Google updates to a cleaner, simpler Play Store design [Updated] - TechCrunch

[Update: the Music tab has been relocated] Google’s Play Store has gotten a big visual makeover, the company announced today, with changes that include a cleaner look-and-feel, new navigation, an easier way to to see app information, and more. Most notably, however, is that Google has taken a page from Apple’s playbook with the priority given to its two distinct sections for apps and games. It has also removed the “Music” tab from the top-level navigation, likely ahead of planned changes to Google Play Music and YouTube Music.

Though the redesign is in keeping with Google’s Material Design philosophy, it’s hard to miss Apple’s influence here — from the brighter, whiter and cleaner layout to the new navigation and updated app detail page layouts, among other things.

With Apple’s huge App Store revamp in 2017, the company made several changes to refocus user attention away from top charts and rankings to editorial content, stories and tips, recommendations, and curated collections. As a part of this redesign, it created two separate tabs for Apps and Games in the App Store app’s main navigation to better direct users to the type of app content they wanted to browse.

The Play Store had already broken out Apps and Games before today, but they had been part of a much larger navigational element at the top of the home page.

The new design now relocates the Play Store’s main navigation to the bottom of the screen, just like on the iOS App Store. It also distills down navigation to just four tabs: Games, Apps, Movies & TV, and Books. (Music is gone).

Google says its decision to create two main tabs for apps and games will help it to “better serve users the right kind of content.”

Within the Games and Apps sections, users can browse into other sections including Google’s personalized “For You” suggestions and Top Charts, and more. Here, you’ll find the same sections the Play Store had before (like “New,” “Events,” “Premium,” etc.) — they’ve just been relocated within the new tabs instead of existing as a second-level navigation bar on the Play Store homepage.

When the user finds an app or game they’re interested in, the updated store listing page layout will now surface richer app information at the top of the page and a bigger call-to-action button (e.g. “Install”).

This, too, is similar to iOS, where key details about the app or game — like its rating or age range — are at the top of this app detail page.

The store also features Google’s new icon system where apps have a uniform rounded square shape. Apple has always enforced standardized app icons.

The Play Store makeover had already leaked earlier this year, thanks to enterprising developers who got their hands on Google’s tests and published screenshots.

Some more screenshots of the new Google Play UI, this time with working reviews and music store. Only UI bug is the toolbar disappearing (that I can see), and it's *fairly* stable (but still crashes a fair amount), might be something at I/O next week? pic.twitter.com/7TmTH2TYMb

— Kieron Quinn (@Quinny898) May 2, 2019

As for the Music tab’s relocation, Google already confirmed it was planning to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music, and shut down Google Play’s artist hub this April in preparation for that. With the removal of the Music tab from the new Play Store, the completion of this merger appears to be imminent.

Update: the Music tab has been relocated, says Google…it’s a bit buried now

In Google’s announcement today about the redesign, it showed off the new look with a photo. (see top photo above).

It’s pretty odd that the app being showcased in Google’s photo, Alto’s Odyssey, is an Apple Design Winner that launched on iOS first — as did its precursor, Alto’s Adventure. When coming to Android, the game development company worked with Android publisher Noodlecake on its Android ports.

In other words, not only is this a non-exclusive game, it comes from an iOS-first shop. Sure, it’s a great game. But that’s also a pretty weird pick, on Google’s part.

The Google Play Store has over two billion monthly active users, Google said in its announcement. The new version of the Play Store is rolling out now.

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https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/google-updates-to-a-cleaner-simpler-play-store-design-with-no-music-section/

2019-08-21 19:01:02Z
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Intel's line of notebook CPUs gets more confusing with 14nm Comet Lake - Ars Technica

• The best news about Comet Lake is the high-end 6C/12T i7.

  Intel Corporation

• We'd recommend taking the 16% overall performance boost far more seriously than the 41% boost claimed for very specific O365 scenarios.

  Intel Corporation

• Get ready for a world of pain trying to figure out whether you're getting "the good CPU" or not—the Ice Lake i7 on the left has roughly 3x the graphics performance of the Comet Lake i7.

  Intel Corporation

Today, Intel is launching a new series of 14nm notebook CPUs code-named Comet Lake. Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question—and one largely left unanswered by Intel—is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs.

Both the Comet Lake and Ice Lake notebook CPU lines this month consist of a full range of i3, i5, and i7 mobile CPUs in both high-power (U-series) and low-power (Y-series) variants. This adds up to a total of 19 Intel notebook CPU models released in August, and we expect to see a lot of follow-on confusion. During the briefing call, Intel executives did not want to respond to questions about differentiation between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake lines based on either performance or price, but the technical specs lead us to believe that Ice Lake is likely the far more attractive product line for most users.

• A very broad overview of the differences between Ice Lake and Comet Lake notebook CPUs.

  Intel Corporation

• Comet Lake's CPU lineups offer OEM-configurable TDPs of 15W/25W for the U-series, or 4.5-5.5W/7W/9W for the Y-series.

  Intel Corporation

• With the exception of the non-configurable 28W i7-1068G7, Ice Lake's U-series runs at 15W/25W and its Y-series at 9W/12W.

  Intel Corporation

Intel's U-series CPUs for both Comet Lake and Ice Lake operate at a nominal 15W TDP. Both lines also support a "Config Up" 25W TDP, which can be enabled by OEMs who choose to provide the cooling and battery resources necessary to support it.

Things get more interesting for the lower-powered Y-series—Ice Lake offers 9W/12W configurable TDP, but Comet Lake undercuts that to 7W/9W. This is already a significant drop in power budget, which Comet Lake takes even further by offering a new Config Down TDP, which is either 4.5W or 5.5W, depending on which model you're looking at.

Comet Lake's biggest and meanest i7, the i7-10710U, sports 6 cores and 12 threads at a slightly higher boost clock rate than Ice Lake's 4C/8T i7-1068G7. However, the Comet Lake parts are still using the older UHD graphics chipset—they don't get access to Ice Lake's shiny new Iris+, which offers up to triple the onboard graphics performance. This sharply limits the appeal of the Comet Lake i7 CPUs in any OEM design that doesn't include a separate Nvidia or Radeon GPU—which would in turn bump the real-world power consumption and heat generation of such a system significantly.

Comet Lake's Y-series makes a similar trade-off. Although Comet Lake's Y-series does offer significantly lower power consumption than Ice Lake's, it makes plenty of sacrifices to get there. Its all-core turbo frequencies are typically down about 400 MHz from Ice Lake's, the RAM drops from LPDDR4x-3733 to LPDDR3-2133, and (of course) no Iris+ graphics. We expect this will all add up to Ice Lake's Y-series performing much better than Comet Lake's, at a very obvious, seat-of-the-pants level in otherwise similarly configured systems.

Finally, Comet Lake does not support Intel's Deep Learning Boost, a limited extended instruction set that accelerates AI workloads based on vector neural networks. This extended instruction set was originally available in Cascade Lake series Xeon Scalable processors before moving down to the laptop with Ice Lake.

We're willing to give Comet Lake a pass on this one. Personal-assistant technology in the moderate-to-near future might begin taking advantage of INT8 instructions to significant effect, but for now, we don't think most consumers are likely to miss it.

• Intel's press briefing avoided differentiating strongly between Ice Lake and Comet Lake. This lone slide seems to position Ice Lake as the "AI" choice, intimating that Comet Lake is the better general-purpose consumer part. We're not so sure about that.

  Intel Corporation

• The one thing Ice Lake and Comet Lake really have in common is a focus on Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6. The performance claims for Wi-Fi 6 are, in our opinion, badly overstated.

  Intel Corporation

One focus the two product lines share is an enthusiasm for integrated Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 support. That's probably because neither is built into rival AMD's current lineup. The Wi-Fi 6 support is punched up particularly hard, with an entire slide devoted to glowing claims from Netgear, TP-Link, and Comcast.

It's probably a mistake to get too excited about that Wi-Fi 6 support; independent tests of the current crop of Wi-Fi 6 routers do not support the wild claims of 300% improvements in throughput and latency made on this slide. More importantly, the real promise of Wi-Fi 6 was never single-device throughput in the first place—the real promise of Wi-Fi 6 lies in whole-network efficiency increases. Those increases come with OFDMA, which is described by Netgear itself as the biggest benefit to Wi-Fi 6. Also according to Netgear, the benefits don't kick in until you've got at least four Wi-Fi 6 clients operating simultaneously.

Conclusions

In a world that went straight from Whiskey Lake to Comet Lake, this lineup would look pretty good. But we have trouble seeing a real value for Comet Lake in a market where Ice Lake was just released. The low power consumption of Comet Lake's Y-series is interesting, but the 6C/12T i7-0710U is the only really tempting part of its U-series line—and in both cases, we expect that most consumers would be better served with Ice Lake's much higher-performance graphics and RAM.

This isn't the first time Intel has dropped a confusing mix of notebook CPUs on the market near-simultaneously. Some new eighth-generation Coffee Lake products, for instance, launched after the entire run of ninth-generation Coffee Lake and Whiskey Lake parts had finished. It's tempting to speculate that Intel needed this late Comet Lake 14nm refresh due to production limits on Ice Lake, but it's just as likely that this is simply business as usual in the Intel world.

Assuming pricing is similar, we see the Ice Lake product line as clearly superior to Comet Lake for most consumers. The confusion between the two lines could also represent a field Intel has left ripe for its rival AMD to sweep. Perhaps AMD will even finish the hat trick it began with Ryzen 3000 on the desktop and Epyc Rome in the server room.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/intels-line-of-notebook-cpus-gets-more-confusing-with-14nm-comet-lake/

2019-08-21 13:00:00Z
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Sony acquires Insomniac Games, coming off of that gangbusters Spider-Man PS4 partnership - Destructoid

Well, make it official

Insomniac Games might work with Sony a ton, but they're actually independent. Well, they were, until today that is. During Gamescom Sony announced that they've actually acquired the studio, having "entered into definitive agreements to acquire Insomniac Games, Inc."

Sony details exactly what's happening in the following statement provided to Destructoid (emphasis mine): "Upon completion of the acquisition, Insomniac Games will join the global development operation of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios ("SIE WWS"). Insomniac Games is the 14th studio to join the SIE WWS family. This addition furthers SIE's continued commitment to creative excellence and innovation in game development exclusively for the PlayStation platforms. Building on a working relationship between Insomniac Games and SIE spanning more than 20 years, this acquisition enhances the creative force within SIE WWS and formally adds a studio to the PlayStation family that continues to raise the bar on open world, story-driven games. The day-to-day operations of Insomniac Games post-closing of the acquisition are expected to be run by the current management team in conjunction with SIE WWS San Mateo Studio."

Spider-Man PS4 was a cash cow for Sony and it makes perfect sense why they'd want to lock up a studio who is reaching even greater heights than they have in the past. Given how close Sony keeps their studios close to the chest, any future games like the Xbox One-bound Sunset Overdrive or multiplatform releases like Song of the Deep are now likely pipedreams. I also wonder if all of their VR games (Edge of Nowhere, The Unspoken, Feral Rites, Stormland) will be making their way to PSVR at some point!

Also, Spider-Man 2 exclusively on PS4 here we come! This is a huge get for Sony and the next generation console war just got a little hotter.

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2019-08-19 19:10:00Z
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Apple’s game subscription service will reportedly cost $5 per month - Engadget

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Apple has been pretty quiet about Apple Arcade, the curated gaming subscription service coming this fall. But a few new details are emerging. 9to5Mac reported that a promotional message in one of the APIs used by the app priced the service at $5 a month. The company hasn't officially announced the price for its "Netflix for Games" service, so that price tag could change. Apple declined to comment after Engadget reached out today for confirmation of the news.

The company is expected to roll out Apple Arcade on September 10, during its release event for the new iPhone. The basic idea behind the service is that users will pay a flat monthly rate to play as many participating games as they want. Each subscription will also include access for up to six family members. Players will be able to access Arcade on the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, so both desktop and mobile games will be included.

The service is expected to include over 100 games, including titles that are new and completely exclusive to Apple. After looking at the early access program, 9to5Mac reported that a mix of games were available to download from the store, most of which were still in-development builds.

It's likely we'll have to wait until next month to learn more about what Apple Arcade holds in store. But if the $5 price tag is correct, it's a reasonable price for a gaming service, not to mention cheaper than the $10 per month cost of services like Apple News+ and Apple Music.

Source: 9to5Mac

In this article: apple, apple arcade, gadgetry, gadgets, gaming, gaming subscription, internet, iphone, mobile, thebuyersguide

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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2019-08-19 17:42:12Z
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Nintendo Switch Gamescom Stream Recap: All New Game Announcements - GameSpot

Gamescom 2019 is beginning soon in Cologne, Germany, but before the event starts in earnest several publishers are rolling out announcements. Nintendo used its showcase to spotlight indie games on Nintendo Switch--including a trio of excellent titles that are out today, August 19. But the presentation held plenty of surprises in store overall. Just in case you missed it, we've compiled all the big news and announcements below, or you can rewatch the presentation in its entirety.

Nintendo also plans to debut new footage of its lineup throughout the week, including Luigi's Mansion 3, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Astral Chain, Dragon Quest XI S, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, and The Witcher 3. For more out of Gamescom, check out our full schedule of Gamescom press conferences.

Nintendo Indie World Showcase From Gamescom 2019

Nintendo Gamescom 2019 News Recap

Skater XL Coming to Nintendo Switch

The indie skateboarding game Skater XL is in early access on PC now, and Nintendo revealed it will come to Switch as well next year. It features a stick-based physics system reminiscent of the Skate series, so it might just scratch that itch. Plus you can actually take this one to a skate park with you.

Superhot Comes to Nintendo Switch Superfast

The acclaimed puzzle-shooter Superhot is coming to Nintendo Switch, but more surprising is that it's coming to Nintendo Switch today. The game pits you in seemingly impossible situations against multiple foes, but the movement of time is tied to your own movement so you can always stop and take a moment to get your bearings. The result is a bullet-dodging action game that has you shattering your foes like Neo.

Hotline Miami Comes In Hot

Superhot isn't the only game with a surprise-drop on Nintendo Switch. Both Hotline Miami and Hotline Miami 2 are available on Nintendo Switch starting today. The pair of games feature an overhead perspective as you make your way through a series of kill rooms, but one hit will take you down. You'll have to plan your attacks carefully and make use of environments to survive.

The Touryst Goes to Germany

One of the most unexpected surprises of the presentation was a brand-new game from the Fast RMX team. But far from a fast-paced racing game, this one is an action-adventure game full of dungeons, puzzles, and traps. The Touryst features a voxel art style and Zelda-like gameplay, so it's one worth keeping an eye on. It's planned for a November release.

Microsoft Lets Nintendo Play With Ori

Nintendo's burgeoning relationship with Microsoft has already resulted in a port of Cuphead and Banjo in Smash, and now we've seen the latest in the partnership. Ori and the Blind Forest, the acclaimed 2015 platformer from Moon Studios, is coming to Nintendo Switch on September 27.

Everything Else From Nintendo's Indie Showcase

• Risk of Rain 2 from Hopoo and Gearbox is coming to Nintendo Switch this summer
• We got a new look at Torchlight 2, which is due on Nintendo Switch on September 3--plus you can grab an exclusive Nintendo Switch pet
• Eastward from Pixpil is coming to Nintendo Switch in 2020
• The music-driven shooter Freedom Finger from Wide Right Interactive is coming to Nintendo Switch this fall
• The action RPG Skellboy has set a date to release on Nintendo Switch on December 3
• Roki is a puzzle-adventure game based on Scandinavian folklore coming this winter
• The puzzle-platform adventure Youropa is coming this winter too
• EarthNight, a 2D platformer that pays homage to classic arcade games, is coming this year
• Dungeon Defenders: Awakened will be a timed exclusive on Nintendo Switch when it launches in February 2020
• Creature and the Well and Northgard are now available for pre-order on the Nintendo Eshop

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https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-gamescom-showcase-wrapup-all-the-new-game/1100-6469156/

2019-08-19 17:33:00Z
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SUPERHOT - Launch Trailer - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9gU9Jgk3eY

2019-08-19 14:00:11Z
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After Math: Plead the fifth - Engadget

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With Dave Chappelle coming back to Netflix for the one, two, three, four, fif time later this month, we're taking a look at all of this week's headlines that will make you want to plead against self-incrimination.

Netflix's fifth Dave Chappelle comedy special debuts August 26th

Come August 26th, high school woodshop teachers across the country will need both hands to count all of Dave Chapelle's stand up specials on Netflix.

Massive biometric security flaw exposed more than one million fingerprints

How many fingers do we have on each hand? Five, that's right. And how many people have had their biometric data exposed because security company Suprema couldn't bother to properly secure its database? One milion, right again.

US Homeland Security Committee subpoenas 8chan owner

At least three white nationalists have posted their screeds on 8Chan just before shooting large numbers of people so, understandably, Congress has a few questions. The legislative body has requested the site's owner to appear before it -- on September 5th, natch.

Who are you and why are you leaving old TVs on porches in Virginia?

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear televisions and deliver old CRT televisions to 50 of their closest neighbors.

'Jimmy Kimmel Live' fined $395,000 for using emergency alert tones

The FCC, notorious for its sense of humor and easy going demeanor, handed the popular late night talk show a six figure fine this week over what ABC describes as a "misunderstanding" regarding how and when emergency alert tones can be broadcast (hint: it's never when there's not an emergency).

In this article: 8chan, after math, aftermath, biometric, congress, DataBreach, DaveChappelle, fcc, internet, JimmyKimmelLive, netflix, security, tomorrow

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/08/18/after-math-plead-the-fifth/

2019-08-18 15:30:41Z
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