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Inspiring Kids to Learn Coding through Playing Games Apr 17th 2015, 07:05 Code Kingdoms wants to inspire kids to learn one of the essential creative skills of the 21st Century – coding. They want kids to have the freedom to have fun and be creative with code, so they built a game that enables just that. In Code Kingdoms, kids build and protect their own worlds and share them with friends. Code Kingdoms allows kids aged 6 to 13 to learn computational thinking alongside a real coding language, whilst promoting soft skills like problem-solving, teamwork and time management. They encourage kids to experiment with code knowing that it won’t always work – breaking things is OK! Getting stuck, debugging and further problem solving are all part of how programming works in the real world. Requirements: – Demo: http://codekingdoms.com/ License: License Free The post Inspiring Kids to Learn Coding through Playing Games appeared first on WebAppers. Once A Virtual-Reality Joke, Google Cardboard Is Unfolding Into Something Real Apr 16th 2015, 20:18 Maybe big things really can come in small, ridiculous cardboard face-boxes. Google just made several announcements Thursday that aim to advance its popular Cardboard virtual reality viewer for manufacturers, app developers and end users.  Cardboard, the curious corrugated VR "unit" Google launched at its I/O developer conference last year, seemed like a practical joke at first. (It's basically a box you fold up into a kind of headset with an Android phone in it to serve as the display.) A year later, though, we’re all still waiting for the punch line. Meanwhile, Google has gotten serious, encouraging development for VR apps and interest by “hardware” partners to make their own versions of Cardboard.  See also: Google Cardboard Gets Software Development Kit For VR Apps It's now offering a new certification program, changes to its developer tools and new app categories for end users looking for compatible VR apps. Let’s take a closer look. Just "Works With Google Cardboard" Google really, really wants virtual reality to take off—especially the sort enabled by its Cardboard project. The company has been doing its best to raise an army of Cardboard users and partners, and the latest announcements play directly into that. The hardware, if you can describe a cardboard box that way, now comes in a variety of configurations from an array of partners. Google wants to help them, so it now offers a new certification program that lets manufacturers—like DodoCase, Knox Labs and others—prove that they based their versions on Google’s original design and that the alternatives will work with any Cardboard app. As part of the program, Google offers a "new tool that configures any viewer for every Cardboard app, automatically.” Manufacturers list their major parameters—including focal length, input type and inter-lens distance—and the system churns out a QR code they can post on their products. Customers scan the code with the Cardboard app, and all supporting VR apps get optimized for that viewer. Compliance lets them slap a “Works with Google Cardboard” badge on their products, which sell for anywhere from $9 to $40, depending on the options.  On the software side, app developers get new design guidelines for creating immersive experiences without disorienting users or confusing them with nonsensical menus and interfaces. Speaking of disorientation, Google also revised its Cardboard software development kits for Android and Unity, so head tracking and drift features work better. Update your apps with the new SDKs, and you too can earn a "Works with Google Cardboard” badge. Not to leave end users out, Google also improved search and discovery for the “hundreds” of Cardboard apps and games available in Google Play. The company rejiggered the categories, which now list new ones such as Music and Video, Games and Experiences. Just The Beginning Google Cardboard Cardboard may look like an elaborate prank, but the real joke in virtual reality is how long it's taken the technology to slog its way to the market. Laughable—and let’s not forget nausea-inducing—early attempts stymied this niche for decades. Then Oculus’ 2012 Kickstarter for its Rift headset put VR in the spotlight again. Now owned by Facebook, the former indie startup has since worked on several developer versions, including its latest "Crescent Bay” unit, and its technology shows up in Samsung’s smartphone-powered Gear VR headset. Meanwhile, others—like Sony and HTC—have hopped on the bandwagon. But they’re taking their time. A few have promised consumer-ready releases this year, including Oculus (finally). Amid the frenzy, Google swooped in last year to give the public the cheapest, fold-it-yourself VR viewers imaginable—even offering instructions on how people can make their own. It also promoted other companies that make their own knock-offs, urged app makers to develop supporting VR apps, and jazzed up its own Google Maps application with Cardboard-friendly VR Street View. See also: Street View Comes To Google Cardboard "We think that Google Cardboard offers everyone a simple, fun, and affordable VR experience,” said Andrew Nartker, product manager for Google Cardboard. "It's exciting to show everyone that their current smartphone can already run great VR apps.” That sentiment steps on Samsung’s territory more than most. While underpowered compared to full, computer or gaming console VR set-ups, Gear VR eradicates cables by seating a smartphone inside the unit. But Gear VR is limited to Samsung devices only. The low-tech Cardboard won’t work with every single smartphone on the market either, but at least it works with more—including some Nexus, Samsung, Motorola phones and others. Plus, Samsung’s headset costs $200, while you can pick up Cardboard for less than the price of lunch. Soon, that meager investment could look even better. Google also scooped up some new talent—namely the audio maestros from Thrive Audio team, from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering, and experts in 3D painting from Tilt Brush, which won a Proto Award for “Best Graphical User Interface” last year. The move suggests that, when it comes to the humble Cardboard, Google hopes to have more to brag about before long.  Lead photo by Adriana Lee; others courtesy of Google Media files: MTI2NzcwMjc1MTA5OTU3NjAy.jpg (image/jpg) Speaker Profile: Circa's Matt Galligan On The Wearable Future Of News Apr 16th 2015, 20:09 Wearable World Congress, ReadWrite's signature annual conference in San Francisco on May 19-20, will feature the key players who are shaping wearable technology and the Internet of Things. This series profiles some of the experts who will be speaking at the conference.   Is the smartwatch a media platform? As the first Apple Watches start landing on wrists later this month, we'll soon find out. One entrepreneur who's poised to leap from phone to wrist is Matt Galligan, the CEO of Circa News. Just one year ago, I declared Circa, which delivers news updates written specifically for smartphones, the first media startup to be truly "wrist-ready." Since then, Galligan has proven me right in spades. Last fall, Circa updated its app to deliver notifications on Android Wear devices. And now it's ready to do the same for the Apple Watch. Buy tickets now: Wearable World Congress, May 19-20 I've invited Galligan to speak at Wearable World Congress, ReadWrite's signature event in San Francisco, where he'll join a panel of media entrepreneurs and innovators. In preparing for his session, I've had several conversations with Galligan about how the Apple Watch and other wearables will change the media business. Here are some highlights:  CNN, the New York Times, and Flipboard have announced Apple Watch apps. How do you feel about the competition? Everyone's going to have their own unique play. The New York Times is going to do one-sentence stories, which I read to mean headlines. We've been building for this platform since we launched in 2012. We write our stories so they'll work, no matter the mobile interface.  You've got a massive mountain to climb if you haven't been thinking about mobile in a fundamental way. Flickr had a mobile website. That didn't stop Instagram from crushing it. What have you changed about Circa for smartwatches? The challenge was that, at first, we were [building the app by] staring at an emulator on a screen. The moment people held up their wrist for 30 seconds, it was a different ballgame. I bet you 50%, maybe even 75% of developers won't have done that. The story list is gone. You used to be able to read the entire story. We pared the app down dramatically to just updates and notifications. You can get an update and follow a story, and if you want to read the full story, you can do that on your phone. I’m not convinced that someone’s going to stare at their watch that long. Anyone who’s going to try to present articles is insane. The lesson for me is that it's all about "glanceability" and quick actions. Get those right, and then worry about features. What will change for developers, as usage shifts from phones to wearables? I feel like notifications are a blunt object right now. You’re going to keep seeing things rip through. If your phone lights up on the table, you can ignore it pretty easily. If you’re in a social setting and your watch is going off, it’s going to be a problem.  The norms by which we use things are going to shift pretty quickly. A lot of how we use things is going to shift as well. Push notification abusers will get called out much quicker than they do today.  To hear more from Matt Galligan and other innovators and experts, register for Wearable World Congress 2015, May 19-20 in San Francisco. Early bird prices end soon! Photo of Circa News CEO Matt Galligan by Dave Morin Media files: MTI5NTI3MjI1ODkxNDYxNTk4.jpg (image/jpg) The Fitness Tracker Is Finally Growing Up Apr 16th 2015, 18:53 Jawbone has announced two new fitness trackers to go alongside its existing flagship UP3 band, which is finally shipping this week after a production delay of several months. With more advanced sensor technology and a fledgling mobile payments system, they represent the next generation of fitness trackers at a time when many are wondering if they have a future at all. As far as wearables go, so far 2015 has been the year of the smartwatch—the Apple Watch, Pebble Time and numerous other devices are testament to that. With all these intelligent timepieces featuring multiple sensors and smartphone notifications kicking around, the question is whether there's still room for devices that focus solely on activity tracking. Jawbone certainly thinks so. The company's new line-up offers three devices that are similar in appearance but different in functionality: the UP2 (announced today, on sale now), the UP3 (announced in November, on sale this week), and the UP4 (announced today, on sale later in the summer). Up, Up, Up And Away The new bands feature Jawbone's most advanced sensors yet. The UP2 is Jawbone's old UP24 tracker shrunk down and wrapped in a new UP3-style suit of clothes. It doesn't have the advanced heart rate and extra sleep tracking capabilities of the UP3 or UP4, but it only costs $100. Like the UP24, it measures steps, activity, calories and sleep. Then there's the $180 UP3, announced last year and finally shipping this week after a delay in production. Jawbone promises it's the company's most accurate fitness tracker yet, thanks to a bioimpedance heart rate monitor and sensors for skin conductivity, temperature and sweat. Wearers can get more detailed information about their cardiovascular health and individual sleep stages than they could with previous Jawbone kit. These advanced electronics also make their way into the newly unveiled UP4, coming this summer for a $20 premium over the UP3 price. That extra markup gets you an NFC-powered mobile payment feature that for the moment only works with American Express cards—users link a card via a smartphone app and can then pay for items with a tap of their fitness band. In the design of all three new bands, watch faces and flashing lights are most definitely out. "Too many bright displays, techy beeps and LEDs have invaded our lives," writes Jawbone's Yves Behar. "Health and lifestyle data is of greatest value if people track their progress continuously all day and night. A small and lightweight device on the wrist makes it something we forget we are wearing, in a good way." All the bands come with Jawbone's colorful app for analyzing statistics and a Smart Coach utility that takes collected data and makes exercise, diet and sleep recommendations based on it. Fitness Tracker 2.0 The HTC Grip—like most trackers—comes with a display. Jawbone isn't the only manufacturer rolling out extra goodies for users. Misfit this week announced an upgrade to its mobile app that lets users interact with Yo, Spotify and other services from their wearables—music playback can be started or stopped with a double tap, for example. Like Jawbone's line-up, Misfit's range of products focus on fitness tracking with a minimal and discreet aesthetic. With almost every other firm—including Microsoft, Fitbit and HTC—producing chunkier smartband/smartwatch hybrids that tell the time and display smartphone notifications, it will be interesting to see which strategy pays off. After all, aren't wearables supposed to be near-invisible extensions to our bodies rather than cut-down mini-smartphones? Jawbone and Misfit will be hoping there's still a market for devices that maximize functionality while minimizing bulk. Images courtesy of Jawbone and HTC Media files: MTI5NTI1OTI0Nzg0ODA2MzY2.jpg (image/jpg) LulzBot Mini: Finally, A Reliable 3D Printer Apr 16th 2015, 17:12 It's tough to decide what to look for in a 3D printer these days. The oldest machines use sturdy, reliable parts, but can feel intimidating to the beginner. 3D printers aimed at the mass market favor closed-off designs meant to make them simpler to use, but they usually don't live up to that promise and become even bigger headaches to fix. The Lulzbot Mini is the new mid-range ($1,350) 3D printer from Aleph Objects, which has traditionally made printers for relatively experienced users. The machine has the same stripped-down, industrial feel of early—and technologically challenging—desktop 3D printers. But over several months of testing it proved so reliable and easy to use that I am convinced it belongs in the mass-market printer category.  Nearly all of the prints that came off the Lulzbot Mini looked perfect. Here, it unsurprisingly struggled with the steep overhangs on the car. Getting Started Unboxing a 3D printer for the first time can be scary. Did it break during shipping? Do you need to calibrate it? Where does this weird part go?  Luckily, the Lulzbot Mini comes with a thorough guide to getting started. A twig of filament—the spooled string of plastic that feeds into the printer—comes pre-loaded in the printer with directions on how to use it for a test print. When that runs out and you move to an actual spool, which hangs from a bar at the top of the printer, the guide walks through how to pop open the print head and load in the fresh filament. Like much of the printer's innards, the latch you pop open is made of 3D printed plastic. It feels a bit flimsy. But the filament loaded easily enough, and if the compartment ever breaks, Aleph provides the files to just 3D print a replacement part. The Lulzbot Mini's print bed is made from a plastic called polyetherimide (PEI) that requires no maintenance. Most 3D printers need to have their bed prepped with painters tape, glue or hairspray to ensure the printed plastic sticks. PEI adheres to plastic on its own and does not need to be cleaned between prints. Once everything is set up, you load a model into the software and hit print. Then, that's it. The Lulzbot Mini and its software take care of everything else. Industry-Tested Software The Lulzbot Mini runs a custom version of Cura—the open source 3D printing software produced by popular 3D printer maker Ultimaker. Those who have used other 3D printers will have an easy time with Cura, but users new to the machines will likely find it intimidating. That feeling quickly abates. Cura opens with a 3D workspace. You load in a file the same way you would open a document in Microsoft Word. Short menus on the left side provide options such as print quality and filament type. Models can also be rotated and scaled. It's not beautiful, but it is simple and intuitive.  My one gripe is that Cura doesn't warn you of potential print errors. For example, a particularly steep overhang can cause the print to fail or have defects.  Once you hit print, Cura cuts up the file into the tiny layers the printer will print and spits out the code. All of this is done in the background, without any action required from the user. Then the intimidating window pops up. The print control window lets you do everything from move the print head by a few millimeters to giving direct, typed demands to the printer.  On an old RepRap—the open source 3D printers that helped to jumpstart the consumer 3D printer market—this window was necessary. You used all of the controls. The good news is on a Lulzbot Mini everything is automated. After you hit print, the printer just prints. Just put your hand over your screen and ignore all the complicated information, because you don't have to use it.  But if you want to, you still can. It Just Works Once the printing gets underway, you can appreciate where the Lulzbot Mini really stands out. Before each print, the printer cleans its print head on a pad at the back of the print bed, which helps prevent clogs. The pad needs to be replaced every so often. The print head also carefully touches down on each of the four corners of the print bed to ensure it is level. Traditionally, the head had to be lowered to the bed manually to ensure it started printing at the right level. Automatic leveling has become fairly standard on modern printers, and the Lulzbot Mini nailed it every single time. The head always made perfect contact with the bed. That precision continues throughout the prints. While the Lulzbot Mini has the occasional hiccup on tough overhangs, its basic printing is remarkably reliable. I didn't have a single print fail for no apparent reason—something that's sadly common on other printers. While printing with HIPS, the somewhat unusual plastic that Aleph recommends for printing on its machines, prints stuck to the PEI bed perfectly every time. And once the bed cools, they actually pop off on their own. You simply lift the printed model off and the bed is all set for the next print. Sacrifices To sell such a nice printer at such a relatively low price, Aleph gave the Lulzbot Mini some clear handicaps. It does not print over WiFi or via an SD card. Instead, your computer must be tethered to it via a USB at all times. It's inconvenient, and if you accidentally unplug the cord you have to start over. The Mini also trades out Aleph's higher-end TAZ 5 printer's large print volume for one that measures 6 x 6 x 6 inches. That's enough to print a cover for your mobile phone and lots of other trinkets, but limits its use for prototyping and other jobs that require large models.  The Takeaway Charmanders printed at the low, medium and high quality settings on the Lulzbot Mini. I was pleasantly surprised by the Lulzbot Mini's ease of use and reliability, which easily beat out any printer I have used in the past. Its low-maintenance nature erased many of the headaches I usually associate with 3D printing. If you are interested in buying your first 3D printer (or second, or third), take note of the Lulzbot Mini. It may not look the friendliest, but it is. If only every desktop printer could be this trustworthy. Media files: MTI5NTI0NjM1NDg5Mzc1NTA2.jpg (image/jpg) Listening To Music In An Age Of Infinite Choice Apr 16th 2015, 13:00 Spotify offers a library of 30 million songs. Today, with $9.99 in your back pocket and a working Internet connection, you can sign up for Spotify and get instant access to some 30 million songs, all ready and waiting to be played at the push of a button. For today's teenagers, that's the new norm. For anyone who grew up carefully collecting records one by one before the turn of the 21st century, it's a strange new world that takes some getting used to. The growth of the Web and the spread of high-speed access to it hasn't just brought all the world's knowledge to our fingertips, it's brought all of the world's music (and movies and TV shows) along, too. And that's causing a fundamental change in the way we think about the songs that can play such large roles in our lives. In the words of Thom Yorke on the 2000 Radiohead song "Idioteque"—which may or may not be about a future technological apocalypse—it's "everything all of the time." Which is bound to have an impact on both our listening habits and even such simple things as the basic idea of a record collection. How We Got Here Spotify is accessible from almost anywhere. The history of recorded music starts somewhere in the 19th century, but for brevity's sake we'll start with the MP3: Once music could be easily digitized into ones and zeroes, it became much easier to duplicate tunes and ping them across the world in seconds. Having dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of tracks on a PC and later an MP3 player was the first fundamental shift in music listening habits. Listeners could suddenly queue up a whole day of music with a few clicks of the mouse. The iPod (launched in 2001) wasn't the first portable digital audio player, but it was clearly the most influential. Why take a stack of CDs with you in the car when your iPod can carry more songs more easily? The landscape shifted dramatically in a few short years. Whereas tapes and vinyl had to be listened to sequentially, and CDs only offered limited mixing options (remember those 6-CD changers?), the humble shuffle button soon became an integral part of listening to music. Thousands of songs, sorted randomly on your behalf, plus the ability to jump ahead whenever you like—perhaps that's why more than half the tunes we listen to now get skipped before they finish. Subsequently, less than a decade after the MP3 turned music listening on its head, Spotify did it again with its 2008 launch. Suddenly (just about) all of the music in existence was yours for one flat monthly fee, as long as you keep paying. It meant renting, rather than owning, music. But it also ushered in the age of the infinite record collection: More music at your fingertips, but also less of a connection to it. What Happens Next Rdio opened its virtual doors in 2010. We all have our own listening habits, of course. Vinyl sales are on the rise again, which proves we're not all signing up for the digitally streamed, limitless record collection model just yet. But for kids growing up with Spotify and Netflix, earlier ways of collecting music, whether on CD or iTunes, are looking rather out-dated. When whatever you want to listen to is only a search or a click away, it's hard to go back to a model of slow, deliberate and expensive aggregation. Having everything all at once is the new standard, and looks likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. (Even Apple has apparently seen the light.) It's impossible to ignore YouTube in all of this. The video service isn't as slick and organized as Spotify and the like, but it's heading in that direction. It's also free of charge to boot, making it the go-to music source for more people than you might realize. You can listen to any new single on YouTube free of charge from anywhere, and that's a huge deal. With so much music available, listeners need tour guides more than ever—whether that's Spotify's recommended panel, a playlist made by your next-door neighbor or a Pitchfork review. We need help finding the best stuff—although again, there's also a bewildering variety of options for that kind of discovery. We've always had gatekeepers—like the radio DJ or record store clerk—telling us what's worth listening to from everything that's out there. But the mechanics of how that works have become more crucial and more democratic. Bringing Back Focus R.E.M. has changed since 1994 ... and so has music. One of the first albums I bought was R.E.M.'s Monster, on tape. I would listen to it over and over again for weeks on end, with an occasional switch back to the radio. There was no shuffling and no skipping, and as a consequence I got to know that album better than almost any other since. Monster is still there in my Spotify collection, of course—but now it's surrounded by millions of other songs that are a click away. I could still listen to it for hours on repeat, but I'm much less likely to with so much other stuff to explore. In some ways, I'm happy to embrace the ways of the future; but there are aspects of the analog age that I miss. As Nick Hornby so wonderfully puts it: "If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you?" Of course, Spotify and the other streaming services still allow you to form your own virtual record collection through playlists and favorites, and showing it off to the world has never been easier. A bigger issue is bringing back intent, focus and deliberate listening, free of skips and shuffling, during a time when 30 million other songs are only a click or a tap away—and that's an Internet-age problem that's not exclusive to music. I'm glad to have instant access to every album ever made but I wish I knew a few more of them as well as I know Monster. If Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, Google, Apple and all the other players in the music streaming field can solve that problem, then they're welcome to add on a few more dollars to my monthly subscription. Images courtesy of Spotify, Rdio and R.E.M. Media files: MTI5NDU0MDkxNzI1MjE2MjIy.jpg (image/jpg) Useful Services & Tools for Converting Designs to Code Apr 16th 2015, 12:13 An experienced website or mobile app developer can sail through the initial design process, only to have things come to a grinding halt when the time comes to convert his designs into SEO-friendly, cross-browser compatible code. PSD to HTML conversion can be a time-consuming task, and an error-prone one as well for anyone who does not do it on a daily basis. Fortunately, there are a number of companies, and several online or downloadable tools, that can do the conversion for you. Several of the leading PSD to HTML/CSS businesses are listed below, together with a downloadable tool you can use to perform conversions yourself. Browse the list, and see what might work best for you. PSD To Manythings PSD to Manythings, as the name implies, is a company that offers a variety of practical services to the web community. Send them your PSD design, and they will return pixel perfect, cross-browser compatible (X)HTML, CMS, and Ecommerce markup, templates, or themes. This company has a sterling reputation. It serves clients in over 50 countries, and it has more than 500 WordPress implementation projects under its belt. This is the only PSD to HTML company recognized by Woo Commerce. Many within the using community will tell you it is among the top 10 companies in the industry. In addition to their basic PSD to HTML services, PSD to Manythings’s services include PSD to Responsive HTML, WordPress, OpenCart, and Joomla. They will also upgrade and/or maintain your website if you request. Their development team will fully adhere to your specifications and requirements and deliver clean, well-documented, and SEO semantic code on time and at an affordable price. Chop-Chop.org Chop-Chop.org is another highly-regarded company that can take your PSD design and convert it into hand-coded, multi-browser compatible, pixel perfect HTML and CSS markup. All you have to do is upload your design file, whether it is a PSD file, an AI file, or another standard file type, and send along your payment (PayPal will work best). Your designs will be sliced, or “chop-chopped” if you prefer, and the resulting clean-coded, SEO-friendly HTML/CSS files will be sent to you via email. Chop-Chop.org currently serves over 500 clients in more than 30 countries. With more than 5 years of software development experience behind it, this company has a well-deserved reputation as being one of the best, and possibly the best startup shop in the HTML/CSS slicing service industry. PSDgator PSDgator will take your PSD design and convert it into an HTML/CSS thing of beauty. You can rest assured the code will be clean, pixel perfect, cross-browser compatible, and W3C compliant. It will naturally be hand coded as well. In addition to working with new designs, they will re-code and re-slice your working website at your request, using SEO-friendly, hand-coded practices. PSDgator will go over your project’s design, requirements and specifications with you in detail any time you request them to do so. They guarantee you will always receive friendly customer service, as well as prompt customer support should you encounter problems in installing a coded page. Most orders are completed within 48-hours. Direct Basing With 7 years of experience, and over 10,000 successfully completed projects behind them, Direct Basing is in an excellent position to offer you top-quality service. They invite you become one of their more than 2,700 clients. You can try their PSD design file conversions to HTML, XHTML, or HTML5 with or without WordPress, Joomla or Magento CMS today. The finished code will be cross-browser compatible, responsive, and SEO-friendly. You upload, Direct Basing does the slicing and coding, and you download. That’s all there is to it. SLICENPRESS SlicenPress has the expertise to help you build good websites for your clients. Among their various services, they offer PSD to HTML/CSS slicing, responsive development, and adaptive layouts that are delivered to you as code that has been thoroughly tested across each of the major browsers and devices. If you need on-going support or assistance in keeping your site up to date, SlicenPress can help you there as well. Pixel2HTML Like most of the other companies in this list, Pixel2HTML will take your beautiful design, and convert it into and amazing Responsive HTML/CSS markup. Their prices are quite reasonable, which makes this company well worth looking into. Once you have uploaded your Photoshop/Sketch/Illustrator design files, there’s not much more for you to do while your files are being converted into hand-coded websites. At your request, Pixel2HTML can also integrate you markup files with CMS such as Shopify, Tumblr, or WordPress. All you need to get started is to request a quote. CSSChopper The CSSChopper development team has successfully completed more than 13,800 projects for 9000+ clients. What this means for you is if you choose them to provide your PSD to HTML conversion needs, you have every reason to expect a quality service in a reasonable turnaround time. They accept virtually any standard design format, and your multi-browser compatible, pixel-perfect hand written code will normally be ready for you to download in less than 2 days. CSSChopper emphasizes the point that their code is always designed to be as fast loading as possible. CodedPSD CodedPSD has great faith in their capabilities. If the hand coded HTML/CSS you receive after having submitted your PSD design file does not meet with your complete satisfaction, there will be no charge. It is a nice feeling to work with a company that does not expect payment until you have received the final result and you are happy with it. Their clean code is W3C validated, cross-browser compatible, and search engine optimized. XHTMLized The XHTMLized front-end development team adapts Photoshop, Illustrator, or Sketch design processes, and translates them into website-ready code. They provide back-end support as well. They will take your PSD design, slice it, and convert it into an up-and-running HTML5 or WordPress-based website or website page in no time. XHTMLized developers will also create clever animations for your website, thanks in part to their expertise in CSS3 transitions and animations. Your needs may be nothing more than simple PSD to HTML conversions, but you nevertheless have a full-service software development company at your disposal for whatever assistance you may need. Reliable PSD If you’ve ever sent your design off to get coded, and what you got back horrified you, this new service just might be your “beacon of light”. Digital agency Unexpected Ways recently launched a PSD to HTML / WordPress conversion service called Reliable PSD. They too experienced countless frustrations with these services, so they decided to create their own. Louisa Levit, Reliable PSD co-founder said, “We realized that so many designers were as frustrated as us. So we said, ‘If we ran one of these companies, what would we do differently?’ And we realized we were really passionate about fixing this problem.” MARKUPBOX MARKUPBOX offers multiple types of PSD conversions, including PSD to HTML/HTML5. They offer reasonably priced, 100% hand-written, pixel perfect markup that is cross-browser and device compatible. AI and PNG conversion is also available. Their markup is easily integrated with the CMS of your choice. Optional features include Responsive, retina display compatibility, and screen reader’s compatibility. XHTMLchamps XHTMLchamps enjoys a global presence, and currently serves clients in 60 countries, from Argentina to Greenland. Their services include PSD conversions to XHTML and CSS2, PSD conversions to HTML5 and CSS3, Responsive web design, and mobile template development. As a conversion service provider, they put a premium on delivering SEO-friendly code that is guaranteed to load quickly on any of the standard browsers. HTMLPanda HTMLPanda develops websites and mobile apps. They invite you to submit your latest and best design idea so they can work their magic and deliver a top-quality digital product in return. Their specialty is converting PSD into W3C-validated, SEO-optimized code, whether it is for your website or for a mobile device app. The company is in fact an industry leader in iOS and Android mobile app development, having a broad background in development and coding. CODLY Codly is a Photoshop extension especially for mobile developers and designers. Since it acts as an extension, there is no need for you to learn a new tool to make your own conversions. Everything is drag and drop. You can use this extension as a prototyping tool, use it to produce native Android XML, or generate code for cross-platform use on iOS, Windows, and Blackberry. PSDSLICER With PSDSLICER at your disposal, you can convert PSD to XHTML, HTML5, Responsive, or WordPress. Their hand-coded markup strictly follows W3C guidelines, and is cross-browser compatible, pixel perfect, and SEO friendly. Their pricing is quite reasonable, and delivery time is normally within 24 hours. Express delivery (8 hours) is also available, as is 24/7 online support. Ending thoughts Now that you have had a chance to browse this list of use PSD to HTML/CSS conversion companies, give one of these companies a try if you believe they could be of help to you, and let us know how it worked out. If you don’t see a company you feel belongs in our listing, please leave a comment below and tell us which one it is. The post Useful Services & Tools for Converting Designs to Code appeared first on WebAppers.

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Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Pipes Output

How To Blur Your Search Tracks On Google Apr 17th 2015, 20:29 Like a lot of people, you may be vaguely uncomfortable with how much Google knows about you. It makes a great deal of money mining your search history in order to help various companies serve you targeted ads, and even though it doesn't sell your data to advertisers now, you never know if it might change its mind sometime down the road. So what can you do about it? The Boston-based privacy company Abine has one solution. Earlier this year it launched Private Search, a service designed to shield your Google queries so the search giant can't link what you’re searching for to its increasingly detailed profile of you. Private Search is easy to set up and use. The best part is that you don't really have to change your behavior--or even log out of YouTube and Gmail—to get it working.  But it's not perfect. Private Search currently only works with Firefox, for instance, and it's not clear when—or if—it will ever work with other popular browsers such as Chrome. It also won't protect you on other search engines like Bing or Yahoo, although Abine says it's working on that. You have to sign up and opt in to the service, and its protection—against a still somewhat hypothetical threat—isn't foolproof against every possible tracking technology. For instance, Private Search won't shield you from canvas fingerprinting, a tricky new user-tracking technique that's emerged over the past year at some sites (though not Google). Why Private Search? Perhaps in response to public pressure, Google offers users concerned about privacy various opt-out options. Users can opt out of ad preferences and disable their search history in Google's dashboard. And so far, the search engine behemoth does not share the information it tracks with data brokers, and no data changes hands when advertisers target specific demographics using Google’s ad network. But the possibility of accidentally leaking information still exists—for example, if you create an account on a website after clicking on a targeted ad, you may be unwittingly giving demographic information to that company. As Abine CTO Andrew Sudbury put it to me: Your search history is part of what's being used to create a profile of you, your demographics, your propensity to buy certain types of services, and all of these data profiles are slowly and inexorably being exposed to more and more commercial uses because that's just the way the market forces are pushing them. Additionally, mass market profiling is increasingly becoming more invasive in ways that aren’t always easy to either predict or immediately pinpoint. This isn't just an abstract threat. I spoke with Adi Kamdar, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he described the problem eloquently: What we've seen when it comes to data brokers is we see them targeting poor populations or certain disenfranchised populations or people who are older or more subject to falling for scams or falling for payday loans or taking financially risky investments, or something along those lines. That's the sort of population that should be most worried about this but is probably the least exposed to these sorts of tools or information about privacy tools or data brokers. Private Search is an easy choice for your less technically-savvy friends or family members who may be more vulnerable to potential future threats, and also less likely to hear about them. Do Not Track Me Launched in late January, Private Search is part of Abine's freemium privacy suite Blur, which combines the company's previously separate privacy tools DoNotTrackMe and MaskMe. Blur includes tools for masking email addresses, your phone number and credit card data; blocking tracking by data miners; and managing online passwords. The Private Search tool allows users to tap into a randomized pool of made-up identities—ones that come with prepopulated tracking cookies and user-agent strings. Cookies allow websites to track an individual's browsing activity and to identify return viewers, while user agent strings provide sites with information about your browser and operating system. Using fake identities prevents all that from happening. How To Blur Your Searches After you’ve set up the Blur extension in Firefox and opted into Private Search, you're ready to go. Private Search provides a new made-up identity for each individual search. It then funnels the request through an SSL tunnel, so that the search is encrypted—even Abine can't see what you're searching for. And every phrase or topic you search appears as if it is unconnected to previous searches, since each query is sent through Abine’s server with an entirely different IP address (which is yet another avenue by which websites can track people). Your search requests are modified before leaving your browser in a way that breaks the identity connection between your searches and the rest of your tabs. That means you can keep your YouTube tab open with all of your videos, and stay logged into Gmail, all without allowing Google to link your search queries with your account (and identity). One thing to look out for: Private Search will protect queries made through Firefox's search bar, but you won't necessarily know it. Sudbury told me the extension isn't currently tweaking the search-results page to include the blue-colored text that lets you know Private Search is on the case. Other Ways To Evade The Search Police "One of the real problems with privacy on the Web is that it's simply too hard," Sudbury says. "Companies say, ‘look, all of these controls exist, so people don't need to be protected,’ but these controls are like ridiculous. To implement them is ridiculous.” This makes Private Search a great option for casual Web users with limited technical knowledge or a low tolerance for disabling and resetting plugins. If you're so inclined, though, there are plenty of (somewhat more cumbersome) alternatives to the Blur tool: Browsers such as DuckDuckGo or StartPage don’t track users the way that Google does, but the results provided are considerably less refined. Using a VPN offers protection from hackers at cafes, and swaps your IP address with that of your VPN’s, but it will not hide your identity from Google. Plugins such as AdBlock Plus, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and Disconnect—as well as some of Blur's other features—can help stop some types of online tracking, though they may render some sites unusable, and they don’t block everything. These solutions work best for more sophisticated users, as it is sometimes necessary to disable the trackers in order to use specific sites. To be clear, Private Search isn’t a solution for, say, Chinese dissidents or anyone else wanting to hide their identity from the government. In such cases, the Tor browser is a better option. Tor prevents Google (or anyone else) from knowing your IP address, it keeps no history, and it clears cookies and cache between each session. Tails is an entire operating system that operates using Tor. But Tor is slower than other browsers due to the way it reroutes traffic to preserve anonymity. In addition, features such as video playing are disabled, certain sites have restrictions (such as captchas), and some sites even block traffic from Tor. Google Chrome’s Incognito mode doesn't store cookies, but it also doesn't hide your IP address. Additionally, you’d need to open a new Incognito tab with a clear cache and new set of cookies for each search to avoid them being linked with one another during each session. And using Incognito mode requires you to re-enter passwords for password-protected sites for each session. Google also recommends blocking or deleting cookies, disallowing them from certain sites, and clearing browsing data. Lead image by ilouque

Media files: MTI5MzUzOTYxNTQyMDAzMzMx.jpg (image/jpg) Pebble Smartstraps Are Coming—And Here's What They Might Do Apr 17th 2015, 18:49 One of the most intriguing—yet still underappreciated—elements of Pebble's latest flagship smartwatch, the Pebble Time, was the late-breaking announcement that the gadget will support "smartstraps." Pebble Time Smartstraps are basically hardware extensions to the smartwatch that can augment its capabilities or provide brand-new ones. The concept is pretty simple—think of a watchband equipped with, say, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi radios, extra batteries or other sensors. These smartstraps can plug into the magnetic charging port on the back of the Pebble Time, which doubles as a data connection.  The possibilities are limited only by makers' imaginations (and technological reality). It is, of course, still early—the Time itself doesn't ship until sometime next month—and so there are way more smartstrap ideas floating around than practical examples of the technology. But it's a fascinating, if clearly still evolving, space. So let's see what smartstrap developers are thinking of strapping up. What’s Up Pebble’s Sleeve There’s one place you can be sure that will have smartstraps on offer, and that’s Pebble itself. Eric Migicovsky Pebble credit: Pebble “It's only been a few short weeks since we announced smartstraps, but we're pretty pumped with how it's going,” Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me via email. “Pebble is working on a few projects internally, but we haven't made any of them public yet.” While he wouldn’t say for sure what Pebble has planned, Migicovsky offered up some hints: Imagine GPS, so you could track your runs and rides without taking your phone along, or a battery strap, increasing Pebble Time's battery from seven days to…maybe a month? Then there is always the opportunity for hackers and makers to create straps that bring a special, unique sensor or functionality for a particular use case, like a certain health situation. Migicovsky didn't elaborate on what he meant by “a certain health situation,” but it's not hard to imagine some of the possibilities. Perhaps we'll see straps that can measure a wearer's pulse, blood oxygen saturation, body temperature—pretty much the bevy of biometric readings boasted by fitness trackers. And while it may be a bit technologically trickier, a glucose reading smartstrap for diabetics isn't outside of the realm of possibility.  Features like that could give wearers more insight into how their bodies react to exercise, or maybe if they're coming down with something. The more sophisticated the sensor, the more complicated the insights can become; it's conceivable that a smartstrap could warn a wearer about an impending heart attack.  Xadow and Spark To help good ideas go from concept to reality, Pebble announced a $1 million fund in March that will go towards smartstrap developers seeking crowdfunding. After a month, though, Migicovsky tells me that only one project—TimeDock, a charging cradle for the Pebble Time—has received any portion of Pebble’s smartstrap fund. Why a non-smartstrap earned some of Pebble's funding isn't clear—but, if nothing else, it seems like a nice way to charge your watch. Independent efforts, however, appear to be moving forward. Seeed, based in China, is working on an adapter to connect its modular hardware platform, Xadow, with the Pebble Time via its smartstrap port. Xadow’s modules include barometric sensors, NFC chips, and accelerometers, among over a dozen others; determined makers could probably cobble together some interesting smartstraps with those tools. Seeed's Xadow modular platform will be compatible with the Pebble Time via an in-development adapter. Meanwhile, there’s also Spark, a San Francisco Internet-of-Things startup, whose staff hackers threw together a cellular connectivity smartstrap ... in an afternoon. “When Pebble was announcing Time, they talked about their smartstraps, and we were building the Electron at the same time,” Zach Supalla, Sparks’ CEO, told me in a phone interview. The Electron is Spark’s recently Kickstarted cellular connectivity development kit, meant to help makers connect electronics to wireless networks. “We thought, oh, this would be a really cool use case,” said Supalla. “Let’s hack together a prototype and show how a Pebble could theoretically be not tethered to a phone and connect directly to a cellular network.” The cellular connectivity "hackstrap," made in an afternoon by Spark. The prototype won’t be for sale from Spark anytime soon—or, really, anytime at all, since the company's main mission is creating tools for companies who are building connected products. “Really for us, it’s about inspiring people to think about creating products like that themselves,” Supalla said. “We’d love to see somebody take the Electron, which is our development kit, and use it to create something like that as a commercial product.” Strap Hacks So that leaves the rest of us—non-professional makers who have big ideas. Browsing through the Pebble Smartstrap forums reveals a wealth of concepts, but only a few users who might have the technical know-how to try and get them made. Some of the most repeated suggestions offered by the forum’s enthusiastic posters include a game controller of some kind, as well as solar energy or kinetic energy harvesters that could be used to extend the Pebble Time’s battery. “Oh yeah, I heard about the game controller one,” Migicovsky told me. “That sounds ridiculously cool. Right now a lot of people are gaming on Pebble with apps like Pixel Miner. Pixel Miner, a popular game for the Pebble, could get even more interesting with a smartstrap controller. "[That] will be even cooler with a controller,” he added. As for straps that charge the Pebble via alternative energy sources, Migicovsky said: I'd put kinetic or other energy harvesters in the moonshot category. Hard to do right now, but worth investigating. The Pebble Timetable Even though the Pebble Time will hit our wrists in about a month, the wait for smartstraps will be a good deal longer—even from Pebble itself. “It will probably take 6-12 months to see more smartstraps hit the market,” Migicovsky said. “Hardware is hard!” In the meantime, the CEO agreed that if Pebblers wanted to get smartstraps a bit earlier, a 3D printer might not be a bad investment. That’s not a brush off for amateur hardware makers who want to jump into the smartstraps game. While not running the company, Migicovsky is getting in on the strap hacking himself. “I'm working on a little hack to make a Geiger counter smartstrap,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.” Pebble Time and smartstrap images courtesy of Pebble; Xadow image courtesy of Seeed; Electron image courtesy of Spark; Pixel Miner image courtesy of Doctor Monolith on the Pebble App Store

Media files: MTI5NTI3ODY2OTE1MzQyMzQ2.png (image/png) Google Doubles Down On Deep Links For App Discovery Apr 17th 2015, 17:26 Google is finally getting deep into deep links. Starting this week, the search giant will add mobile-app links to its search results on Android phones. Specifically, the results will prompt Android users to install relevant apps that contain information related to their queries. It's a major step for Google, which has long faced a business quandary on mobile. Its primary advertising business is desktop-based and hasn't translated readily to smaller smartphone and tablet screens. Meanwhile, its search engine—also based on the open Web—has offered limited visibility into information locked away inside mobile apps. See also: Google Has New Targeted Ads That Encourage You To Dive Into Apps The search-result changes are Google's latest push to build out a mobile Web of "deep links" that take users to pages within apps, whether or not they're currently installed. They turns Google into an app discovery index, one that highlights content deep inside an app and might in turn inspire users to download it. This could obviously benefits for anyone using Google search, as it can turn up app-based information you might otherwise have missed in a Web-only search. (It might also irritate some users by cluttering their results with app-install prompts.) Developers, Index Your Apps But it's much more a play for the hearts and minds of app developers. App-install links in Google search results could offer a huge incentive for developers to use Google's technology, which it calls App Indexing, to create those deep links to pages, photos, videos and other information inside their apps.  See also: Google Search Extends Deep Into Apps With Android 4.4 KitKat (Just in case you didn't get the picture, Google’s blog post on the subject is titled, "Drive app installs through App indexing.") App Indexing has been part of Android for more than a year, and already helps point users to relevant apps. For example, if you're looking for a movie review and already have the Flixster app installed, the search result would present you a deep link to the app. But it wouldn’t work if you didn’t already have the app installed on your phone. Now Google will highlight apps in search results whether or not the apps are installed, and then prompt you to install if not. The feature will include all apps whose developers have registered them in Google’s App Indexing program, which currently contains more than 30 billion deep links. Lead photo by Roy Luck; animated GIF via Google

Media files: MTI5NTQ3MjI2NDgwNDE3MjQ2.jpg (image/jpg) Thanks To Google's Mobilegeddon, Your Search Rank May Be Toast Apr 17th 2015, 13:00 It's not as if you haven't been warned. Google has said for years it was going to get serious about mobile. Now, on April 21, it is. As it announced back in February, on April 21 Google will "expand [its] use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal," which "will have a significant impact on search results." See also: Why Google Wants To Padlock The Web While most big companies have planned accordingly and can sleep through "Mobilegeddon," others, like Procter and Gamble and Microsoft, have not, and need to optimize their mobile sites or risk fading from Google's sight.  Carrots And Sticks For years Google largely ignored the mobile Web as it focused on Android and native apps. But recently the company has kicked its mobile Web love into overdrive, announcing a number of initiatives to dramatically improve performance of Web apps on Android.  As summarized by Michael Bleigh: It's hard to even enumerate all the different ways they're working on this. From speeding up paint to putting more workload into the GPU to providing flame charts (so cool!) in DevTools so you can figure out what causes that jank. Those are the carrots Google is offering the world. But there are sticks, as well, and its Page Rank is the biggest stick it wields. While Google has talked for years about the importance of the mobile Web, it really wasn't until February that it got everyone's attention. At that time, Google announced some upcoming changes to how it ranks mobile websites: Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices. While great for users, it's less great for those companies that continue to plod along the mobile path. While this change will affect small companies, it will also hit big companies like Microsoft (Windows Phone), Procter and Gamble, and more. As if Windows Phone needed any more headwinds. So what's an enterprise to do? Avoiding Mobilegeddon For some, the answer is "Build a responsive website!" This is a great place to start and is, in fact, Google's recommendation (and has been since 2012).  But companies shouldn't stop there. Mobile success isn't ultimately a factor of making a desktop Web experience look nice on mobile devices. It's a matter of rethinking the Web experience for mobile and, really, the complete brand experience on mobile. When Flipkart, India's Amazon, did this, it decided to dump its mobile website altogether and go all in on apps. For others, like MGM Resorts, the right approach has been to mostly embrace the mobile Web with a lighter app approach. Mobile Internet usage now exceeds desktop Internet usage, and has since early 2014, according to comScore. Whether that trend has hit your particular company, however, is another matter. Some companies will have most of their site traffic coming from mobile devices, whereas others will see most from desktop browsers. But dropping off the Google Page Rank radar is bad no matter how much of a company's business is currently coming from the mobile Web.   For those concerned by the changes—and if you're not, you're not paying enough attention—Google offers an easy way to check your site's mobile readiness. (Relax, ReadWrite.com is Google-approved.) Lead photo by Iwan Gabovitch

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Free Photoshop Mockups for Web Designer & Developer Apr 21st 2015, 07:05 Flat Apple Devices Mockup A huge collection of flat Apple devices mockups to showcase your responsive web designs. The PSD file includes iPhones, iPads, iMac and Macbook with different viewing angles and now even an Apple Watch! Free iPhone 5 Mockups When it comes to a mobile user interface design presentation these phone mock-ups will really come in handy. One of the important points to consider in UI design presentation is to make it looks natural as possible. To give a real preview of the original product to thee client or the public is really time consuming and need a lot of effort. Here is the set of iPhone 5 mockups. They served us well, hope you will find them useful too. A3 Poster Frame Mockups Poster frame mockup in universal A3 format; a great minimal template to display your poster design in a special realistic way. Free Apple Watch Mockups Apple watch is one of the latest products that has released recently. I expect there will be a lot of demand for Apple watch designs so here is a 4 Apple Watch mockups that you can use. These will help you design beautiful apps for this new piece of technology, and show them nicely to your clients. A4 Magazine Mockups A professional modern A4 magazine mockup template to present your design. The mockups are based on 16 different angles & arrangement settings. The post Free Photoshop Mockups for Web Designer & Developer appeared first on WebAppers.

Learn to Type Faster with Ratatype Typing Tutor Apr 21st 2015, 07:03 Ratatype is an online typing tutor and a great website for people who want to type better. Start mastering your skills with us, challenge your friends or simply get a typing certificate. Typing is a more important skill than writing nowadays. And if you do it slow you are just wasting your time. Your time deserves much more than this. If you increase your typing speed by 30% you can save 20 minutes daily. That’s 1 year of your life saved in 20 years! That is why Ratatype is here. We want to save your life! At least part of it. So, Ratatype is a website for you to learn touch typing online. It is delightfully easy and completely free. Requirements: – Demo: http://www.ratatype.com/ License: License Free The post Learn to Type Faster with Ratatype Typing Tutor appeared first on WebAppers.

Moore's Law Is Dead! (But Not In Mobile) Apr 20th 2015, 22:49 Moore's Law is dead at the age of 50. Everyone says so.  And yet, if we look at improvements in mobile performance over the past few years, if anything, we see Moore's Law in overdrive. What gives? Moore's Law Is Too Expensive Moore's argument, which has stayed strong for 50 years, is essentially that by shrinking transistors on a chip every 18 months or so, engineers could roughly double performance in that time period. More recently, however, the economics of shrinking transistors has become cost-prohibitive.  While Moore's Law probably has another decade to run, the cost of keeping up is already causing some to lose faith in it. The Wall Street Journal's Don Clark declares Moore's Law is "hitting some painful limits," given the exploding costs of shrinking transistors.  The Economist, for its part, highlights the shift away from raw processing power to cloud computing: [T]ransistors can be shrunk further, but they are now getting more expensive. And with the rise of cloud computing, the emphasis on the speed of the processor in desktop and laptop computers is no longer so relevant. The main unit of analysis is no longer the processor, but the rack of servers or even the data centre. The question is not how many transistors can be squeezed onto a chip, but how many can be fitted economically into a warehouse. Moore's law will come to an end; but it may first make itself irrelevant. But before we bury Moore's Law, it's worth exploring its current impact on mobile. Mobile: Moore's Law In Overdrive If we think of Moore's Law in terms of raw performance, and not necessarily a matter of shrinking transistors, then mobile computing clearly shows Moore's Law in overdrive. For example, if we look at how MacBook Pro performance compares to what Moore's Law would anticipate (using Geekbench data), it's clear that Moore's Law isn't driving laptop performance: Source: ReadWrite (Geekbench data) Now compare this to the meteoric performance increases for Apple's mobile iOS devices: Source: ReadWrite (Geekbench data) In the PC market, market growth and investment has slowed considerably, with the cloud taking on more and more of the burden of delivering processing power. In mobile, by contrast, the market is booming and the need for more on-device processing power is sprinting to keep pace with software (and cloud) innovation.  Again, I'm not really talking about the number of transistors scrunched onto a single chip, which is at the heart of Moore's Law, but rather an extrapolation thereof: mobile chip performance is off the charts, even as it stagnates in PCs. Room To Roam This isn't new, but it's being overlooked in the premature eulogies for Moore's Law. As Intel's Matt Ployhar wrote back in 2010, the mobile industry is moving at "Moore's Law pace or faster."  And then there's Raj Sabhlok's contention that even if Moore's Law is petering out for hardware, something similar is happening in software: "The price of software applications has plummeted, while the functionality and quality has grown exponentially." Either way, expect the pace of computing—and innovation—to accelerate for years within mobile. Call it the revenge of Moore's Law, or whatever you want. But it's fast, and getting faster. Photo by Pawel Loj; charts by ReadWrite

Media files: MTI5NjIzNDg4NDU2NTk1OTM0.jpg (image/jpg) Nokia Reportedly Planning A Return To Smartphones Apr 20th 2015, 21:27 The Nokia brand may come back to phones—just not Windows Phones. We spent a lot of time over the past few months bidding a soggy farewell to Nokia as a phonemaker. Those tears may have been wasted. Nokia may soon jump back into the smartphone game, according to a report published by Recode Monday. You may be scratching your head: What once was Nokia’s smartphone division was gobbled up by Microsoft in 2014, and its brand was subsequently scrubbed from the handsets. But there's still a Nokia proper left behind in Finland, and the remnants of that company could take up the mantle of Android once again.  The New (Old) Nokia The details from Recode’s report are relatively scant: Nokia Technologies, the division responsible for licensing the company’s patents, has plans and designs for new smartphones (and, apparently, virtual reality projects) in the works.  And before that report, there was already ample evidence mounting that Nokia had plans to come back to mobile. In November, 2014, the company designed the N1 Android tablet and licensed it to Foxconn to manufacture and distribute it. Around the same time, Nokia’s Z Launcher for Android devices appeared on the Google Play Store. N1 courtesy of Nokia However, no matter how many great ideas Nokia Technologies is cooking up, it likely won’t be able to do much with until late 2016, barring some tricky negotiations with Microsoft. That’s because the terms of Microsoft’s 2014 acquisition of Nokia's devices business prohibit the Finnish company from selling smartphones under the Nokia name until after December 2015. The company can’t license its brand for any smartphones until after Q3 2016. (The N1 appears to take advantage of a loophole that allows for the Nokia brand on tablets.) There's another problem, which is who's going to make the phones. Nokia’s manufacturing plants went to Microsoft, too. And it just spent a lot of money buying Alcatel-Lucent, so it's unlikely to go out shopping for a company that owns manufacturing facilities. Nokia doesn't need to replace the factories Microsoft bought. Apple doesn't own its own phone factories, and there are plenty of Asian contract manufacturers who would be happy to build phones for Nokia.  (And here's a thought: If Microsoft's Windows Phone business doesn't pick up, it may want to keep those former Nokia factories busy by building phones for other companies. Nokia could be a customer.) Nokia's Z Launcher offers a new twist on the Android UI. One thing is pretty clear, though. Given its recent Android-focused projects, don’t be surprised if the return of Nokia’s mobile business is Android-exclusive. We may finally see some more Nokia X phones after all, whether Microsoft likes it or not. Images courtesy of Nokia

Media files: MTI2MzMwODczMTExOTU1NDY2.jpg (image/jpg) OnePlus One Now On Sale To Anyone, As OnePlus 2 Ramps Up Apr 20th 2015, 20:24 This time last year, the OnePlus One smartphone was the stuff of phone geeks’ dreams—an advanced smartphone powered by a modified version of Android called CyanogenMod. The device was a critical success and apparently so exclusive, the company wouldn’t just let anyone buy it. You had to request an invitation first, and wait lists were long. Now the company has opened up One sales for broad availability—which is great news, if you don’t mind picking up a year-old device. If you do, then take heart: OnePlus has a new generation up its sleeve, coming soon. The first OnePlus One offers a high-end smartphone for the unsubsidized base price of $299 for the 16GB model, and just a wee bit more for quadruple the storage, at 64GB for $349. To purchase this self-proclaimed “flagship killer," just visit the website, no invitation necessary. Or you could wait for the next-generation model, the OnePlus 2, which will hit the market in the third-quarter of this year as—you guessed it—an exclusive by invitation only. Apart from the new numeral naming convention, the company hasn’t disclosed details about this device, but judging by the top-shelf specifications in its last version, the hardware could be worth the wait. See also: So Cyanogen's Big Plan To Seize Android Is ... To Jump In Bed With Microsoft As for software, the company’s spat with Cyanogen lead OnePlus to create its own homegrown Android modification, OxygenOS. While One users can either stick with CyanogenMod or install OxygenOS, it’s not clear yet whether OnePlus 2 users will have the same choice. The new handset could eschew the Microsoft-backed Cyanogen software altogether.  Image courtesy of OnePlus

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ReadWrite Turns 12: Now, To Map Our Own Future Apr 20th 2015, 19:31 The tween years are turbulent, and ReadWrite, which turns 12 years old today, has been no exception. In the past year, we've gotten a new publishing system, a new office, and new owners and colleagues.  What has not changed is our commitment to exploring the new world of technology and making its complexities accessible for everyone who wants to reap its benefits. As I wrote a year ago, on the occasion of ReadWrite's 11th anniversary, just making it this far in the fast-moving world of digital publishing is its own accomplishment. Now that we're part of Wearable World, with new resources behind our mission of democratizing technology, I feel like it's time to lift our sights and not just chronicle the effects technology is having on our world, but dive into the maelstrom of change ourselves. Respecting History, Celebrating The Future ReadWrite began life as ReadWriteWeb, with a special focus on the newly open world of Web publishing. Having largely won the battle to make the Web both readable and writable, we saw something happen that broadened the ambit of our journalism and the intensity of the challenge we faced: The Web has become the world.  The simple protocols advanced by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to link together documents have now become the basis of the Internet of Things. Connected devices speak to other machines through application programming interfaces that run on what are, in essence, Web servers. It is now the world that we must make readable and writable, and hence open to all who seek opportunity and the realization of their creative potential.  See also: Should We Crowdfund ReadWrite? I am convinced we can't do this alone. We need to rally our community of readers. We're now building some tools which I hope will connect our readers far more intimately into our process of reporting and storytelling. Here, too, we have an opportunity to take something that is presently broadcast-oriented—our own digital publication—and make ReadWrite itself far more read-write in nature. We're on the brink of announcing more details about this. If you want to stay informed, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or subscribe to our email newsletter. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your ideas on how we can let our community participate in ReadWrite's next chapter. Tweet at @owenthomas or leave a comment here to tell me what you think. Photo by pagedooley

Media files: MTI5NjE5OTUxNTUxMDM5NDk4.jpg (image/jpg) Twitter Now Lets You Receive Direct Messages From Anyone Apr 20th 2015, 18:33 Twitter DMs are undergoing another change. Starting Monday, Twitter users get a new option to receive direct messages (DMs) from anyone in the network, whether they're following the sender or not, reports Recode.  Previously, users only got private one-to-one DMs from people they were following. Likely aimed at brands looking for a more direct way to interact with customers, the change follows a recent update that allowed groups of people to chat privately in the same conversation.  See also: Group Direct Messaging Is Just Twitter's Latest Flip-Flop The messaging race has been heating up lately, with social giant Facebook pushing out updates to its Messenger service recently. Twitter has its eye fixed on this area as well; its new option is merely its latest attempt to own the world's conversations.  The Ever-Changing Face Of Twitter Twitter's new-look home page. It's been a busy few months for Twitter, which hopes to boost user engagement and spruce up some of the neglected parts of its service (such as Direct Messaging). Last week the network revamped the home page that shows up for non-users, giving newcomers an easier way to find out what's happening immediately without requiring an account login.  The company has also launched its own live-streaming app in the shape of Periscope, as well as enabling native video uploads in January. Live-streaming, video content, messaging—Twitter's rivals have pushed forward on all of these areas as well, making for an increasingly heated competition.  It's been a long and windy road to get to this point, and our brief history of Twitter DMs shows just how unsure the company has been about how to use its 140-character private inbox feature. The latest change looks like another line item in its growing list of experiments. While allowing Direct Messages from anyone actually makes sense in a lot of scenarios—from personal to business communications—it may also be a recipe for spam, if companies abuse it. Hopefully, as Twitter rolls out this feature, it also working on some measures to guard against that.  The option to receive DMs from anyone should start appearing in the settings dashboard from today. To turn it on, log into Twitter, select the "Security and privacy" page, and scroll to the bottom.   Twitter home page image courtesy of Twitter; all others courtesy of ReadWrite

Media files: MTE5NDg0MDYyNDg2ODU3MjMx.png (image/png) Can We Find Meaning In Our Wearable Data? Exist Thinks So Apr 20th 2015, 17:04 Thanks to a recent explosion of wearable devices and continuing improvements in smartphone sensors, we're collecting more data about ourselves than ever before: steps taken, sleep had, calories burned, distance run, and many other metrics. There's still plenty of room for improvement in terms of health tracking and sensor technology, but the basics are comprehensively covered, and the data is pouring in. So what, actually, do we do with it? The next challenge for developers is finding meaning in our wearable data, turning an endless table of figures into something that's useful and life-enhancing. Knowing your average step count for the year is one thing; knowing what to do about it is another. Working Harder ... And Smarter The Jawbone app makes suggestions. The process of setting goals—exercise, steps, sleep—is now a familiar one that underpins just about any activity tracking app out there. Yet some users are struggling in making sense of this data or finding the motivation to keep recording it without any ultimate payoff. There are several groups of people working on the problem. TicTrac, for example, pulls in data from trackers and apps to provide a deep look at your activities and health. The platform is based around core areas (like fitness or sleep), enabling users to both visualize their data and act on it. One of the more promising platforms in this area—though still in the early stages of development—is the Web app Exist. It imports data from wearables, apps and services to build up an overall picture of users' health, attempting to find patterns and trends you can then act upon. Exist aims to do more with your data The number of plugins Exist already supports is impressive: Fitbit, Jawbone, Twitter, RescueTime, Last.fm and even weather forecast feeds. Many more integrations are expected further down the line as the platform grows, and there's an API in the pipeline to make this easier. "We were inspired to create Exist after frustration using activity trackers on their own," explains co-founder Belle Cooper. "There's so much more you can do with your steps and sleep data in the context of your entire life. It can be pretty boring to just watch that 10k steps goal every day, not to mention the motivation it provides fades pretty quickly. We wanted to build on top of those raw numbers to provide something more useful." That usefulness manifests itself in various different ways, such as charting an average sleep time or step count over many months. Some of the correlations the app can draw are pretty bizarre—like the relationship between how far you walk each week and how much you tweet—but as Exist adds more integrations it will become more helpful to its users. In The Mood One of Exist's manual features is also one of the most important. Users can opt in to rate their mood at 9pm each evening, which can then be charted against steps, sleep and other data. Is too little shut-eye putting you in a bad frame of mind? Is a lot of music good or bad for your mood? It's also handy at spotting something out-of-the-ordinary—a sudden shift in average bedtime perhaps, or an unexpected surge in productivity—and alerting users to something they otherwise wouldn't have noticed. "We track the strength of correlations over time," Cooper says, "so users can see that, for example, last year they were more likely to have a good day on the weekend, but this is less true lately. We can't provide the reasons why this is—that's up to you to find out—but we uncover patterns that users may not have noticed on their own." Exist gets smarter over time too, using data from the past 90 days to suggest new targets for the future. If you play tennis every Wednesday, for example, Exist suggests a higher step goal for that day, without interfering with the overall average. "This is built-in and requires no effort from our users apart from checking Exist each day to see what their goal is," Cooper explains. "It actually becomes fun to see what goal you've been set—or set for yourself through your actions, essentially—for the day. This is one of our biggest aims for Exist: to make your data useful and actionable with as little input from you as possible." Drowning In Data The main Exist user dashboard. Right now, the Exist team consists of two people working in their spare time, so progress is gradual. Alongside new integrations with third-party hardware and software, iOS and Android apps are imminent. The aim is to collect as much information as painlessly as possible. "I think context is something we're still trying to achieve in terms of wearables and all personal data," Cooper says. "Seeing your step count for the day without the context of what else was happening in your life gives you a really skewed view of your progress and can make it disheartening to work on building healthy habits or achieving goals." "Our lives are so connected and interwoven that it's impossible to get a picture of even one aspect, like your health, from just one or two data points. We need to find better ways to connect all of this data, and allow the user to provide context for outliers in their data." For example: If you're suffering from a bad cold, it's probably better for you to stay in bed than try and hit that 5,000 step target for the day—your fitness app should be intelligent enough to recognize this and adapt accordingly. More data is required, and (as the data load increases) more intelligent ways of sorting through it. As developers catch up with the wearable boom, apps like Exist are going to be invaluable in telling us not just how we're doing but what we should be doing next. Lead image courtesy of FitBit; screenshots by Exist and Jawbone

Media files: MTI5NjEwNjkwMjU5NDI1NzU4.jpg (image/jpg) Google Unlocks Wi-Fi, Wrist-Flicking And More For Android Smartwatches Apr 20th 2015, 14:00 As the earliest of Apple Watch adopters get ready to strap on their new iPhone companions, Google decided to remind everyone that it, too, has a smartwatch platform. Monday, the tech giant announced changes to the Android Wear software, some of which take direct aim at the competition. The software update turns on Wi-Fi support, letting watches work even without smartphones nearby, plus the ability to move through notifications with new wrist-flicking interactions, always-on apps and sketch-to-send emoji replies.  See also: What Android Smartwatches Really Need To Compete Google’s wearable software may be less than a year old, but in the fast-moving world of smartwatches, it already runs the risk of becoming stale. Altogether, its new updates put Android Wear a little more on par with the Apple Watch, which lands on (some) customers’ wrists in mere days. Consider these strategic moves; the Apple Watch also uses Wi-Fi and lets users draw on top of its watch face. Here’s how Google’s version works. Ready To Wear Last year, teardowns revealed that the Moto 360 and Samsung Gear Live had Wi-Fi-capable radios, though neither actually offered any features that used them. Now we know why. Putting to bed recent rumors, Google is flipping the switch on Wi-Fi support. The software already allows for offline music and standalone GPS features, primarily to unshackle its fitness features. But Wi-Fi support could be the biggest liberator yet.  See also: Hey, Wait A Minute—The Moto 360 Has Wi-Fi? Previously watches like the Moto 360 and LG’s G Watch R required a Bluetooth connection with smartphones to work. Now, as long as both the watch and the phone are connected to the Internet, the wearable will be able to pipe notifications and put Google Now features on the wrist. In other words, you can still use your watch, even if you leave the house without your Android smartphone.  To build on the convenience theme, Google also gave users the ability to flick their wrists to move forward and back through info “cards” on the watch, which should be handy when those hands are full, as well as keep apps and screens from going to sleep. The latter may be helpful when checking off grocery items or navigating through city streets. Interesting features, considering Apple’s watch has gotten flack for being clunky and difficult to use. The rival watch forces people to learn how and when to use taps, “Force Touches" and the Digital Crown.  Android Wear will also feature new way of responding to messages, by drawing emoji, seems fun and charming.  Sure, it looks like a direct attack on the Apple Watch, which lets people make simple sketches and send them to contacts. But Google’s variation on the theme matches your shaky scrawl with its own library of hundreds of emoji texting graphics, pulling up the one it thinks you’re trying to send. That spares recipients, who won’t have to decipher the chicken scratch you just blasted their way. Amid these extras, Android Wear also boasts one fundamental change: a new app drawer. Similar to what third-party apps like Mini Wear Launcher do, Google made watch apps and contacts easer to reach from the main watch face. Instead of speaking or going through menus, you just swipe left.  Ready Or Not Google may have just closed some of the gap between its play for the wrist and Apple’s, but it also silences criticisms that Android Wear requires too much swiping. See also: The Apple Watch: Here This Morning, Today Sold Out Through June The changes may also come with downsides, though. Flick-based motion control may be ripe for accidental triggering, and the potential effect of always-on apps and displays on already limited battery life could fill any Android watch user with dread. The company does its best to ease battery worries, stating that "the screen is only full color when you're actively looking at it—so you get the info you need, and you save on battery life.” That may help, but we’re skeptical. There will likely be some sort of impact on those power cells, especially with Wi-Fi added to the mix.  Even if the new features just sip instead of guzzle power, they’re drinking from an awfully shallow well. For the most part, Android smartwatches tend to only last for a couple of days as it is. We’ll know for sure once the changes roll out over the next few weeks. The LG Watch Urbane will be first up; at some point after that, LG's G and G Watch R, the Moto 360, Samsung Gear Live, Asus ZenWatch and Sony’s SmartWatch 3 will receive the update. Lead photo courtesy of LG; Moto 360 photo courtesy of Motorola; all other images courtesy of Google

Media files: MTI1ODkzNDg0NjQ4MzQ0MTk1.png (image/png) Lazyr.js – A Small Library for Lazy Loading Images Apr 20th 2015, 12:18 Lazyr.js is a small, fast, modern, and dependency-free library for lazy loading images. Lazy loading boosts page speed by deferring the loading of images until they’re in (or near) the viewport. This library makes it completely painless – maximizing speed by keeping options to a minimum. The scroll event has been debounced to minimize the weight on the browser, and images are revealed within rAF to ensure optimal rendering. For each image, put a placeholder in the src attribute, the regular image in the data-layzr attribute, and the retina image in the data-layzr-retina attribute. Requirements: JavaScript Demo: http://callmecavs.github.io/layzr.js/ License: MIT License The post Lazyr.js – A Small Library for Lazy Loading Images appeared first on WebAppers.

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Basscss – A Low Level CSS Toolkit Apr 22nd 2015, 07:03 Basscss is a lightweight collection of base element styles, immutable utilities, layout modules, and color styles designed for speed, clarity, performance, and scalability. Using clear, humanized naming conventions, Basscss is quick to internalize and easy to reason about while speeding up development time with more scalable, more readable code. Basscss strikes a balance between consistency and flexibility to allow for rapid prototyping and quick iterative changes when designing in the browser. Requirements: CSS Framework Demo: http://www.basscss.com/ License: License Free The post Basscss – A Low Level CSS Toolkit appeared first on WebAppers.

Amazon Rolls Out Destinations To Help You Plan Weekend Trips Apr 21st 2015, 20:57 Amazon knows what you buy, what you watch and even which of your home appliances need repair. Now it wants to know how you spend your weekends away. The company just added Amazon Destinations, a new service designed to help Amazon customers find nearby places for quick jaunts close to home.  Though wrapped up as part of Amazon Local, the company's Groupon and Living Social rival service, Destinations won’t serve up deep discounts from local businesses. Rather, the travel service will focus on corralling hotel options (at their regular prices), along with links to restaurants and other attractions. The approach, first spotted by Skift, guarantees Amazon has plenty of hotel inventory, since it won’t have to strong arm businesses into slashing prices. Hotels also incorporate Amazon’s user review model, letting customers review their experiences or vote on the helpfulness of other people’s reviews. Of course, Yelp does something similar—though it frequently finds itself in hot water over its user-reviews and rather opaque ratings system. Amazon, on the other hand, has largely managed to avoid similar controversies, at least when it comes to user product reviews. Now we’ll see if it holds up for travel reviews. For the time being, Destinations covers the regions around the Pacific Northwest, Southern California and the Northeast. But if Amazon expands the service, it would push into territory carved out by Expedia, Travelocity, TripAdvisor and a growing array of local travel-oriented sites and apps.  Where Do We Go From Here? Amazon's hardware initiatives have been uneven at best—with a category-defining Kindle e-reader, mildly interesting Fire tablet, a blockbuster Amazon Fire TV stick and last year’s unmitigated flop, the Fire smartphone. Meanwhile, its digital offerings have been firmly mediocre; Amazon Instant Video has become a staple offering on smart TVs and set-top boxes, but suffers from an inferiority complex when it comes to Netflix and Hulu. That inconsistency could have led Amazon to double down on what it knows best: merging its digital and physical world. That power play has fueled its e-commerce empire since 1995, and likely inspired services from Amazon Local to the new Amazon Home Services, Amazon Dash Button for instant product ordering, and its new Dash Replenishment Service. Destinations looks like just another building block toward Amazon’s long-game, whatever that may be. (We have some ideas, though.)  For now, Amazon’s strategy comes off a bit like a twisted Santa jingle, blurring the line between helpful services and creepy undertakings: Amazon can see you when you’re shopping, it knows when you hire folks. It knows when you stream Orphan Black, and it knows when you leave home.  Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Photos and screenshots courtesy of Amazon

Media files: MTI5NjQ0NzU2ODY2MjEwMjcw.png (image/png) Sony Says Pop-Up Notifications Will Come to Android Wear Apr 21st 2015, 18:35 Sony's SmartWatch 3 Hot on the heels of Google’s Monday announcement of new Android Wear features, Sony has made an announcement of its own—revealing a couple more interesting new features coming to the wearable operating system. According to Sony, Google gave its watch platform more than just flick-based controls, always-on apps, and a new built-in app launcher. Android Wear devices like the SmartWatch 3 will also get pop-up notifications and adjustable font sizes. Considering there are no actual software differences between Android smartwatches, all of them should get the changes. I contacted Google, which confirmed the new additions.  See also: Google Unlocks Wi-Fi, Wrist-Flicking And More For Android Smartwatches Adjustable font size on Android Wear seems pretty self-explanatory in terms of what it will mean for the platform. Essentially, users will have more control over the size of the text on their watches. The helpfulness or convenience of pop-up notifications, however, seems less certain. In fact, they have just as much chance of being really great as they do of being really annoying.  Pros And Cons Of Pop-Ups Smartwatches aren’t much more than notification machines already. Currently, one of their main reasons to exist is to siphon notifications from your phone to your wrist, so you can keep your smartphone in your pocket and go about your day. But pop-up notifications could make for information overload, especially on a screen so small.  On the other hand, the new updates to Android Wear make apps more usable and accessible in general. Wearers may soon find themselves treating their smartwatches a lot more like their smartphones—which could mean they might appreciate (or hate) pop-up notifications in the same way.  Right now, Android watch alerts live mostly on your home screen in the form of Google Now cards. You configure the notifications on your phone to determine how notifications show up on your wrist. For instance, I turned off sound notifications for emails, but left them on for texts. So when my ZenWatch is connected to my phone, I get a buzz with every new text, but emails appear silently. Both notifications generate new cards, and neither interrupt my app usage on my watch.  In other words, I don't see new card alerts when I'm actively in another watch app. But a new pop-up notification system may change all that.  Android Wear's new "always-on" apps mean that pop-up notifications could be pretty useful. Currently, you can't see new card alerts unless you go back to the homescreen. That could be an issue if you take advantage of Android Wear's new “always-on” feature for watch apps. But with new notifications showing up immediately (which is what "pop-up" suggests), then you might see every new alert blaze across the display as it comes in, even if you're in another app.  The company didn't offer specifics on how they will work, and those details matter. It would be great if you can navigate your city's streets with your Moto 360, without worrying that you're missing texts or emails. But not if they're intrusive or blaring at you all the time. Hopefully, Google will also include new settings that let you control which apps or, better, contacts can interrupt you.  We'll know more over the next few weeks, as the Android Wear update rolls out to everyone. So keep your eyes glued to your wrist for that system update notification.  SmartWatch 3 image courtesy of Sony, Android Wear apps image courtesy of Google

Media files: MTI1NDY0OTU1NjI4NTYzMDc1.png (image/png) Let's Talk: Quip, Zendesk, and Evernote All Want A Piece Of Your Work Chat Apr 21st 2015, 15:00 Quip, an online tool for workplace collaboration, is getting chatty, adding features that let coworkers chat in free-form chatrooms.  Chattier, we should say, since Quip launched two years ago with the ability to chat one-on-one or in small groups. But those conversations were always sidebars to the comments and discussion attached to Quip's documents. Tuesday's updates to Quip's desktop and mobile apps allow for freewheeling discussion—with the ability to instantly start a new document when conversation turns serious. The Medium Is The Message "Our product has always had messaging as a central component," Quip CEO Bret Taylor told me in a recent chat. (On the phone. What can I say, I'm old-fashioned.) "When we launched, the main experience difference, besides being exceptional on mobile devices, was that we integrated messaging with document authoring. We’ve always had messaging as a core part of our product experience, and there’s a lot more messages sent per day than documents, though a lot of those messages are hanging off a document." One notable thing about chat in Quip is that it's, well, fun. Taylor and his team noticed that while document-centric discussions were very focused, watercooler discussions were more social in nature. So Quip added some features that seem ripped from BuzzFeed and I Can Has Cheezburger. In Quip chats, you can not just to paste jokey visual memes you find on the Web, but generate new ones on the fly. (My favorite is The Most Interesting Man In The World.) "At first we were a little hesitant and then we really embraced it," says Taylor of the quirky, GIF-laced nature of online chat. "It’s making the experience of communication more fun and interesting and improving the dynamics of the team that uses it."  There's serious business at stake, though. Quip has a lot of rivals in harnessing the power of chat—and hoping to have conversations hang off of its core features.  Evernote introduced Work Chat in October, to capture discussions around shared notes. Zendesk, which launched an experimental new email-handling offering called Inbox in September, added a feature called Team Talk in March. Zendesk Inbox already let colleagues add internal notes about email sent to group aliases; Team Talk lets them have discussions unattached to particular emails.  And then there's Facebook, which has launched Facebook At Work, a version of its service which lets employees chat with each other using Facebook's social tools. With Facebook At Work, users set up work accounts which don't expose any of their personal profiles to coworkers and don't require adding each other as "friends" to communicate. Talking About Billions All of this product development takes place against the backdrop of the runaway growth of Slack, the maker of a team-collaboration tool now used by 750,000 people a day—200,000 of whom are paying something for the privilege. (Rather, typically, their employers are.) Investors recently valued Slack at $2.8 billion.  Taylor says he admires Slack for making a "really high-quality product" and notes that many Quip customers use both Quip and Slack together. (Full disclosure: ReadWrite is one of those joint customers.) He believes that what's driving the addition of chat features into business tools is the deep penetration of mobile devices in the workplace. Push notifications, in particular, have freed up business-software tools from having to rely on email as a channel of communication. And consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have trained a generation of workers to look anywhere but their email inbox first. This new generation of business tools are creating a new problem, though, as they all add chat, which is that they put a burden on their users to follow conversations from one place to another—or make the hard decision to centralize chatter in one place.  That's difficult if—say, like a certain editor of a certain technology news site—you admire the elegant email handling of Zendesk Inbox, the collaborative document editing of Quip, and the real-time communication features of Slack. "To be perfectly honest, I think we’re in a period of rapid experimentation and innovation in business productivity or business communication," says Taylor. "Over the next few years, it will be particularly acute." In consumer social networks, there was a strong winner-take-all effect, as everyone moved to Facebook because that's what their friends were doing. That seems less likely to happen in social business tools, which tend to be contained within individual, idiosyncratic workplaces. We've seen consumer messaging exist in a fragmented state for a while now. Quip—and all of its new chatterbox competitors—may find that it's hard to talk people into using just one tool. Photo by Drew Stephens; screenshot courtesy of Quip

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WordPress. How to edit portfolio title length Apr 20th 2015, 07:05 This tutorial will show you how to edit portfolio title length in Wordpress CherryFramework based templates. WordPress. How to remove “|” sign from pages browser titles Apr 19th 2015, 05:57 This tutorial shows how to how to remove "|" sign from pages browser titles in Wordpress. WordPress. How to make slider appear on inner pages Apr 14th 2015, 05:16 In this tutorial you will learn the way to make slider appear on pages you need in Wordpress. Making your first POST Module, PART 1 - HakTip Apr 13th 2015, 23:00, by feed...@revision3.com (Revision3) Metasploit Minute - the break down on breaking in. Join Mubix (aka Rob Fuller) every Monday here on Hak5. Thank you for supporting this ad free programming. Sponsored by Hak5 and the HakShop - http://hakshop.com :: Subscribe and learn more at http://metasploitminute.com :: Follow Rob Fuller at http://room362.com and http://twitter.com/mubix Media files: hak5--haktip--6033--postexploitation--hd720p30.h264.mp4 (video/mp4, 151.7 MB)

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T3 JavaScript Framework for Large-scale Web Applications Apr 23rd 2015, 07:03 T3 is a client-side JavaScript framework for building large-scale web applications. T3 is different than most JavaScript frameworks. It’s meant to be a small piece of an overall architecture that allows you to build scalable client-side code. A T3 application is managed by the Application object, whose primary job is to manage modules, services, and behaviors. It’s the combination of these three types of objects that allow you to build a scalable JavaScript front-end. T3’s design enforces best practices such as loose coupling by limiting how certain components can communicate with each other. Modules cannot interact directly with other modules but may communicate with them through an event bus. Modules may use services directly, but may only reference behaviors in a declarative way. These restrictions ensure that the various pieces remain loosely-coupled to make dependency management easy and maintenance self-contained. The loosely-coupled nature of T3 components means that creating tests is easy. Dependencies are injected into each component, making it trivial to substitute a mock object in place of real ones. Requirements: JavaScript Framework Demo: http://t3js.org/ License: Apache License The post T3 JavaScript Framework for Large-scale Web Applications appeared first on WebAppers.

Shopify. How to remove Olark Live chat feature Apr 23rd 2015, 05:16 This tutorial will show how to remove Olark Live chat feature in Shopify. WooCommerce. How to remove “product description” text Apr 23rd 2015, 05:10 This tutorial shows how to remove "Product description" title in Woocommerce store. Up Close With PopSlate, The “Second Screen” For Your iPhone 6 Apr 22nd 2015, 21:14 The wide open space on the back of a smartphone may be the most overlooked area in mobile technology today. But that’s starting to change, as accessory makers catch on to the primo real estate back there. Now, PopSlate has joined the fray. Tuesday, the startup gave iPhone 6 users a way to make their pricey Apple handset resemble a YotaPhone, a curious Android device from Russia with a built-in rear display. PopSlate offers the same proposition, except as a Bluetooth-enabled case with a secondary e-ink screen. "They’re helping to validate the second-screen space,” PopSlate founder and CEO Yashar Behzadi said of YotaPhone. Behzadi doesn’t see the companies in competition; in fact, he said they’re friends. “We have a different take on it that's a little more ubiquitous,” he said. “Every single aspect of their phone has to be better than an iPhone. [But] we want to extend that, not replace it.” PopSlate sells for $129. That would be a ridiculous price if it were just a case, but it's more than that. Think of it like a wearable gadget, but for your phone—one with its own Bluetooth wireless radio, display, battery and approval from Apple's Made For iPhone certification program. See also: Mastering Apple's Gigantic iPhone 6 Plus With Puny Hands Sounds great, at least on e-paper. I checked out the device, to find out if it's worth the cost and how well it earns the increasingly valuable space on our phones’ backsides. Pop And Lock The back of my own iPhone 6 Plus is already a busy place. It bears a removable iRing attachment and an iQi wireless charging receiver. The latter slips between my clear case and the device, letting me charge the phone on Qi wireless charging pads. I’m running out of room to put new things. As it turns out, the PopSlate review unit won’t fit my device anyway. For now, it’s strictly an iPhone 6 affair. I’ve been using a PopSlate (on a loaner phone) for a little more than a week now, and its charms are growing on me. That says something, considering the plastic casing—available in white or black—looks pretty mediocre. It’s also chunky, at a little more than half an inch in total thickness. Of course, the slide-in case does pack a 240 mAh battery and a secondary screen. Users of Otterbox cases are most likely to feel at home here. PopSlate gets its name from its primary feature: Using its mobile app, users can “pop”—read, send—black and white photos and illustrations from the phone to the back panel via Bluetooth. The unit remembers a small collection of recent pops, so users can just hit the hardware button on the side to rotate between images. The PopSlate display isn't a touchscreen, so you don't have to handle it gingerly, either. From the app, you can take a photo, do some limited basic photo editing, pull pics in from your Instagram account or camera roll, or follow other PopSlate users.  I particularly like the social features, since other testers and company insiders had some really stunning two-tone “art” and other graphics. Overall, it’s easy to see how the product may appeal to art and design fanatics. They can shoot, share or download pics, making for an easy way to adorn their devices with a changing parade of “pops.” Others can simply show off images of their loved ones or pets. Don’t expect high resolution, though. The black and white, 4-inch screen can only display 16 shades of gray at 240-by-400 resolution. While that made for a more “artistic” aesthetic in some cases, other times, the images looked noticeably degraded. That matters less when using the rear slate as a holding tank for things like mobile boarding passes, digital movie tickets, street maps, daily agendas, grocery items, to-do lists or other critical information. Users can transmit anything from the front screen to the back, whether through pics or screenshots, and the screen stays on even when the battery on the phone or PopSlate dies. Speaking of power, the e-ink display stretched out the small battery capacity, giving me about a week of use, as promised.  In general, I like the basic concept more than I imagined. But I’m not sure it trumps the pedestrian looks of the physical case itself or its limited integrations. At this point, to take on yet another gadget that requires charging (even weekly), I have to love it or find it absolutely essential.  Neither is true with PopSlate. If it gets a little thinner, amps up its looks and brings down the price, I might find it easier to make that argument. Software development might help. At the moment, PopSlate only works with a limited number of services. But, according to the CEO, the company has big plans to broaden the popping action. Screens Ahoy Although not perfect, PopSlate does look like a clever way to solve problems, from photo app and info overload to limited battery life, using the iPhone’s oft-overlooked backyard. But it’s not the only company playing with the idea of adjunct displays. YotaPhone, whose second-generation device sells abroad for $530 to more than $800, will bring its YotaPhone 2 to North America this summer. Samsung also followed up its Galaxy Note Edge, which features a secondary side-oriented display, with the S6 Edge, a beautiful smartphone that boasts two ticker displays on the left and right side of the main screen. But PopSlate is not a phone maker. It's an accessory maker that got its start on crowdfunding site Indiegogo two years ago based on the idea of breaking the screen out into a separate device—which, it turns out, also lays down the groundwork for its own budding platform.  Behzadi says the company aims for three major uses. The first, which targets fashion- and social-minded users, aims to let people show off gray-scale artwork. The second focuses on productivity, which is where popping agendas and to-do lists to the e-ink screen comes into play. The last has to do with "contextual information,” said Behzadi, so PopSlate can display the data you need, when you need it. The company can’t manage the third on its own. It needs developers and partners. In the near term, Behzadi told me that his software will integrate with IFTTT, so users can tie other apps and services to their PopSlates. (Apparently, the IFTTT integration hasn’t been switched on yet, as I didn’t find the channel active when I checked.) The company also has a software development kit in the works that will someday offer developers back-end tools they can use to make their apps work directly with PopSlate. Eventually, the company will need to create different versions of its products for other devices—an iPhone 6 Plus model, for instance. It will also have to refine its hardware and physical design to earn its spot on the back of our phones. That’s no easy task. PopSlate essentially has to teach people a new behavior, while proving that its product is worth more than other accessories vying for that space. That’s the same conundrum wearable devices face as they fight to rule our wrists.  In more ways than one, PopSlate could become the Pebble smartwatch of phone backsides: an upstart that helps define a category. That’s precisely what it needs to become, if it wants to convince consumers and partners that popping is the way of the future.  Photos by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite

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Project Fi Is Google's Blueprint For The Future Of The Network Apr 22nd 2015, 20:01 We knew it was coming, and now it's here: Google Fi is the tech giant's disruptive move into the wireless telecom market. Like many other Google projects before it, from Glass to Loon, it's both experimental and innovative at the same time. See also: Google's Latest (Potential) Disruption: Pay-Per-Gigabyte Wireless Data The idea is simple: Sign up for Project Fi, and wherever you wander with your phone, it will automatically connect you to the fastest possible network. That could be a Google-approved public Wi-Fi spot; or it could be a 4G LTE link from one of its partners (Sprint and T-Mobile are on board to begin with). It's a more advanced, more ambitious version of the cellular/Wi-Fi switching we've already seen from Sprint and T-Mobile, functionality that lets you seamlessly swap from one to the other. Google's new service, promises to be more expansive than ever before. Project Fi goes beyond switching from Wi-Fi to cellular connections and back again, though. It also incorporates a truly cross-platform experience, where you can (for example) forget your phone at home and still make calls and texts from your work computer. Project Fi illustration (Source: Google) Google users can already get to their email, documents, photos and much more by logging into a Web browser, and Fi adds calls and texts to that mix, essentially putting the SIM card in the cloud. It's a more modern version of Google Voice and from Google's explainer site it looks like Hangouts is going to act as the backbone to it. From a company invested in ultra-high-speed broadband and connecting developing parts of the world, Project Fi makes a lot of sense: It's about making sure smartphone users are on the fastest possible speeds, wherever they are, on whatever device. Pay-As-You-Go Data One number lets you make and receive calls from multiple devices. That "wherever" part of the equation extends across the world as well. Fi users pay $20 a month for talk, text, Wi-Fi tethering and international coverage in 120+ countries, then it's $10 per gigabyte of data. An extra $10 a month gets you 1GB of data, $20 gets you 2GB and so on. Any data you don't use, you get a refund for—so if you pay for 2GB but only use 1GB, then Google will send you back $10 at the end of the month. Interested? Google is letting users request an invite from the Project Fi site, but at this stage you're going to need a Nexus 6 to get involved. That's partly because some advanced circuitry is required for switching between so many types of network across the world. At the same time, Google won't want to spook the existing networks too much, and limiting the roll-out achieves that. Like the Nexus program and Google Fiber, Project Fi aims to set an example for others to follow. It's one of those Google initiatives that makes a lot of sense for users in terms of convenience and ease-of-use, and now the onus is on the rest of the market to respond. It's also concerned with breaking down the distinction between Wi-Fi and cellular data, a distinction we may not even recognize in five or ten years. The SIM card had a good run, but its time is coming to an end. Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock; other images courtesy of Google

Media files: MTE5NDg0MDYzNjY1NTIyMTkx.jpg (image/jpg) Developers Can Now Have Their Own Box, Says Box Apr 22nd 2015, 19:57 The big news coming out of Box Dev 2015 was Box Developer Edition, a new offering that lets app developers build on top of Box's storage and other services without making it obvious they're using Box. The new product allows developers to use the parts of Box they want—file storage, content previews, and so on—under the hood of their own applications. Users can just use the developer’s app without having to log into Box separately. In a demonstration of the product in San Francisco at Box Dev 2015, Box’s annual conference for developers, a sample user logged into a dummy healthcare app and gained access to different folders which had content in them. The experience appeared seamless—and Box's role wasn't obvious.  Later, Box engineering executives showed off an administrative dashboard. Developers using the product will have full access to information like all the users of the app, their folders, usage data, and more analytics. “It doesn’t just integrate with our APIs,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in a press Q&A following the keynote presentation. “You can actually build on all the technology we have. That’s what the Dev edition is all about. It’s a developer-owned instance of Box. They can store and manage all the content on their platform.” Currently in a limited beta, Box Developer Edition will have a cost based on the number of users, according to Levie. Data storage will come free since that isn’t the focus, he said.  Most other cloud providers, like Amazon and Google, charge developers based on storage or bandwidth used. This could make Box Developer Edition appealing to certain kinds of developers, but without details on the pricing, it's hard to know how competitive the offering will be and for which apps Box will end up being cheaper or have more of the right features. “[The value of Box Developer Edition] has far less to do with storage and way more to do with workflow in your app that Box is enabling,” said Levie.  Formal pricing for the product will come this summer. Photo by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite

Media files: MTI5NjY3MDYxMTY4MjYxMTMw.jpg (image/jpg) Don’t Root That Galaxy S6 Unless You Want To Lose Samsung Pay Apr 22nd 2015, 19:36 Samsung Pay is one of the Galaxy S6’s most compelling features, but it will apparently disappear if owners decide to root their devices. That could pose a tough choice for Android users who love the new Galaxy’s design—but hate Samsung’s proprietary interface, TouchWiz. Why Rooting Kills Samsung Pay Rooting an Android phone essentially requires breaking through its factory-set security in order to access all of its features, many of which its manufacturer may have locked down. Rooting lets you use apps that reach deep into the operating system—for instance, ones that allow you to backup all your apps and their data, or that unlock the Wi-Fi hotspot feature in Android.  It also lets you replace the factory-installed version of Android for one with new features and fewer restrictions. Eliminating Samsung’s custom launcher, TouchWiz, has typically been a big motivation for people who root their handsets. See Also: Everything You Wanted To Know About Android "Launchers" But Were Afraid To Ask  But because rooting breaches the device’s built-in security, it seems that doing so may kill the ability to use Samsung Pay. Slashgear's JC Torres explains it this way: Samsung Pay most likely relies on Knox, Samsung's security framework, and Knox is notorious for not playing well with rooted devices. Technically, rooting on Android is indeed a form of security exploit, so naturally Samsung Knox would see this as a violation of trust. And considering a mobile payment system is dependent on that trust, it's only reasonable to expect it not to work when a phone's security has been seemingly compromised. The upside here is that Samsung Pay should stop working if your phone’s security is compromised. The downside, of course, is that users hoping to go hog wild with the Galaxy S6’s hardware might have to think a little longer before they decide to root. Why Samsung Pay Could Be Too Good To Lose Unveiled in early March, Samsung Pay is the smartphone maker's attempt to catch up in the world of mobile payments (in this case, by acquiring mobile payments startup LoopPay). The premise of Samsung Pay is nearly identical to that of Apple Pay and Google Wallet before it: Link some credit or debit cards to the app and you can wave your smartphone at a compatible terminal and pay for stuff in an instant. See also: Take That, Apple! Samsung Unveils Its Own Pay-With-Your-Phone System But unlike its rivals, Samsung Pay is different because it’s compatible with both Near Field Communication terminals as well as Magnetic Secure Transmission terminals. While NFC terminals haven’t yet seen widespread deployment, MST terminals are already just about everywhere that accepts credit card payments—they’re the little card swipe machines you’ve been using for years. While smartphone-aided payments haven’t been around long enough to feel necessary, Samsung Pay may be too convenient to pass up. Moreover, if you’ve shelled out the major cash necessary to buy a Galaxy S6 or Galaxy S6 Edge, you’ll probably want to enjoy all of its many built-in features. Losing out on Samsung Pay probably isn’t the end of the world, but it could be a big sacrifice just to get away from TouchWiz. Screenshots courtesy of Samsung

Media files: MTI4NDU5OTE5MDAyMjM0ODUw.jpg (image/jpg) Speaker Profile: How Fullpower's Philippe Kahn Navigates The Watch's Past, Present And Future Apr 22nd 2015, 13:00

Wearable World Congress, ReadWrite's signature annual conference in San Francisco on May 19-20, will feature the key players who are shaping wearable technology and the Internet of Things. This series profiles some of the experts who will be speaking at the conference.

Swiss watchmakers, legendary for creating precise, stylish timepieces, have faced their fair share of challenges. Their analog timepieces have withstood the advent of quartz watches and novelty devices foisting calculators, garish video games and more. Now smartwatches join the ranks as the latest rivals.  Re-enter Philippe Kahn, CEO of Fullpower, the company behind the MotionX software that powered many of the original activity- and sleep-tracking bands. Recently he's been working with well-known Swiss watchmakers to create a new line of horological smartwatches.

Buy tickets now: Wearable World Congress, May 19-20

Fullpower's technology now aims to blend the digital and analog worlds by combining activity tracking, sleep monitoring and cloud services, with always-on time and date, as well as battery life that's measured in years, not hours or days.  I caught up with Kahn, who will be speaking at Wearable World Congress next month, to talk with him about innovation and what got him interested in wearables in the first place. As a consumer, what excites you about wearables? What irritates you? I hate charging devices. I already have my laptop and my smartphone. I don’t want to worry about a third device. That’s the biggest irritation. I do love beautiful objects and iconic design, even though I am a geek. I just love beautiful objects, and I like wearing beautiful objects. I love them when they are like an Alpina watch. As the great Miles Davis used to say: "If you want to play good, you have to look good!" There's a perceived mad rush to improve user experience. How do you see this future playing out? What are the key developments that need to happen for us to get there? Because wearables need to be worn, the charging and invasiveness factors are key to the user experience. For example, we built the Alpina horological smartwatch. It is a beautiful Swiss watch, [but] we had to solve an impossible technology problem and deliver two-plus years of battery life. And we did. That was the number one experience request from users. A watch should be able to tell the time, all the time, every time. Tell me about the moment when you decided that you needed to solve the power issue. When we started our company in 2003, nobody was thinking about wearables. We realized that if we wanted people to use them 24/7, we needed to solve the power issue and make the technology invisible. So we decided to build a strong technology foundation focused on breakthrough power management technology and miniaturization.  Of course this was a roadmap, but we called our company Fullpower and the technology platform MotionX. We thought that this would keep our focus on what really matters. What are the top five things companies should consider in seeking to follow in the footsteps of horological designs? Fullpower built the MotionX platform so that iconic brands such as Mondaine, Alpina, Frederique Constant and others have the flexibility to build beautiful objects. That’s the challenge: To make the technology invisible, and yet deliver breakthrough battery life and miniature form factor without ever compromising on quality and accuracy. It’s a beautiful thing.  To hear more from Philippe Kahn and other innovators and experts, register for Wearable World Congress 2015, May 19-20 in San Francisco. Early bird prices end soon! Photo courtesy of Philippe Kahn/Fullpower

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Create Cross Platform Desktop Applications with Electron Apr 24th 2015, 07:03 The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor. You can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.Electron is open source; mantained by GitHub and an active community. Best of all, Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Requirements: – Demo: http://electron.atom.io/ License: MIT License The post Create Cross Platform Desktop Applications with Electron appeared first on WebAppers.

The Internet Dodges A Bullet: The Comcast-Time Warner Merger Is Reportedly Dead Apr 23rd 2015, 21:42 Ding-dong, the merger's dead. After the FCC reportedly told Comcast it would oppose its $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable, Comcast is apparently ready to walk away from the deal, Bloomberg reports. The result: Two mostly terrible cable companies won't turn into one entirely terrible cable company—one that would have controlled between a third and half of the U.S. broadband market. FCC staff reportedly said the merger would threaten competition and innovation, and thus would likely harm consumers. When reached for comment, the Internet had one response: "Well, duh." So you can also breathe a sigh of relief now. Though to be safe, you might want to wait until tomorrow, when Comcast is likely to announce it's officially abandoning the deal. Do Not Pass Go Nobody likes you, Anthropomorphic Comcast Remote. The merger's death is a big win for consumers and the open Internet. Neither Time Warner and Comcast face much competition in their respective territories. Linking the two companies into one mega-ISP would only serve to consolidate their power over other media and Internet companies and give them an even stronger grip on the pipes that connect us to the Internet. See also: With Time Warner, Comcast Wants Total Control Of The Internet Pipes This is the latest unexpetedly Internet-friendly action by the FCC. Back in February, the FCC’s chairman, Tom Wheeler, offered his plan to reclassify the Internet as a utility in order to preserve net neutrality. Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock; Comcast remote photo by Steven Depolo

Media files: MTIyMjkzMDQ2NTgxNjkwOTgy.jpg (image/jpg) Amazon's Cloud Juggernaut Still Has "World Domination" In Its Sights Apr 23rd 2015, 19:55 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Amazon Web Services is on a mission, and as its name might suggest, it's not a particularly small one. Indeed, as Gartner analyst Lydia Leong declares, "They are essentially pursuing world domination." And at its current course and speed, who would bet against Amazon? On the eve of Amazon breaking out the financials for its cloud business for the first time, one thing is not in doubt: All cloud roads lead to Amazon, and its competitors can only have themselves to blame. Giving AWS A Seven-Year Head Start After all, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched, no one within the business unit expected "a seven-year head start," as AWS chief Andy Jassy told Businessweek. But this cloud thing was new, hardly profitable, and sort of crazy. After all, what company in its right mind would put its data in the cloud? Lots of them, it turns out. And some day, all of them. Ultimately, it all comes down to convenience. As such, in some ways, the rise of AWS was inevitable. Box CEO Aaron Levie hinted at this in a recent tweet: The user experience includes the look and feel (i.e., user interface) of an application, but it's much deeper than this. Today's consumer demands immediate gratification of an ever-widening array of wants. This, in turn, forces enterprises and the developers they employ to iterate quickly to appease those desires. In this rush to get things done NOW, the data center is generally too slow. In order to evade cumbersome IT and procurement policies, developers have gone straight to the cloud and, generally, to Amazon's cloud. And today, for the first time, Amazon will tell us exactly how much it's making from the stampede. Dominating The Future IDC expects the overall cloud infrastructure market to top $32 billion in 2015, with public cloud claiming $21 billion of the market, roughly double its private cloud peer.  Until today, it has been guesswork to determine how much of that public cloud market is owned by Amazon. Andreessen Horowitz's Benedict Evans, for example, put AWS revenue at roughly $5 billion in mid-2014, smartly assuming Amazon's "Other" category mostly equates to Amazon Web Services: That jibes with analyst Karl Keirstead at Deutsche Bank, who estimates current AWS annual revenue of about $6 billion.  (Update, 2:52pm PT: Amazon Web Services reported $1.56 billion in first-quarter revenue, up 49% compared to a year earlier. Operating profit stood at $256 million, up just $20 million, or 8.5%.) But that's small change compared with where the market is headed. After all, as Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman points out, "New stuff [workloads] tends to go to the public cloud ... and new stuff is simply growing faster" than more traditional data center workloads.  This trend is on display in Bittman's analysis of the growth in VMs across different environments over the past few years: Source: Gartner So if the public cloud is growing roughly three times as fast as private cloud, and both are growing much faster than traditional data centers, and AWS can claim at least a third of that public cloud largesse.... Well, we live in Amazon's world now. Getting Fat On Skinny Amazon, for its part, can't get enough of AWS. As much as the overall company tends to lose money, AWS is very profitable.  In fact, as Gartner analyst David Smith notes, "I've seen some estimates that AWS is a double digit profitability contribution to the company."  Importantly for Amazon, AWS doesn't have to rack up gargantuan profits to make a huge impact at a company that thrives on razor-thin margins. Its competitors, however, can't subsist on the same thin profitability gruel. IBM, for example, just announced its twelfth consecutive sales slide, even as its cloud business inches upward (by how much is subject to debate).   In short, Amazon has every incentive to feed AWS, because AWS plumps its profits. Meanwhile, its competitors will be forced into a painful transition to lower-margin cloud services, often hobbling their success by trying to charge for "premium" services to make up the gap. It won't, and they won't. Only Microsoft seems to have a credible answer to AWS today. There's plenty of room in the public cloud's billions for two. Lead photo by Steve Jurvetson

Media files: MTI1NDkzNjE4NjI5NjgzODQz.jpg (image/jpg) How Google’s Project Fi Could Upend Wireless Service With A Simple Math Trick Apr 23rd 2015, 19:39 This post first appeared on the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated news service; it has been edited. For inquires, please email author and publisher Gregory Ferenstein. Google unveiled an ambitious new plan to take on wireless carriers Wednesday with the launch of its own wireless telecom service, Project Fi. Google CEO Larry Page is reportedly frustrated that AT&T and Verizon just haven’t been interested in building better infrastructure. So, he launched his own wireless service — with a twist. See also: Project Fi Is Google's Blueprint For The Future Of The Network Google’s pricing plan seems like a clever math trick to align profits with the incentive to build out more data infrastructure, so that carriers face the right incentives to keep up with demand. Under Google’s pricing, wireless carriers only make money when consumers use data, because consumers are charged exactly for what they use. If a consumer has a $60 6GB data plan and only uses 5.5GB, they only pay $55 for the data. The math trick is to increase price linearly with data use. Aligning Profits With Demand  Unlike most wireless carriers, Google makes most of its money when consumers actually browse the Web. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint profit when users pay for data they never use or accidentally go over their rate allowance. The upshot is that most wireless carriers have these tricky pricing plans of hidden fees, overage charges, complicated contracts and odd incremental upgrades. (AT&T, for instance, has a 6GB and a 15GB plan—but  nothing in between). In some instances, these companies benefit from users who consume less data, since they charge more per gigabyte for low rate plans (illustrated in the bottom left side of the graph above). In other words, these companies have no particular reason to build out their wireless infrastructure in order to keep up with increasing demand. Instead, they'd rather call you a data hog and throttle your connection if you to use more than they think you ought to be using. See also: How All The Major U.S. Carriers Throttle Your Wireless Data This odd business strategy reportedly irks Google. The Information’s Amir Efrati reported: For Google, a mobile offering would fit neatly into CEO Larry Page’s playbook. He hasn’t been shy about discussing with subordinates his disdain for existing wireless carriers and telecom companies who he believes have been much too slow to upgrade their networks and heavy-handed in trying to control the services that subscribers use on their devices. So, Google is offering monthly data plans: $20 unlimited text/talk and $1 per 100MB of data (i.e., a 2GB data plan will set you back a total of $40, plus taxes). It partnered with both Sprint and T-Mobile, so phones should effortlessly switch to whatever network is best in a given area. Under this grand scheme, there’s no incentive to lock users to a single wireless network or come up with tricky plans aimed at tripping up consumers. If a consumers uses more data, the carrier has simple incentive to build out faster and more reliable capacity. It’s ambitious in its simplicity. And, if it works, America might actually catch up to the rest of the world with faster, cheaper, mobile broadband. Lead photo by Ervins Stauhmanis

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Welcome Back To ReadWrite, Jolie O'Dell Apr 23rd 2015, 16:54 I'm very pleased to announce that ReadWrite has brought back Jolie O'Dell, one of our most distinctive voices, in a new role of special projects editor. We don't often gaze at our navel here at ReadWrite, but when we do, all the lint comes out. As you know, I've been thinking a lot about ReadWrite's future. We just turned 12, which is a long time for a digital publisher. Our industry always faces forward, yet those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I've always believed that we need to draw on the heritage of deep thinking and analysis we owe to our founder, Richard MacManus. At the same time, we must keep embracing the very technologies we write about to transform ourselves. I've relied on ReadWrite's alumni network for advice and counsel as I've led this site for the past two years. Now Jolie is going to help us plan our next steps. Enough from me—here's Jolie herself: TL;DR: The bitch is back. When I left ReadWrite in 2010, it felt more like a traumatic breakup than a giving of notice.  ReadWrite had become my spiritual home. I came of age here, got my first gray hairs here, built a family here, both within the readership community and with my fellow writers and editors. I'm not ashamed to say that in my final conversation with ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus, I cried like a baby. Today, we're announcing that I'm coming back home to my beloved ReadWrite family, and I want to explain why. I won't immediately be contributing to ReadWrite's daily editorial—at least not in a way that will be evident to those outside the newsroom. What I will be doing is bringing back a little of the old ReadWrite magic, that blend of thoughtful analysis, careful reporting, and a deep love of technology and its creators. Editor-in-Chief Owen Thomas is a wonderful friend, and his vision for what ReadWrite will become is beautifully aligned with Richard's original mission, and with mine. Ultimately, we all want to make the Internet in all its forms accessible—readable and writable—for our community.  Back in the day, we were obsessed with teaching our readers how to code, how to manage newly social communities, and how to best participate in a Web that was transforming from static to real-time. Today, we're forging a future where you all can be participants, not just consumers, in the new Internet of Things and wearable (or even implantable!) technologies and devices. Want to build a robot? You can learn how on ReadWrite! Want to program a drone? ReadWrite. Want to master responsive design for the mobile Web? Want to figure out how to maintain your humanity in a machine-dominated world? We're here for you. Want to know why you should care, why any of this matters? We will work through these issues alongside you. As at the old ReadWriteWeb, we understand deeply that we're all in this together, as users and as creators. We all have a responsibility to understand and help build the Internet we want to exist. My job is managing special projects for Owen and for Wearable World CEO Redg Snodgrass, also a good friend of mine. The first of these special projects is already underway, and it's a hot-damn doozy.  I can't wait to tell you more very soon, and I hope to talk more with each of you as we work together to make today's ReadWrite the best blog and the best community it can be. I'm also curious: What special projects do you think I should be tackling next? I'd love to hear your thoughts. After all, you're the “write” half of this whole endeavor. It doesn't work without you. With much love and deepest gratitude, I remain your humble correspondent and faithful servant, Jolie O'Dell.

Media files: MTI5Njg3MjE3MTgxMzU2MDAy.jpg (image/jpg) How Twitter's New Abuse Filter Could Backfire Apr 23rd 2015, 16:51 Twitter's ongoing efforts to counter online harassment are commendable. And its latest policy changes, which expand Twitter's prohibition on violent threats to cover a much broader range of threatening behavior, are long overdue.  But one possible change the company announced Monday—an abuse filter that users can't opt out of—could have unintended consequences. Taking away the option for intended recipients of harassment or threats to see what's coming their way also eliminates their ability to respond in a way they deem appropriate. See also: Twitter CEO Admits Company Sucks At Dealing With Harassment Twitter described this abuse filter as a "test" product feature intended to automatically flag tweets as potentially abusive and to limit their "reach." It examines what Twitter calls a "wide range of signals and context" including the age of the tweeting account and similarities between a given tweet and others that its safety team has deemed abusive. Those abusive tweets, however, won't disappear entirely. They'll still exist on Twitter, even though the intended recipients—and, perhaps, other users—will presumably be unable to see them unless they already follow the senders or search out their tweets. And unlike a "quality filter" that Twitter recently introduced for verified users, the abuse filter cannot be turned off. Shielded From Harassment—Like It Or Not Twitter's goal here—to limit the spread of sociopathic threats and to tamp down harassment campaigns—is certainly a good one. To its credit, Twitter also notes that the test feature "does not take into account whether the content posted or followed by a user is controversial or unpopular." But there's still a big problem with an abuse filter you can't turn off or control: It can limit your ability to respond to legitimate threats.  See also: Twitter's Latest Anti-Harassment Measures Still Don't Do The Trick Just consider how Twitter's other policy change, the long-overdue expansion of its violent threats policy, could be blunted by the abuse filter. The policy change expands the definition of violent threats from "direct, specific threats of violence against others" to “threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others.”  It's a big step forward, given how often those harassed on Twitter have been told that the abusive tweets they flagged don't violate Twitter rules. The new policy has some teeth, too, since Twitter has given its support team the power to temporarily lock abusive accounts. (Support personnel could already ask such users to delete specific tweets or to verify their phone numbers.) Can't Fight What You Can't See All that's great, but it overlooks one important thing: It's impossible to report threatening posts you never see. An abuse filter, for example, could allow a user to post violent threats which will be read by a horde of like-minded followers posts but not the recipient. This does nothing to limit the post's reach to the people most likely to act on it. Meanwhile, it decreases the likelihood that someone will report the tweet or the account that posted it. Some users may prefer to be blissfully unaware of harassing tweets they can't see. But others may want to see the content of abusive tweets to determine whether they need to take additional measures to protect themselves.   In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde wrote that the company's goal is to "welcoming diverse perspectives while protecting our users." Unfortunately, shielding users from threatening speech while rendering them incapable of dealing with the consequences does little to protect them.  It's unclear whether Twitter has taken these considerations into account or will address them in some fashion. Here's hoping it does. Lead image by Celtikipooh

Media files: MTI5NjY1MTI1NzQ4NjEwMzIy.jpg (image/jpg) We're All At The Mercy Of The Facebook Newsfeed Apr 23rd 2015, 15:41 Another Facebook newsfeed tweak has been attracting attention this week, not for the first (or last) time. In addition to three significant changes, it brings yet another reminder that we're all at the mercy of its algorithms. Whether you're a million-dollar publishing empire or a mother with some baby pictures, it's largely up to Facebook just how many other people are going to get to see your post. The New New Newsfeed About those newsfeed changes. First, if yours happens to be a little on the sparse side (did all your friends leave for Snapchat?), Facebook will now show you more posts from the contacts you do have rather than let you reach the "end" of your feed. Second, Facebook will now favor updates "posted directly by the friends you care about" in your newsfeed. If there are certain people you interact with more often, you'll see more posts by them. If you spend a lot of time clicking and commenting on links from the New York Times, you'll see more material from that page, too. Third and last, you won't see as many posts and comments from your friends on pages you're not connected with. Uncle Ed might love Coca-Cola's Facebook presence, but unless you've also liked the Coca-Cola page, you won't see Uncle Ed's love-in with the sugary soda drink quite as much as you did before. With online publishers relying so heavily on Facebook for traffic, tweaks like this merit close study, since they can send referral traffic soaring or plummeting. The third part of this latest reconfiguration has been widely seen as a blow for sites and brands looking for as many eyeballs as possible, though it's going to be a while before we know the full effects of the changes. Whose Feed Is It Anyway? Social is diversifying, and so is Facebook. No sooner has the virtual ink dried on an analysis of one newsfeed update than the next one comes along to replace it. Last August, Facebook went to war against spammy, clickbait-style articles, a move that would have pleased pretty much everyone except those who make their living from such pieces. Facebook's also exploring the possibility of hosting content from key publishers itself rather than linking out to it. When you attract the attention of more than 1.4 billion users, then you get to call the shots on what gets priority and what doesn't. With each of us having so many connections on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his band of engineers have to take some editorial control over what pops up in the newsfeed—a flat stream of everything that was happening in sequential order wouldn't be much fun at all. But it's interesting to weigh the question of exactly what users want to see. Why do we log into Facebook in 2015? Is it more for updates from friends or links of interest? Facebook is always keen to emphasize that its tweaks are based on user feedback, and our tastes are always changing—hence the re-emergence of instant messenger-style apps. Newsfeed algorithm updates will always generate plenty of comment and discussion from publishers, but they say as much about social networking and our virtual relationships with our friends as they do about the future of news. Lead image courtesy of Facebook; photo of Mark Zuckerberg by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite

Media files: MTI5NjgyNjc5MDExNTM2ODY2.jpg (image/jpg) Speaker Profile: Take It From Bia Sport And Contour's CEOs—Great Products Don't Guarantee Success Apr 23rd 2015, 13:00

Wearable World Congress, ReadWrite's signature annual conference in San Francisco on May 19-20, will feature the key players who are shaping wearable technology and the Internet of Things. This series profiles some of the experts who will be speaking at the conference.

Business leaders may like to spin yarns about how their hot startups rocketed directly to the top, but in most cases, that couldn't be further from the truth. Just ask Bia Sport's Cheryl Kellond and James Harrison of Contour.  Kellond, Bia Sport's CEO, learned the hard way that having a great product doesn't guarantee success. The sports watch maker, known for devices that catered to female athletes, went under just last month. Contour, an action camera company based in Utah, learned that lesson as well. The company close its doors two years ago. But since then, Clarke Capital bought the assets out of receivership, resurrected the brand, reformed the product team, built a new team of executives (helmed by CEO Harrison), and put out a new product, the ROAM3, introduced last year. In light of that, and by its latest legal tussle against rival GoPro, Contour looks ready to do battle.

Buy tickets now: Wearable World Congress, May 19-20

Both Kellond and Harrison will appear at Wearable World Congress to share their insights and experiences in a panel called "The Life, Death, and Rebirth Of Your Wearable Startup." I spoke to them, to find out more about the trials and tribulations they faced at Bia Sport and Contour.  Cheryl Kellond of Bia Sport and Contour's James Harrison What sticks out as a lesson learned from the hardships your company has faced? Kellond: There’s no big "Aha!" like, "Wow, I wish we’d done this differently" or "Wow, we were really naive and stupid." The wearable space is super competitive, and became so really quickly. We had trouble raising money early, which put our product behind. That meant, by the time we went to market, our coffers were depleted. It was an impossible combination. I should have quit much earlier but we had commitments to deliver the best device we could. So we went to Herculean lengths to do so.  Harrison: Contour was not initially keen to go into big box retail, which it was invited to go into by Walmart and others. The delay ... really cost the company. Then it was time to catch up, which was very hard to do. There was inexperience within the company about how you go about scaling a company.  How important is managing initial expectations or launches? Kellond: Don’t pre-sell. Do not pre-sell. Do not do it to fund it; just don't do it. There’s no value from it. It only creates difficulties later on. It’ll put you in a hole. It’s never enough to convince a venture investor, because they view pre-sales as different from other sales. Don't worry about being late to market. Every company is late. If you don't pre-sell, then you have nothing to manage. I talked to two of my cohorts. Both raised very large seed rounds [for their companies]. They said the same thing. One of them pre-sold and her thought was, "That’s the dumbest thing I've ever done." Harrison: You need to hit your forecasts every single time. Cashflow always going to be tight. You need to make investors confident. If you miss being able to deliver to a retailer the stock that you promised, they just won't come back. They’ll go to someone else. If you’re able to get it right, they come back and say, "We’d like to do a new product." That’s when you get a virtual loop. The first few forecasts you do have got to be absolutely rock solid and sell through.  The ROAM3 Is there anything you'd change about the product itself if you were doing things over again? Kellond: No. We were really disciplined about hitting those needs. Nothing that happened along the way disproved that logic. What we set out to do, and the logic behind it, was the right thing to have done and the right fit with the market. We had that product/market fit. Harrison: No. We, in a sense, were very lucky because we’re blessed with a great company. It's a great brand. The way we looked at it… it's almost like Apple in the late 90s, where someone who buys a Contour camera feels better because they think their camera is superior to all other cameras.  To hear more from Kellond, Harrison and other innovators and experts, register for Wearable World Congress 2015, May 19-20 in San Francisco. Early bird prices end soon! Photos of courtesy of Cheryl Kellond, James Harrison and Contour

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Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Pipes Output

There's Gold On Them Thar Wrists Apr 24th 2015, 18:21 It's been a long wait since September, but Apple Watch launch day is finally upon us—and Apple has brought some 3,000 apps to the party, according to the best estimates. At the time of writing, WatchAware is showing 2,436. Too bad most of them are doomed to obscurity. The Gold Rush Is On Developers are falling over themselves to announce Apple Watch support, and who can blame them? This is the biggest gadget launch of the year, and there's no shortage of apps hoping to ride along on the hype. Apple has singled out apps by Instagram, Yelp, The New York Times and Twitter as particularly worthy of attention. Others so anointed include Citymapper, weather forecasting app Dark Sky and Mint, the personal finance tracker. Then there are the apps shown off by Apple on stage in September and March: The American Airlines app for getting through the airport terminal more efficiently, and the Starwood Hotels app for unlocking your hotel room door with a swipe of your wrist. Media outlets have been equally keen to push their lists of must-have Apple Watch apps that should be installed as soon as the wearable is unwrapped. It's quite a contrast to the launch of the iPhone, which of course had no third-party app support to begin with. Fool's Gold 2,000+ apps and growing. Irrespective of how many units it actually sells, the Apple Watch is generating a huge amount of interest—and it makes sense for developers to try and tap into that. It's a ticket into the biggest tech party of the year. But at the same time it's important to temper expectations about just how many of these apps are going to gain traction on the wrist, where screen size and attention span is more limited than ever before. Smartphone app development can rake in millions with the right formula, but life on the long tail of that success is less appealing. If anything, there are going to be fewer winners on wearables, not more. While developers rush to get their apps updated to take advantage of the new smartwatch, not every app suits a 1.5-inch display. Get the mix wrong, and users might actually end up spending less time with an app because of its Apple Watch extension. Once the initial rush for Watch compatibility dies down, and Apple opens up the field to standalone apps that can run independently on the wearable, we'll get a much better idea of who has found the right balance and who hasn't. The winners in the wearable app rush will be the ones that offer the most usefulness, not those that got there first. Lead photo manipulated by Brian Rubin for ReadWrite; other images courtesy of Apple and WatchAware

Media files: MTI5NzExNjAyOTMxODk3NjE4.jpg (image/jpg) Apple May Be Lowering The Boom On Pebble Apps Apr 24th 2015, 17:40 Apple doesn’t cotton well to competitors setting up shop in its App Store, and now Pebble might be starting to feel the heat. An app developer said that Apple rejected an update to his Pebble-compatible app on Thursday because he dared mention "Pebble" in the app's metadata. It's possibly a dire harbinger for Pebble, which to date has managed to co-exist peacefully with Apple in its App Store. Now that the Apple Watch is making its way into the hands of consumers, though, that détente may be over. No Pebbles Allowed The developer, who goes by the name Steve, posted his frustrations to the Pebble developer forums. He said the App Store rejected his latest update for SeaNav US—a Pebble and Apple Watch compatible app for plotting boat routes—for mentioning Pebble in the update’s metadata. (I've reached out to Steve for comment, and will update if he gets back to me.) The rejection notice cited a four-year-old rule from Apple's developer guidelines that states: “Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected.” SeaNav US’s rejection specifically reads, in part: We noticed that your app or its metadata contains irrelevant platform information in the app. Providing future platform compatibility plans, or other platform references, is not appropriate for the App Store. Specifically, your app and app description declare support for the Pebble Smartwatch. SeaNav US, however, has offered Pebble support on the App Store for the last two years. It’s telling, and not a little ominous, that Apple decided to reject an app that mentions Pebble support on the eve of the Apple Watch’s launch. As it turns out, Steve said he'd uploaded the update to the App Store explicitly to add support for the Apple Watch. How long until Apple rejects other apps that support the Pebble? Additionally, as other forum users point out, Pebble isn’t a mobile platform at all. It's more of an accessory, like any number of fitness trackers. (Not that Apple views all fitness trackers with equanimity, as Fitbit learned last year when Apple tossed the device out of its retail stores.) The Apple Watch launch—or, perhaps, just the in-app mention of it in close proximity to its rival Pebble—might have focused Apple's attention on Pebble-related apps it had previously allowed through benign neglect. Apple support responded to Steve’s appeal by suggesting he remove mention of Pebble from the app’s metadata. That, of course, would prevent App Store users from knowing that SeaNav US supports Pebble—which is presumably the point. Skipping The Pebble It can be dangerous to extrapolate from a single incident, especially since individual App Store reviewers aren't always reliable indicators of Apple corporate policy. If this rejection stands, though, you have to wonder just how long Apple is going to tolerate other Pebble-compatible apps—much less the main Pebble app itself—in the App Store. Such a development would also seem to put the kibosh on any potential Apple-Google cooperation in smartwatches, however far-fetched it might have seemed. There have been several indications over the past few months that Google is developing an iOS version of its Android Wear app.  But if Pebble can't maintain its beachhead in the App Store, you probably shouldn't count on pairing an Android smartwatch with your iPhone any time soon. Lead photo by hurk; Pebble image courtesy of Pebble

Media files: MTI5NzExMTA3MTMxNjExNjE0.jpg (image/jpg) Speaker Profile: Cuff's Deepa Sood, On Fusing Fashion and Function Apr 24th 2015, 13:00

Wearable World Congress, ReadWrite's signature annual conference in San Francisco on May 19-20, will feature the key players who are shaping wearable technology and the Internet of Things. This series profiles some of the experts who will be speaking at the conference.

Before becoming CEO of Cuff, Deepa Sood was a lawyer, a journalist and an executive at Restoration Hardware. On the side, she played with jewelry design, with the simple notion of making the items that she wears.  That experience comes in handy at Cuff. The company aims to make smart jewelry that's also easy on the eyes, so it designed its namesake flagship device with both fashion and function in mind.  The small unit—which fits inside various bracelet styles, as well as a pendant casing—offers three primary features: phone notifications (via vibration), activity-tracking and safety features. The latter is a critical issue for women, in particular. Cuff can alert designated contacts when you need help, send them a live audio recording and transmit location details with a single button press. Plus, since there's no touchscreen, the device's battery can keep on ticking for a week between charges.

Buy tickets now: Wearable World Congress, May 19-20

Cuff hasn't shipped yet, but it has already attracted plenty of attention. In January, the company announced a partnership with Richline, one of the country's largest jewelry manufacturers. Sood also told me that pre-orders, which began in February and will start shipping this summer, already number in the "hundreds of thousands."  I'm one of them. I submitted my pre-order back in February, so I was particularly interested in chatting with Sood. She'll soon join ReadWrite on stage at Wearable World Congress next month, but I had the opportunity to get acquainted with her in advance. I wanted to learn a bit more about how Cuff got off the ground, and get her take on the state of fashion and wearable technology. Here's an excerpt from our conversation.  How did your previous experience help lead you to launching Cuff? It helped build it, but the idea was actually one of those things born out of necessity. Like all good ideas, it was born out of a dinner party where people got drunk at the house. My husband is a Web software guy, and he and his friends were geeking out about the newest fitness tracker. My friends thought the functionality was so cool, but instinctively tried to disguise it within their other jewelry. I thought, why does it have to look one way? That very simple idea became a platform. Do you think other wearable tech companies are trying do too much with their devices? I think there's a huge market for people who don't want everything and the kitchen sink duct-taped to their wrist. Some people do want that, but many people that we talk to, and who gravitate toward our product, want less. They want more of a curated experience around their tech—in the same way that fitness-tracking companies are learning that nobody really wants a huge data dump. They want more of a guided experience. People who gravitate to our product are not Luddites; they enjoy technology and want it streamline or simplify their life, versus buying a wearable to have another gadget. How many people have preordered the product? I can't remember the exact number, but it's hundreds of thousands of pieces. The Cuff, the electronic, is modular, so it goes in and out of every piece of jewelry we sell. My hypothesis was that some people don't want to wear the same thing every day. I think it is true, because the average purchase on our site when we were selling individual pieces, rather than bundles, was 3.2 pieces. I think we proved the point that you can make the technology more versatile, and it'll go with you.  To hear more from Deepa Sood and other innovators and experts, register for Wearable World Congress 2015, May 19-20 in San Francisco.  Photos courtesy of Deepa Sood and Cuff

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