Google partnerships with Novartis for groundbreaking product

Google have announced that they have partnered with Novartis, the worlds biggest multinational pharmaceutical company, to work towards the development of a product that could have massive health repercussions if successful.

The product they have in mind is a ‘smart’ contact lens with capabilities to not only  help those who suffer with being shortsighted with an auto-focus type feature, but also to measure and transmit blood sugar levels of people who suffer from Diabetes. This would be a huge step forward in the care and health of diabetics not only with the elimination of manual glucose measuring  but with the ability for both themselves and their doctors to have real time blood sugar levels collated in a smart phone or similar device.

Google are already on their way with the creation of the groundbreaking product. As of January  their prototypes  being able to make one Glucose reading per second.

Those involved are saying that the development of the ‘smart’ lens will take at least 2 or 3 years to bring to market, but they are hopeful that with the collaboration of Novartis and those behind the miniaturization of electronics in the X blue-sky innovation arm of Google will be able to succeed as soon as possible.

This is one of many inroads into health technology being made by the big tech companies, and is a hugely positive marker that as an industry, they’re heading in the right direction!

New iOS 8 Features discovered

There’s by now been some time since the features of iOS 8 were announced at WWDC 2014. Developers have had access to the new operating system since then and some more details have arisen from that. Hooray for developers!

Here’s some of what they’ve discovered:

* You can send your iPhone or iPad’s last location to Apple before it’s battery dies.

* The magical miracle of Shazam will not be integrated into Siri, and you will have the option to buy or find out more about the song playing once it’s identified. Um, Awesome.

* Using Safari, you will be able to use the device’s camera to scan in credit card numbers when you make online purchases, rather than typing the number in. Because those numbers are soooo long, you guys.

* You know how sometimes you hand your phone or iPad to a friend so they can see a photo? And then they just start rolling on through all the rest of your photos? And sometimes we have photos that should not be seen by others, are we right? Well, in iOS 8 you will have the option to hide certain photos from the Moments, Collections and Years view within the app. The photos will still be visible in the albums view, but in a sneaky new ‘Hidden’ album.

* The Photos app will have two new albums; “Recently Added” and “Recently Deleted.” The Recently Deleted album will temporarily show photos that have been recently deleted. (d’uh).

* The Camera app will have a sweet new Time Lapse feature, manual exposure controls and a self timer mode for 3 or 10 seconds.

* The new Weather app will take it’s information from The Weather Channel in iOS 8 and will feature a bucket load more details about the weather- UV Index, sunset/sunrise times, humidity, pressure and that all important ‘feels like’ option.

* Photos will be able to be inserted into notes in iOS 8, so that instead of trying to describe that amazing thing you saw that one night that meant that you were actually supposed to be an astronaut, you can take a photo. Cos that’s a thousand words right there.

*There will be new options for calendars in iOS 8, including Islamic, Chinese and Hebrew. Meanwhile, keyboards will be available in Filipino, Marathi, Slovenian, and Urdu. Sladko!

* There will be location based apps displayed on your screen depending on where you are – the example given is the Apple App store App will display automatically if you’re in an Apple store. So many Apples.

* Peer-to-peer Airplay will give users the option to stream content via Apple TV without having to share a network connection.

So there you have it, some more details surfacing about iOS 8! Pretty neat ones too. Although we really can’t wait until the developers tell everyone about the iOS 8 line of sight transportation feature. Now that’s a rad feature.

Google Acquires Skybox Imaging

One of Google’s more recent acquisitions is Skybox Imaging, an intelligence company that has been making vast inroads in satellite technology which Google will harness to use in mapping. The technology could however also have other far reaching  implications on privacy and business to business competition and spying.

From the Sauce:

‘By the time its entire fleet of 24 satellites has launched in 2018, Skybox will be imaging the entire Earth at a resolution sufficient to capture, for example, real-time video of cars driving down the highway. And it will be doing it three times a day.’

Cool cool, right? But they also rather casually mention:

‘ They are already looking at Foxconn every week and are able to pinpoint the next iPhone release based on the density of trucks outside their manufacturing facilities.’

Oooooh…. Interesting? Useful? A waste of technology? Kinda creepy? NOBODY KNOWS! We appreciate the map stuff though, because just how the hell did people know how to get places before?

Apple’s annual ‘back to school’ promotion begins tomorrow!

Apple will begin it’s annual ‘Back To School’ Promotion tomorrow,  Tuesday, July 1st, with a likely offer of an iTunes Store/App Store gift card to students that purchase a Mac, iPad, or iPhone.

If similar to last’s year’s promotion, the offer will be a $100 App Store gift card for the purchase of a new Mac or a $50 App Store gift card with the purchase of an iPad or iPhone.

So if you’ve been waiting for a good time to make that Apple purchase, now might just be the right time! Tomorrow in fact! The same exact right time that the US is going to beat Belgium in the World cup!

What a good day, tomorrow. We like you.

iPhone Tip Of The Day

This one’s for the walkers out there, you good honest souls you! When using maps in iOS 7, you have the option to choose walking directions as a dafault in settings, and to have Siri read you the directions turn- by- turn. Snazzy.

To set walking directions as your default, go to Settings>Maps. Scroll down to the Preferred Directions section and choose between walking and driving.

To ask Siri to give you prompted map directions whilst walking, tap the Directions button in the top left hand corner, select the walking icon at the top of the screen, enter your destination and then tap Route.

Interesting, (and some might say challenging), fact for you – Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.

Go to it!

New Emoji yay

In case you guys weren’t paying attention to your Facebook feed last week,  the world has been blessed by around 250 new Emoji ( yes, the plural of Emoji is Emoji. Like moose, although we, as awesome people, prefer Meese.)

Apparently the people in charge of Emoji are The Unicode Consortium, which sounds way fancier than what we had imagined – ‘ the wacky consortium of fun little doodle things.’  Anyway, they’ve announced version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard, which will in turn see the introduction of all those sweet new Emoji which will be seen in future versions of the Android and iOS operating systems.

According to the Unicode Consortium, the new emoji characters are primarily derived from characters used in the Wingdings and Webdings fonts. A full list of the new emoji names can be found on Emojipedia, which includes descriptions for each future emoji. A few examples:

– “Clamshell Mobile Phone”
– “man in business suit levitating”
– “Black Skull & Crossbones”
– “chipmunk”
– “Sleuth or Spy”
– “reversed hand with middle finger extended”

We’re especially looking forward to using the man in business suit levitating next to a chipmunk. For… reasons.

iPhone Tip Of The Day! Camera Edition

If you’re like us, you use your iPhone camera a lot. Which is super handy and awesome, right, but sometimes there’s that little issue of lighting that can overexpose, underexpose, or just crappily expose your photos.

Here’s a handy tip for getting better lighting by using the Exposure and Focus Lock feature:

*Point the Camera at the lighting you want to use.

*Tap and hold to lock the exposure to those light conditions.

*Turn the phone to the object of your photographic attraction, taking the locked exposure with you.

*Shoot your photo as normal.

*Magic.

This feature is also be used to lock focus, so you can overcome weird depth issues as well by doing  exactly the same as above. And now, you, like us, can become just that little bit closer to shooting photos like a pro!

Sweet Bro!

How to take an extra 10% off any single purchase at Best Buy

Just in case you guys didn’t see it- yesterday we outlined how to get the best deal on a brand new MacBook Air that we’ve ever seen. 

One important part of getting that deal is something that we want to make sure everyone is aware of, because it can help you in so many more purchases in the future!

It’s the Best Buy 10% off any single item purchase coupon from the Movers Guide Coupon Book. This book is free, convenient, and anyone can get one. Just go to your local Post Office, if it’s not lying around, you can ask any one of the lovely USPS employees for one and they’ll get one for you, no problems.

Again, 10% off any single item purchase at Best Buy! We’ll bring you all the great deals on tech stuff that Best buy have in the future so you can combine and stack those discounts too!

Sweet!

OS X Yosemite

Welcome to the new OS X Yosemite. Available for free in the fall, the updated Mac operating system has some quality new features that look to make the Mac and Apple device user experience more seamlessly integrated and an overall better user experience. The new design may take a while to grow on some people, and there isn’t a lot of really new stuff, but snazzy additions like email markup and multi platform sharing, or ‘continuity’, is enough to make us want to ride the OS X Yosemite train.

Here’s what we can look forward to.

 Notification Center

The new ‘Today’ feature in Notification Center gives you a concise and summarized look at everything you need to know — upcoming events, reminders, stocks, weather, and more. You will also have the opportunity to add widgets from the Mac App Store to customize whatever else you might like to see.

Design

The updated user interface design is aiming for bolder and cleaner, with more white and brighter, poppier colors. Rounded icons and button shapes, a new font, streamlined toolbars and window translucency make up the new look.

If you’re not a fan of all things bright, you will also have the option to use your Mac in ‘dark mode’ .

The close, minimize, and maximize window buttons are now close, minimize, and full screen, eliminating the extra full-screen control which we know a lot of people will be happy about.

Even though some people are complaining about it looking cartoonish, we especially like the extra smiley finder icon – we think he might be our new best friend. Craig Federighi himself was most impressed with the Trash can icon. And it’s pretty cool, for a trash can.

Email

A nice new feature of Mail is  Mail Drop, which lets you send super large attachments through the cloud without worrying about your service provider’s limitations or the recipients’ email service.

One of our favorite features of all from Yosemite, mainly because we like doodling so much, (but also because it looks insanely useful)  is the new Markup feature. With this you can quickly annotate an attachment you receive and send it back — without leaving Mail. You can fill out forms, add shapes or text, and add your signature by signing with your finger or capturing it with the camera on your Mac.  You also have the option to zoom. And everyone loves a good zoom, are we right?

Cross Platform interactivity or Continuity

If you have an iPhone with iOS 8, Apple has introduced a way to seamlessly integrate it with your Mac – something they call Continuity. With it you will be able to make and receive phone calls, iMessages, and SMS messages on both your Mac and your iDevices. We’re excited, because we’re lazy.  And just like in iOS 8, messages in Yosemite will now include audio and video capabilities. We’re excited, because we love Karaoke.

Another sweet deal is that with Yosemite (and iOS 8)  you will be able to use your iPhone as a personal hotspot for your Mac and connect to the internet that way if WiFi is unavailable. Something that wasn’t shown at WWDC but is expected to be an active feature of Yosemite when it’s released is a screen sharing feature in iMessages so whomever you’re messaging can see exactly what you see.

As a part of Continuity, the new iCloud Drive feature will give you the ability to to store any type of file in iCloud and access it on any device.  A Dropbox-like service that syncs documents across Macs, iOS devices AND Windows ( WHAT!),  it offers an iCloud storage folder directly within Finder.

Apple has introduced new pricing for iCloud with the debut of iCloud Drive. The first 5GB of iCloud storage is free, while 20GB costs $0.99 per month and 200GB costs $3.99 per month. Tiers of up to 1TB are also available.

The best part of Continuity is Handoff.   A super nifty new feature, it will let you seamlessly switch from your Mac to your iOS device and vice versa no matter what you’re doing. For instance if you’re on a web page, writing an email or finishing a document on your Mac, you will be able to pick up your iOS device and continue without missing a beat. It’s almost like they don’t want us to stop using their products or something…

Spotlight

With a new search window and scrollable previews of your results, Spotlight now finds information from Wikipedia, Bing, Maps, movies, sports, and heaps of other sources. It pops up in the center of your desktop and will give you more a stack more options for what you want to do with the results, such as read a document,make an appointment, save a phone number,  send an email, or make a phone call.

Safari

Safari will have new ways to view what you do. For favorites, click the smart search field and a grid drops down, revealing the icons of your favorite websites. Click an icon and off you go. For your Tabs (on all your devices, because CONTINUITY) you can click ‘Tab View’ to see all your tabs in a nicely organized view.

When you search for something, Safari provides Spotlight Suggestions from sources like Wikipedia, Bing, Maps, news, and iTunes, along with suggestions from your search engine.

Yosemite will bring advanced JavaScript engine optimizations to Safari. Sweet right? Yeah, that just means it’ll be faster. It’ll also be more energy efficient, so, apparently we can do things like watch Netflix for up to 2 hours longer. Because not watching enough Netflix was purportedly a big problem for a lot of people. (We’re being sarcastic. Back away from the Netflix. YOU CAN CONTROL IT. YOU DON’T HAVE TO WATCH THE WHOLE SEASON OF ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK AT ONCE!)

There are also more privacy options  in Safari.  A little late to the party, but you will be able to open one Safari window in Private Browsing mode — which doesn’t save your browsing history — while keeping others in regular browsing mode. AND you can also now search the web using DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track you. Kudos to the naming team on that one, by the way.

So there you have it folks, OS X Yosemite. The future of your Mac and integration with all your Apple devices, and changing the way we communicate and all that good and weird stuff.

OS X Yosemite is available today to registered developers and will be launched to the public this fall as a free upgrade for all users. There will also be an public open beta program launched later this summer.

You can sign up for the OS X Yosemite beta program here: https://appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/

If you guys have any questions about OS X Yosemite, please let us know and we’ll endeavor to find answers for you!

ioS 8!

Welcome to the new iOS 8! As well as a bright new user interface update, iOS 8 will bring to our phones a new level of sharing – between family members, between app developers and between iDevices and Macs.

We’re pretty excited about the new software functionality this operating system is promising, and below you will find a comprehensive outline of everything ( that we know of so far) that iOS 8 will bring to your lives with it’s release in the Fall.

New Spotlight

The search function in iOS is called Spotlight, and with iOS 8 it brings a much broader ability to search, both on your iDevice and on the internet. For example -type in a term and you can see a part of a Wikipedia article, including a picture and a short summary. Tap it, and Spotlight takes you to the full article.

Spotlight will also show you search results like trending topics, popular websites, nearby restaurants with phone number and hours of business that can connect you to maps,  search results within the iTunes Store or the App store, and search results for movie times.

It seems like there is a slight crossover with Siri’s functionality in the new Spotlight, but making things easier all round can only be good!

Messaging

Messaging gets a lovely new overhaul with iOS 8!  Starting off impressively is the new ability to add video and audio messages. Simply touch and hold the new microphone button to record your message, and swipe to send. on the other end, to hear a message, you can now hold your iPhone to your ear and listen or just tap the play button next to the message.

All messages, text, video and audio, will now have the option to be deleted automatically, or within a time period ranging from a year to forever.

With iOS 8 you will be able to create larger and better controlled group conversation threads where people can be added and can leave at their leisure. Group conversations can be named for an event or experience, the attachments can be seen all in one place rather than opening them one at a time, and you can put the conversation on ‘Do Not Disturb’ so you can read the thread when you want without being, well, disturbed.

A new option with messaging which I’m sure teenagers are just going to love is the new location services within the messaging app. It is of course just that – an option – to show others that your are messaging where you are ( and if you really are studying in the library with Rachel, why do you have your location option switched off? HUH? uh oh).

Other than that, we can see this addition promising to be very useful. You can show your location with individuals or everyone for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely.

Finally, a small but lovely touch is the new ability to send multiple photos and videos at once through messaging. YAY Let’s bombard EVERYONE WITH SO MANY CAT PHOTOS AND PHOTOS OF THOSE SWEET MOUNTAINS WE SAW ON OUR VACATION!

Health

The new Health app gives you an easy-to-read dashboard of all of your health and fitness data (Think heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, cholesterol etc) . This data can be collected ( if you choose) from 3rd party sources and apps such as Nike, Fitbit, FitnessPal, medical devices etc and shown here consolidated for you and others ( again, if you choose) to access. This can mean that your Doctor or fitness specialist can be notified when something is wrong, or if you’ve hit a certain metric or met a goal.

Apple has been working  with the Mayo Clinic working towards what they say will  ‘bridge the gap between patients, doctors, and health-tracking devices…with ‘the potential to revolutionize how the health industry works.’

With health in iOS 8 you can create an emergency card  with all of your vital medical information ( think blood type, allergies, medications) that’s accessible from your Lock screen.

Despite all of the focus on Apple’s health related initiative before WWDC, the company spent very little time going over the Health app. It is likely we’ll see an additional focus on Health in the coming months as it is likely to also integrate with Apple’s much-rumored wearable device, the iWatch.

SIRI

Siri gets several updates with the ability to be invoked hands-free with the phrase “Hey, Siri” along with Shazam song recognition, 22 new dictation languages, as well as streaming voice recognition to show you guys search results as you speak. In order to preserve battery life, Apple requires that the device be plugged into power for “Hey Siri” to work.

Notification Interaction

When a notification comes up on your phone, from Facebook, Skype, Messages,  Calendar – whatever- you will now be able to respond those notifications without leaving the app you’re already in. Hoo- RAH! Such a small thing, that will make it so incredibly less frustrating than before!

Email 

Now from your inbox, you can swipe to mark an email as read or flag it for follow-up. Jump between a draft email and an email in your inbox super easily, and when you get a reservation, flight confirmation or phone number in an email, a notification appears. Just tap to add an event to your calendar or a phone number to your contacts.

Safari in iPad

Just like above, you can now see all your tabs on your iPad, just like on your iPhone. You can see all your open web pages with tabs from the same site grouped together. There’s also a new Sidebar that slides out to reveal your bookmarks, Reading List, and Shared Links.

Home Button

From any screen, press the Home button twice to see the multitasking interface which now comes complete with a few friendly faces. These are the people you’ve recently talked to and if you swipe to the right — your favorite contacts as well. Just tap one to call, text, or start a FaceTime call.

New keyboards

QuickType is the new predictive text and something we’re sure will change the way we communicate. We can also see it being comedian’s late night fodder for sure, but until then – it’s a clever and useful feature of iOS 8.  As you use the new keyboard over time, it will learn the way you communicate, get to know your favorite phrases, and suggest options for the logical next word that adapts to the current context with the caveat that those words change, depending on who you are talking to. The iOS 8 predictive text engine is optimized for 14 countries.

Apple is also going to allow users to install third-party keyboards for the first time, which means keyboards like Swype can be used natively on the operating system.

Family Sharing

Family sharing is pretty cool. Up to six people in your family can share all kinds of things across their devices. This includes: calendar information and purchases from iTunes, iBooks, and the App Store, (with the ability to pay for family purchases with the same credit card and approve kids’ spending right from a parent’s device.) You will be able to automatically set up a family photo stream where you can share photos, videos, and comments. And everything stays up to date on everyone’s devices.

Family Sharing can automatically share your location with your family members and show you where they are. You can hide your location too… because that’s not suspicious or anything.

iCloud Drive 

You can safely store all your presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and any other kind of document in iCloud, access them and work on them live from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC.

Using iCloud Drive means you’ll always have access to the latest version of all your documents from any device.

What’s really cool is that now your apps will be able to share files, which means you can access and work on the same file across multiple apps. The example Apple gave is this: you can create a drawing in a sketching app, then open it in a paint app to color it in. Or create a chart in one app and place it in a slideshow using a presentation app. No more making copies or importing documents from one app to another. It’s a whole new level of collaboration between apps.

Cross platform interaction

Um, what? You can do what now? Yass. Now you can make and receive phone calls on all of your devices and your Mac as long as your iPhone running iOS 8 is on the same Wi-Fi network. Incoming calls show the caller’s name, number, and profile picture. Just click or swipe the notification to answer, ignore, or respond with a quick message. It all works with your existing iPhone number, so there’s nothing to set up.

AND

PERSONAL HOTSPOT WHAT. If you’re out of Wi-Fi range but your iPhone is close by, your iPad or Mac will now be able to connect to your phone’s new personal hotspot to surf the interwebs and all that cool internet type stuff.

 Swift

This is a new programming language that Apple has introduced, which for developers, is pretty dope. For the general population, it’s also pretty dope, but on a different level. What it comes down to for you guys – apps for iOS 8 will be better. Which we like.

Extras We’ve learnt about since the WWDC keynote !

iPads will gain the ability to take Panoramic photos like the iPhone, while the Camera will gain an instant burst mode, a timer mode, and separate controls for focus and exposure. iBooks will support an auto night mode and the ability to organize books by series, while notifications will include travel time.

A mysterious Tips app, which was first depicted in an early screenshot of iOS 8, is also mentioned, though it is unclear what this app will do. It is possible Tips will provide iOS users with information on lesser known iOS features, serving as a tutorial app for those who want to learn the ins and outs of their devices.

So there you go, guys, iOS 8. Overall we’re really quite impressed, and very much looking forward to it’s release in the Fall. Apple developers have access to iOS 8 and will be working on creating awesome apps for the update so we can use the operating system precisely how Apple planned. It will, of course, be free.

The only downfall of iOS 8 – Those of you who have an iPhone 4, it doesn’t appear as if iOS 8 will be compatible. . Soooo… you guys…. have you heard about the new iPhone 6 that’s coming?

Stay tuned for our comprehensive outline of OS X Yosemite – and let us know if you have any questions about iOS 8 and we’ll try and answer them as best we can!!