Monthly Archives: May 2015
Google Photos Offers Unlimited Image and Video Storage
During the Google I/O keynote, the tech company announced Google Photos, a standalone photo hosting app allowing users unlimited online storage for images and videos.
Called a "new experience built from the ground up," Google Photos will mark a departure from the need to upload photos to Google+, giving people a personal and private space for storage.
Photos can be quickly backed up to Google Photos and organized for the purpose of being easy to find. Features such as identifying people in different life stages, selecting multiple photos at once, and sharing images with others have been integrated to streamline the user experience.
Uploads are limited to 16MP for images and 1080p for videos. It is expected to launch today on Android, iOS, and the web.
Google Outlines What’s Next for Android Wear
Google announced three new features and several apps for the Android Wear platform at today's I/O developers conference.
The Always On Apps feature will allow the device to go into a low black and white power mode so that a selected app, such as a list or map, will stay on the screen and is viewable without having to tap or wake up the device. David Singleton, Android Wear director, emphasized that Android Wear devices should be "glanceable, actionable and effortless."
The second feature is wrist gestures, which will allow users to flick their wrist up and down to scroll through notifications. Android Wear devices will also recognize sketched emojis. After drawing a picture, the user can select their emoji from a list of emojis similar to what was sketched and send it in a message.
Daily Deals: $300 Xbox One, PS4 With Two Controllers, Destiny $20
PlayStation 4 With Two Controllers
The PS4 with a year of PS Plus deal is done, now Amazon is tossing in a blue DualShock 4. I love controllers as a freebie since they never seem to go for less than $45-$50, whereas game prices drop like rocks.
Stephen King’s It Remake May Float Again
The big-screen adaptation of the Stephen King book It may not be dead as was previously feared.
News broke earlier in the week that True Detective director Cary Fukunaga was exiting the project, which led to speculation that the movie was all but done-for. But now Bloody Disgusting reports that Stephen King's It will move on with production.
‘Now on Tap’ Coming to Google Now
Android's intelligent personal assistant, Google Now, is getting smarter.
At the company's I/O 2015 conference, Google revealed Now on Tap, a feature that uses what's on your device's screen to make contextually relevant notes and actions.
Google Now's Product Director, Aparna Chennapragada, said "We want to proactively bring you answers." In regard to businesses, the assistant understands over 100 million places, and Now on Tap can immediately tell you when those places are open, when they're busy, what to do there, and much more.
What does this mean for the user? If somebody asks you to see a movie (Tomorrowland was Google's example) through email, you can simply hold down the home button to reveal movie times, reviews, actor info, and more for that movie, with no need to highlight the film title or offer any kind of additional input.
Ninja Turtles 2 Set Photos Reveal Shredder and Karai
Well, that didn't take long. We found out yesterday that actress Brittany Ishibashi had been cast as the villainous Shredder's daughter Karai in Ninja Turtles 2.
Today, we have our first look at her in costume alongside The Wolverine's Brian Tee as Shredder and members of the Foot Clan.
Check out some of these new behind-the-scenes photos from the New York set via ComingSoon:
Transformers Developer Working on Destiny?
High Moon Studios, the developer behind the last-gen versions of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and three different Transformers games, has posted a job listing on parent company Activision's careers page that shows it's working with Bungie on Destiny.
Below the job description, a brief description of the company ends with statement "we need to add world class talent as we partner with Bungie to support work on their ground breaking Destiny Franchise," referring to future applicants.
High Moon Studios handled both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, so they know their way around triple-A first person shooters. The job listing is for a Mission Designer, with one of the requirements for the position being a passionate familiarity with the Destiny franchise.
How Inside Out is Turning Disney Infinity 3.0 into a Legitimate Platformer
Disney Infinity 3.0 is using a wealth of interesting developers (Avalanche, Ninja Theory, Sumo Digital) and a new batch of properties (Star Wars, Tron) to deliver some genuinely interesting gameplay opportunities that feel more fleshed out than previous entries. Case in point is Pixar’s Inside Out playset, which delivers a genuinely challenging 2D and 3D platforming game with some really interesting uses of the source material.
The 2D portion plays a lot like 2013’s underrated Ibb and Obb. The world is divided in half horizontally, and every time you cross the horizon, gravity reverses. This means that the top half of a stage plays like a traditional 2D platformer, while the bottom half forces you to rejigger everything you’ve learned since Super Mario Bros. You have to pop between the worlds to solve puzzles, spot gaps in the stage to double back and collect secrets, and utilize long drops in one plane to make a huge jump in another.
Android Pay Introduced By Google
Google dove into the upcoming version of Android, codenamed Android M, at its Google I/O conference today. Among the new features in Android M will be NFC payments with fingerprint authorization.
Android Pay, similar to Apple Pay on iOS, allows users to complete transactions with just their mobile device,
Owners of NFC-enabled Android phones, KitKat and beyond, can use Android Pay by simply placing their phone against a store's NFC terminal.
Google named security as one of its top priorities for Android Pay. According to Dake Burke, Google's VP of Engineering, Android Pay generates a virtual account number for your debit or credit card so that your actual card number is never revealed to participating retailers.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End Release Window Revealed
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will release before April 2016, Sony Computer Entertainment has confirmed.
During its annual Investor Relations Day conference, PlayStation president Andrew House revealed that Naughty Dog's upcoming action-adventure game will be out before the company's 2015 fiscal year comes to a close, which ends March 31, 2016.
Since we already know Uncharted 4 won't be out in 2015, that narrows the game's release to the first three months of next year, and if you want to take Naughty Dog's "spring" launch window literally, that narrows it down even further, to the final two weeks of March.