NEWS
Apple gives some love to all their operating systems at WWDC 2016 Apple kicked off WWDC with a keynote showing off new features in watchOS 3, iOS 10, tvOS and macOS (long live Mac OS X) Sierra. Some headline features of each OS update: watchOS is much faster, with a revamped gesture system. iOS 10 lets you delete the built-in stock apps, LINE/Facebook/Telegram style iMessages with stickers and big emoji and stuff, totally overhauled notification system and the ability for Siri and Maps to get 3rd party integrations. tvOS has dark mode and an iPhone app to replicate the Siri Remote. macOS gets Siri, picture in picture videos, the ability to log in to your Mac with your Apple Watch and support for Apple Pay. All these updates will be available to end users in Spring. Discuss
Other things that happened at WWDC not part of the main keynote Besides what was on stage in the keynote, a few other interesting things popped out of Cupertino at the same time. Apple's about to release a beta of the Apple File System (APFS), a long awaited replacement for HFS+. The Apple Design Award winners were announced, with two Aussie apps getting a sweet light up cube - Zova (a fitness app) and Streaks (a productivity app). Apple did a big change to the App Store terms and conditions as well, so much so, they partnered with a comic book company to outline the changes in graphic form. Finally, one of the coolest things shown off at WWDC was Swift Playgrounds, an app by Apple to teach kids (or adults, but aimed at kids) to code in Swift and to learn programming fundamentals. Discuss
Microsoft busts open the piggy bank to buy LinkedIn for US$28b Just before all this Apple nonsense happened though, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for US$28b. No big deal. Why did it buy LinkedIn? Vox reckons LinkedIn complements Microsoft's business model of capturing enterprise and business users. Microsoft's customer base and LinkedIn's customer base are similar - corporate professionals. Basically, synergy. Lots of Synergy. So much Synergy you'll be blinded by the synergetic fusion event. Paul Ford made a list of 9 things Microsoft will do with LinkedIn and they all sound horrible. Discuss
Labor announces their NBN policy On the Queen's Birthday public holiday, Labor slipped out a policy document (PDF) as an outline of what they'll do with the NBN if they win the Federal election in a few weeks. What's in it exactly? Basically a return to the full fibre rollout, minus the bits that are slated for HFC and the poor suckers who have already had VDSL (aka FTTN) installed or are in an area where FTTN has been designed and will get installed soon. Surprisingly little mention of FTTdp, unless that's what they mean by FTTP. The ALP also plans to investigate with Infrastructure Australia how to get those on fixed wireless, satellite and HFC onto god's own blessed fibre, ASAP. Oh, and NBN is recruiting Irish tradies to work in Australia as copper field techs. Jobs and Growth. Discuss
Most of the E3 keynotes happened over the weekend E3 is also happening at the same time as WWDC and the big keynotes have gone down over the past two days. Microsoft revealed a slimmed down Xbox One S, Gears of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3. It also announced Project Scorpio - a high performance console that isn't a new generation console, or something. Sony showed off a bunch of games, namely Hideo Kojima's first ex-Konami title, Death Stranding - which has Daryl from The Walking Dead in it. Ubisoft (a new South Park RPG!), EA and Bethesda also had their presentations. If you care about gaming, might want to click through and see what they had to say. Discuss
COOL SHIT
Snag a bargain in eBay's 20% off tech sale Another large sale is going down on eBay right now. All sorts of cheap tech goodies are outlined in this Ozbargain post. SSDs, Micro SD, USB 3.0 flash drives, routers and more can be had at very good prices. There's also a good deal on the Logitech MX Master mouse - a very nice and good desktop (so its not tiny) Bluetooth mouse for professional mouse operators. I'm tempted to treat myself to one. Discuss
Sort out your sloppy Chrome tabs Chrome user? Sick of messy, ungrouped tabs? Check out Tab Organiser. It'll group your tabs by URL, so tabs from the same website are next to each other. Let it auto sort your tabs every 5, 30 or 60 minutes, or press Ctrl + Shift + A to sort them whenever you want. Nifty. Discuss
Neal Stephenson and Bill Gates hoon around in a Tesla then get burgers A few weeks ago, Neal Stephenson let bill Bill Gates drive his Tesla Model X and they chatted about sci-fi books. It was needlessly filmed in 360 degree VR rubbish, but if you ignore that and just listen to these two mega nerds talk, it's a lot of fun. Bill Gates takes him to a joint called Burgermaster and they get hamburgers. Awww. Now I wanna read Seveneves and eat a burger. Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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