportunity to let those who read the knowledge base article about the update know that Office for Mac 2011 is now available as a subscription offering as part of Office 365. Owners of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 can either wait for the update to show up and annoy them when they're trying to get some work done, or can download the update package directly.
Getting Ready for Mountain Lion: Preview
Preview, the app that lets you view pictures and read PDFs in OS X, is one of Apple's unsung heroes. There's so much you can do with this app. It goes far beyond simply looking at images. It's a minimal image editor. You can crop your pictures, reorient them, and export them to new formats. It's a multi-format viewer. You can use Preview to read Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. It's a PDF masterpiece. You can annotate PDFs, reorder pages, and add bookmarks. And that's all pre-10.8 behavior! You can do all that now, today, in Lion. Mountain Lion brings a bunch of new enhancements to Preview, taking a valuable little app and putting it on steroids. To start, you get all the standard ML built-in sharing, so you can share your images and PDFs to Messages, AirDrop, Mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. This greatly simplifies the path from importing and previewing images to sharing them directly with family, friends, and colleagues. Next, Preview for Mountain Lion adds in iCloud support. You'll be able to load and save images directly into the cloud for access from any of your Apple devices, mobile or desktop. But it's the PDF updates that really make the new Preview shine. Continuing to roll in Acrobat-style PDF editing, Preview will soon allow you to fill out PDF forms by auto-detecting those areas that are intended for text entry. Preview will find underlining and boxes, and will let you click and type to add your text. It also supports checkboxes. Once you've filled out your form, you should be able to to use Preview's existing signature support feature to sign your PDFs. But that's not all. Preview will let you search through notes and highlights, either by author or by content. That's a huge win for anyone who collaborates with others, and may need to find annotations in large documents on a per-person basis. Apple promises that adding inline notes will be much easier as well; "Click the area where you want to add the comment and start typing. When you're done, the text is hidden. Click to read the comment." Finally, the updated version of Preview will allow you to scan images and forms directly into existing PDF documents, so you can group pages and related material together, as you scan them. I spend a lot of time during my work-week using Preview. I can't wait to get started using these features. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99.
Leaked video promises Office 15 on a crane, on a train, in a boat, potentially with a goat
What's this, then? It's purportedly a leaked promotional video for Office 15, the upcoming version of Microsoft's perennial favorite software suite. Not surprisingly, the animated short, which was "pulled from beta software," talks up the software's cloud functionality. "It's your Office," says the chipper voice. "It goes wherever you go." That includes a number of motor vehicles and electronic devices, all the while being stored safely online. Hop in after the break for one of the happiest office suite promotional videos ever made.
AirParrot mirrors your Mac display to Apple TV in real time
A short while ago, I wrote about David Stanfill (of Napkin Studio) and his work on creating an AirPlay Mirroring receiver for OS X. Work continues on that project. At the same time, he's also building a tool that creates live mirroring from your Mac display to Apple TV. Called AirParrot, the new app allows you to select a Mac display and an AirPlay destination (typically an Apple TV). It then uses H.264 encoding to build a live video stream from your selected display. This allows you to work directly on your laptop or desktop system and mirror it to an HDTV display, just as you would using iOS's built-in AirPlay mirroring features. AirParrot is still in its early days. As yet, there is no subsampling (i.e. you cannot just pick a portion of your screen to mirror) and no audio mirroring. Stability can be a bit iffy as well and the developer is still working on a way to keep the Apple TV from going to sleep while mirroring. Built-in options allow you to control underscan (fewer pixels overall, so more encasing black space but better responsiveness) and compression quality (choose from low to high). The app is super useful for anyone who works in groups or in front of audiences. If you can live with the early adopter drawbacks, it will well be worth your money. You can produce live slideshows through Keynote and Powerpoint, demonstrate apps, collaborate with an audience at a corporate meeting, and more. Here's a video showing it in action from the Apple TV side of things. The biggest drawback in its current form is the natural H.264 compression, especially when working with larger screens. So many of us are used to working with high quality presentation on our main computers, which doesn't translate well to Apple TV resolutions. To deal with this, I ended up reinstalling Avatron's AirDisplay back onto my Mac. Using my iPad as an extra display and mirroring from that smaller screen. I was hoping to use Avatron's new Kindle Fire build for testing, as I felt the screen size (which falls between iPhone and iPad) would be an ideal resolution but their app is unfortunately stuck in Amazon review. I was unable to get early access to try it out. You can, of course, also downgrade your primary monitor resolution but I believe most people will find that a big pain in their daily workflow. The following screen shot is from the Apple TV side, mirroring a Keynote presentation set to an iPad via AirDisplay. To finish off, here's one more video, this time of the app's primary menu. That's an EyeTV HD screen just below it that's presenting the output of my Apple TV. Since I mirror my main display in this video, you end up with a nice recursion produced by displaying the data that's being mirrored, which is in turn resampled. AirParrot ($9.99) requires OS X Snow Leopard or Lion. NVidia or Intel HD graphics chipset are recommended for best performance.
