Tag: ajax

XBMC’s Kodi media player officially hits the Play Store

Kodi’s media player got a name change last year and now it has something even better — official Android status. The app formerly known as XBMC is now available on the Google Play store for all takers. It actually arrived to the store last month in beta form , but prior to that could only be sideloaded on Android. Version 15 (codenamed Isengard) now supports Android 5-specific features like 4K and variable refresh rates on certain Android TV devices, like NVIDIA’s Shield . Another new trick on all platforms is “adaptive seeking” that lets you search material faster by tapping a key several times. There’s also new audio and subtitle lists, an updated add-on manager, improved video queuing and better live TV closed-captioning. It has other minor tweaks and fixes (check the source), and the XBMC foundation said that the next release would support DirectX 11. You can grab the app now on Google Play, but just remember that Kodi is a deep app, so leave yourself some time (and possibly some help ) to get it working. Filed under: Cellphones , Home Entertainment Comments Source: Kodi

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XBMC’s Kodi media player officially hits the Play Store

Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

You ideally want to produce clean hydrogen fuel using clean sources, and Dutch researchers have taken a big step toward making that a practical reality. They’ve built a solar cell that uses a grid of gallium phosphide nanowires to make hydrogen gas from water. The approach gets a useful yield of about 2.9 percent in lab tests. That may not sound like much, but it’s about 10 times more effective than previous techniques and uses 10, 000 times less exotic material. It’s still going to take more refinements before this kind of technology is practical. Even hooking up silicon cells to a battery nets a 15 percent yield, for example. If scientists improve their methods, though, you could be driving hydrogen cars whose fuel is eco-friendly at every step, not just when it’s in your vehicle. [Image credit: AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi] Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Source: TUE , Nature

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Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

Lockheed Martin buys helicopter maker Sikorsky

Don’t look now, but Lockheed Martin just became an even larger aerospace powerhouse. The aircraft maker has acquired helicopter maker Sikorsky (best known for the UH-60 Blackhawk) for $9 billion. The two have already been partners on programs like the MH-60, but this gives Lockheed its very own rotary-wing team. If a customer wants something that flies, the company will have it covered. The buyout is poised to close by late 2015 or early 2016, provided everything goes smoothly. The union might come at a stiff price, however. Lockheed says it’s conducting a “strategic review” of both its information systems group and a chunk of its missile division — tough times in the market have led Lockheed to believe that these segments would be better-off either spun out or sold to someone else. That puts the future of more than 17, 000 workers in doubt, and that’s not including whatever jobs might be cut when the Sikorsky deal wraps up. [Image credit: AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee] Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Lockheed Martin

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Lockheed Martin buys helicopter maker Sikorsky

Plastic roads may put asphalt to shame

The days of putting up with crumbling asphalt streets might just come to an end. Construction company VolkerWessels has revealed plans for recycled plastic roads that are both more sustainable and more practical than old-fashioned blacktop. Besides reusing material, they’d last about three times longer and survive greater temperature ranges (between -40F and 176F) — despite their fragile look, they’re less likely to crack under the strain of vehicles or the weather. You can pre-assemble them to lay them down faster, too, and their hollow structure is handy for cabling and pipes. This is just a concept at the moment, but VolkerWessels fully intends to test it and make sure that it holds up in the real world. That’s not idle talk, either. The Dutch city of Rotterdam is interested in trying out these plastic surfaces in its “street lab, ” and the company hopes to have an honest-to-goodness route in operation within three years. If the idea still sounds outlandish, look at it this way: it’s likely the closest you’ll ever get to driving a Hot Wheels track in real life. Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Via: The Guardian , IEEE Spectrum , Slashdot Source: VolkerWessels

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Plastic roads may put asphalt to shame

Office for Mac 2016 exits preview, bridges the gap with Windows

The last time a new version of Office for Mac came out, the year was 2010. Microsoft had recently released the Kin ; our favorite e-reader had a QWERTY keyboard ; and people were still snickering at some awkwardly named gadget called the iPad . A lot has changed since then: OS X looks a little different; Windows looks a lot different; and believe it or not, people actually want to use Office on that weird iPad thing. Until recently, though, Mac for Office looked the same as it did when it first came out on OS X Snow Leopard. Finally, earlier this year, Microsoft released a preview of Office for Mac 2016, which brings feature parity with the Windows version ( Office 2013 ) and also better matches OS X’s current aesthetic . The final version is out today, and you can download it now for free — with an Office 365 subscription, or if you’re a student. What’s that, you say? You’d rather use Google Docs or OneDrive? You prefer Pages ?! You can have a peek anyway at the screenshot gallery below, and then read on for a summary of what’s new. Microsoft likes to say that its new Mac software is “unmistakably Office.” This is true: Office for Mac keeps the trademark Ribbon stretching across the top of the screen, except this time, it’s been reimagined to match the layout of Office for iPad . That means a generally flatter aesthetic, with a launch page for each app that lets you create a new document, open a local file or pick from a list of stuff you’ve worked on recently. For the first time on a Mac too, Office is integrated with Microsoft’s own cloud services (who’da thunk?), which means you can also open files stored on either OneDrive or a SharePoint site. Windows users have been able to do this since Office 2013 came out. Throughout, Microsoft also redesigned the various Office apps so that they’re optimized for Retina displays. As on Office for Mac 2011, you can use the apps at full-screen, except Microsoft switched to a different set of APIs, which — long story short — should make these transitions feel smoother than they used to. As on Office for iPad, you can choose a colorful theme that has — you guessed it — a brightly colored menu bar for each app (e.g., blue for Word, green for Excel, red for PowerPoint). If you prefer, you can also opt for a so-called Classic theme, whose gray menu bar is more in line with the minimal design of OS X Yosemite and El Capitan. That said, if you have lots of windows open at once, you might like the option of being able to find each one at a glance just based on the color scheme. A couple other new features permeate the new apps. When you make comments in Word or PowerPoint, they now appear as threaded discussions, instead of there being a chat bubble for each person’s contribution. This, too, has been around on the Windows side since Office 2013. Speaking of catch-up features, Office for Mac is also getting real-time co-authoring in Word and PowerPoint, which means you and someone else can be editing the same document at the same time. The only limitation is that there’s a paragraph lock keeping two people from editing the same paragraph at the same time. The winner? Whoever was there first. It’s a similar story with each of the individual apps: There isn’t a single feature here that you haven’t already seen on Office 2013 or even Office for iPad. In Word, you get a “Design” tab in the Ribbon, along with a navigation pane on the left and a style pane on the right. In Excel, a “Recommended charts” feature suggests a chart format for your particular data set. The idea there is that there are so many chart types, but users don’t always know what’s best for their data. Moving on, most keyboard shortcuts will now work across both Macs and PCs, which is to say you can lead with the Ctrl key if you prefer. That said, Mac diehards can also stick with the Command button if that feels more natural. Other enhancements in Excel include “slicers” to re-pivot data, a print-to-PDF feature, a full formula builder and improvements to autocomplete (i.e., entering data into cells). PowerPoint, meanwhile, gets a redesigned Presenter view that displays notes alongside each slide, and that’s consistent with the iPad and Windows versions. True story: Presenter view actually originated on the Mac, but was last improved on the Windows side. So we’re coming full circle here. In addition to that, Microsoft also added new slide transitions, as one does with a new version of PowerPoint, and also added a special viewing option that lets you see an overview of all the animations in your slide deck. There’s also a new conflict-resolution feature — a handy thing, given the new co-authoring tools. There isn’t a single feature here that you haven’t already seen on Office 2013. That covers the three biggies — Word, Excel and PowerPoint — but you also get Outlook for email as well as OneNote, which was not previously included as part of the Mac Office package. In Outlook, you can now propose a new time in the event you’re sent a meeting invite (previously, you could just accept or decline, which perhaps wasn’t the most helpful setup). Other long-overdue amenities include a unified inbox, conversation view, message preview and the ability to sync categories back to an Exchange server so that they’re not limited to your local machine. You can also see your calendar side by side with your inbox (this, too, comes in handy when someone sends you a meeting invite). As for OneNote, the new app comes on the heels of Apple unveiling its own revamped Notes app for OS X. The big update here, in Microsoft’s offering, is the ability to record audio notes, complete not just with timestamps, but also text markers, so you have a better idea of where to jump in. Office 2016 for Mac is available today for Office 365 subscribers. If you’re a student, you can also go here to see if you qualify for either a free or a steeply discounted four-year subscription (it depends on what school you attend). Later in the year, Microsoft says it will offer traditional copies of Office, where you purchase it once instead of subscribe. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments

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Office for Mac 2016 exits preview, bridges the gap with Windows

iPhone encryption has locked out Manhattan cops just 74 times

You’ll frequently hear law enforcement complain that it can’t break the full-drive encryption in newer smartphone operating systems, but how often does the police run into that problem, really? Thanks to a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, you now have a better idea. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has revealed that, out of the 92 cases where an iPhone with iOS 8 has been involved so far, the cops have been locked out 74 times. District Attorney Cyrus Vance portrays this as proof that officers need backdoors or other forms of guaranteed access, noting that there’s at least one case (in Illinois) where evidence from a victim’s iPhone led to a conviction. Police shouldn’t simply be told that there’s “nothing [they] can do, ” he says. Context is everything, however, and this isn’t quite as dire a situation as Vance made it out to be. The Manhattan DA typically handles 100, 000 cases a year — 0.0007 percent is a drop in the bucket. Moreover, there’s no records showing whether or not the encryption actually stopped the investigation cold. It’s possible that the security merely forced officers to rely on other forms of evidence. While there’s still a concern that clever criminals will take advantage of encryption, there’s also no data showing that there would be enough arrests to justify the reduced privacy. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Apple Comments Source: Wired

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iPhone encryption has locked out Manhattan cops just 74 times

Microsoft plans 7,800 layoffs, $7.8 billion Nokia write-down

After cutting its workforce by around 18, 000 over the past year, Microsoft is readying another round of heavy layoffs. The company will cut 7, 800 jobs over “the next several months.” Many of the dismissals will come from Microsoft’s phone business, which joined the company’s newly formed “Windows and Devices Group” in June. As part of the merger announcement, Microsoft also revealed it would say goodbye to the last two major Nokia executives still at the company, Stephen Elop and Jo Harlow , in the near future. It’s clear that CEO Satya Nadella wants Microsoft to be more focused than it has been in recent years. Nadella inherited a company in transition; its nascent Surface business had only just begun to find its feet, and the Nokia deal (arranged by the previous leadership team) had yet to complete. About that acquisition: Microsoft is writing-down a large portion of its value in the coming months — $7.8 billion — which is essentially a tacit admission that paying so much money for the flailing company was not the most financially sound decision. At the end of March, Microsoft had 118, 584 employees (down from 127, 000 in July 2014). Losing another 7, 800 represents yet another dramatic change within the company. In the past month, Microsoft has sold some of its Bing maps tech (and employees) to Uber, and also struck a partnership with (Engadget’s parent company) AOL to essentially hand off its display ad business . In an email to Microsoft employees , Nadella says the company remains “committed to our first-party devices including phones, ” but wants to “focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving innovation.” What does that mean? Apparently, it means running “a more effective phone portfolio, ” with a narrowed focus of “three customer segments.” It says business customers will get “the best management, security and productivity experiences, ” value phone buyers “the communications services they want, and Windows fans “the flagship devices they’ll love.” That suggests we’ll see more low-end Lumias, business-focused services and high-end Surface Pro-style devices in the future. [Image Credit: Stephen Brashear / Getty Images] Filed under: Microsoft , Nokia Comments Source: Microsoft

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Microsoft plans 7,800 layoffs, $7.8 billion Nokia write-down