Samsung is developing its own alternative to Apple’s AirDrop file sharing service that will launch with the upcoming Galaxy S20, XDA Developers reports. Screenshots of the feature show that it will work similarly to AirDrop, allowing you to “share instantly with people nearby,” so long as their device has Quick Share turned on. You’ll also be able to restrict who can send you files to just people in your contacts, or else leave it wide open so that strangers can send you pictures of space sloths.
Despite how useful AirDrop has been on iOS and macOS since its initial launch in 2011, Android has struggled to come up with a viable competitor. For a while Android included an NFC-based version called Android Beam, but this was discontinued with Android 10. Google’s Files app also contains similar functionality, but it’s not the same as having the feature built directly into Android.
There are signs that this could change soon. XDA Developers has reported multiple times on an upcoming Android feature called Nearby Sharing which appears to be accessed directly from the operating system’s quick settings panel. The feature was first spotted under the name Fast Share back in June 2019, but appears to still be under development as of earlier this month.
As well as letting you share with other Samsung smartphone users, Quick Share also lets you transfer data to SmartThings devices. To do so, it uploads your file to Samsung Cloud, before downloading it on the device itself. This mode appears to be more limited, with a data cap of 1GB at a time, up to a maximum of 2GB a day.
Samsung isn’t the only Android manufacturer working on an AirDrop competitor. Last year, three of China’s biggest smartphone manufacturers — Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo — announced that they are working on a peer-to-peer transfer protocol that will work across their devices. The feature is expected to launch next month. Meanwhile, OnePlus also has its own file transfer system called FileDash, which is limited to its own devices.
Samsung’s Galaxy S20 is expected to launch on February 11th, where we could also see Quick Share officially detailed. XDA Developers says the feature is likely to come to all devices launching with One UI 2.1 or later, but speculates that it may end up on older Samsung devices in time.
Adobe is previewing a new feature for Premiere Pro called Productions that’ll help teams work together on projects. Announced today at the Sundance Film Festival, the new panel was designed with filmmakers in mind, and was created with input from the production teams behind Terminator: Dark Fate and Dolemite is My Name. Adobe says a special build of the feature is also currently being used in editorial on David Fincher’s Mank.
Productions is essentially a new panel that acts as a shared folder system, like Google Drive, to make sharing assets between editors easier and more collaborative. On its blog, Adobe describes potential use cases like managing large projects by dividing them into smaller pieces organized around reels and scenes, or grouping episodic shows by season. The feature is meant to make assets easily accessible so teams can retrieve recurring assets like title sequences or audio elements without having to create duplicates. Agencies can also allocate productions to each of their clients.
The new Production panel uses shared local storage, which allows for multiple editors to work on different projects in the same Production. A project-locking feature protects your work from being saved over, while still letting other people access your work. Other users will be able to copy content, but they won’t be able to make changes until you finish your edit. Adobe says everyone working on a Production will share the same settings for projects, including scratch disks, GPU renderer, and capture and ingest presets. “Nothing is on the cloud unless you put it there,” Adobe explains on its blog. “If needed, you can do all your work without an internet connection.”
Adobe has been introducing collaborative features to more of its software, making the Creative Cloud more conducive to teamwork. The company’s UI prototyping software, Adobe XD, added a beta co-editing feature in November last year.
Last week, Google began rolling out a new look for its search results on desktop, which blurs the line between organic search results and the ads that sit above them. In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former. It’s been formatted to resemble the new favicons that now appear next to the search results you care about. Early data collected by Digidaysuggests that the changes may already be causing people to click on more ads.
The Guardian’sAlex Hern is one of many commenters to point out the problem, noting that there’s now next to no visual distinction between ads and search results. “There is still, technically, *labelling*, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is supposed to be difficult to spot at a glance where the adverts end,” he tweeted.
I would argue there is now no visual distinction between ads and results. There is still, technically, *labelling*, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that it is supposed to be difficult to spot at a glance where the adverts end. pic.twitter.com/qjUmisbLER
It’s especially striking considering how distinct Google designed its ads in the past. Up until 2013, the search engine gave its ads an entirely different background color to distinguish them from its organic search results. But even after that, it continued to use unique colors that effectively let users quickly see where its ads ended and organic results began.
In a blog post announcing the new design when it came to mobile last year, Google partially explained the change by saying that adding favicons to organic search results means that “a website’s branding can be front and center,” which means “you can more easily scan the page of results.” But it spent far less time talking about the changes to its ad designs, which now feel much more significant, especially when viewing results on a laptop or monitor.
In the past, Google’s Sundeep Jain justified simplifying the company’s ad designs by saying that a simpler design “makes it easier for users to digest information,” according to Search Engine Land. He added that the company was trying to reduce the number of different colors used on a page in order to bring a little more “harmony” to the layout.
It’s hard not to get the feeling that this “harmony” is less about offering a better user experience, and more about helping Google’s ad revenue. As Digiday reports, there’s data to suggest that’s actually the case. According to one digital marketing agency, click-through rates have already increased for some search ads on desktop, and mobile click-through rates for some of its clients increased last year from 17 to 18 percent after similar changes to Google’s mobile search layout.
Google is fundamentally an ad business. In the third quarter of 2019, Google’s parent company Alphabet made nearly $34 billion from Google advertising, out of a total revenue of $40 billion for Alphabet as a whole. At that sort of scale, small changes in ad click-through rates could end up having a huge effect on Alphabet’s bottom line, even if it means tricking users for cheap clicks.
Apple on Thursday announced its new "Apple Watch Connected" gym initiative, a new series of partnerships with fitness facilities that makes it easier for people who own Apple Watches to track workouts, buy stuff and earn rewards for working out.
It's Apple's latest fitness expansion, helping it to build an entire ecosystem around the Apple Watch and providing owners with more places to use it to improve their fitness tracking. It creates yet another reason for people to buy Apple Watches: If you're trying to work out, why not get a watch that works seamlessly with the gym you're joining? And it helps gyms keep customers through rewards-based initiatives.
It also adds a streamlined tech layer on top of gyms, which often have various third-party technologies that don't always talk to the fitness wearables people have.
A GymKit-enabled machine at Crunch Fitness.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
Four gyms are part of the program with select locations going live on Thursday. Additional fitness facilities will also join the program in the future, Apple said. Launch partners include Basecamp Fitness, Orange Theory, YMCA and Crunch Fitness. It's free for gyms to participate, so long as they meet Apple's criteria.
Here's what you need to know.
Apple Watch Connected
Crunch Fitness will give discounts on monthly memberships if you meet workout goals.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
If you own an Apple Watch, you'll probably want to join an "Apple Watch Connected" gym if there's one nearby and you can afford it, since you'll receive benefits for owning one and working out. The Apple Watch Connected platform includes three tiers that must be supported by a gym that participates in the program.
An Apple Watch Connected gym has to have an iPhone and Apple Watch app that lets people track their fitness, see classes and log-in at the gym.
Gyms have to offer some sort of option for Apple Watch owners to "earn with Apple Watch." For example, Crunch will give you a $3 to $4 in weekly credit if you meet certain goals, like working out a certain amount of time per month. The credits apply to the following month's bill. You can hit those goals either by working out inside or outside of the gym. Orange Theory will offer gift cards to Apple and Nike for hitting certain goals. Basecamp Fitness will give you an Apple Watch Series 5 GPS model that you can earn back by participating in three classes a week for an entire year. At the YMCA, your workouts will go toward providing free classes for children, like swim lessons.
The gym has to accept Apple Pay. That means you can leave your phone in the car and just use your Apple Watch to buy stuff like water, food or other goods only using your wrist.
A fourth tier isn't required but is offered by some fitness facilities like Crunch: GymKit support. These are special machines that will automatically sync your workouts to your Apple Watch, providing more information than the Apple Watch might be able to get on its own. For example, a stair climber will give you a more accurate representation on floors you've climbed, since the sensors inside the Apple Watch can only track actual flights of stairs as you change altitude.
There's a benefit to gyms for adding Apple Watch Connected. Gyms see it as a way to help keep customer turnover low.
"I'm confident this will help member retention and keep members active and engaged," Crunch Signature CEO Keith Worts said during a press briefing at a Crunch Fitness gym Tuesday.
Worts also addressed privacy concerns. He said members will "opt-in" to the program and that the gym "complies with every privacy law there is." Crunch Fitness won't use the data from Apple Watches to see which machines people use most, for example. There are different sensors already built into the machines that already do that, though. None of the data is shared with Apple either, Apple said.
Basecamp will launch Apple Watch Connected to all of its clubs over the next year. YMCA will start with its greater Twin Cities locations this week followed by 22 additional YMCA branches in the coming weeks before expanding further. Crunch Fitness is launching Apple Watch Connected in two Manhattan gyms this week with more coming. Finally, Orange Theory will deploy it in all U.S. facilities in 2020, starting with two Manhattan locations on Thursday.
Welcome back to Processor, a mostly daily newsletter mostly about computers, by which I mostly mean the consumer electronics industry at large. I’m Dieter and if you already know all of the above, thanks for sticking around. If you’re new, welcome!
I’m going to leave the analysis of the truly bonkers story of Jeff Bezos’ phone hack to Casey Newton’s newsletter, The Interface. Go subscribe now. He’s drafting it as I write these words and it contains Very Practical Advice like “Never open a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.”
I promise the previous very nerdy paragraph has implications that matter to more than just Android developers.
You are reading Processor, a newsletter about computers by Dieter Bohn. Dieter writes about consumer tech, software, and the most important news of the day from The Verge. This newsletter delivers about four times a week, at least a couple of which include longer essays. You can subscribe to Processor and learn more about it here. Processor is also a YouTube series with the same goal: providing smart and surprising analysis with a bit of humor. Subscribe to all of The Verge’s great videos here!
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I am really into Microsoft’s developer tools for a lot of reasons — especially the various proposals for making the web work better on dual-screen devices, which in theory could help everybody. But the most important thing is the overall context: Microsoft has the horse and cart in the right order. It’s trying to get the software right before it releases the hardware.
There have been two big problems with foldable devices thus far: 1. the screens are too fragile and 2. Android is not great on tablets and so the windowing systems have been kind of bad. (And, well, a third big problem is that they have been super expensive.)
I have no idea when the fragility thing will be fixed, but I like that Microsoft isn’t bothering with a flexible display. It compromised on whiz-bang hardware to make something more durable and, in many ways, elegant. But the trade-off is that there’s a big ol’ seam between the Duo’s two screens. That’s the cart.
The horse, then, is how the software is designed to deal with that trade-off. (This is a bad metaphor because I don’t know what goes in the cart but we’re in too deep to turn back now.) The details of Microsoft’s answer to “how does Android work on a dual-screen device” all seem really smart.
Windows Central’s Zac Bowden installed the emulator and made a little video showing how windows move around and it’s refreshingly simple. Apps open on a single screen, you go into the multitasking view and drag them to move them across to the other screen, or you move them over the seam for some kind of split-screen.
There are different ways to split-screen: sometimes there’s a list on one side and details on the other, sometimes there’s two pages like on a book, and sometimes the canvas covers the whole thing and you just have to deal with the seam.
All that is fine, but it’s not the smart part. Just because Microsoft appears to have created an elegant SDK doesn’t mean that anybody will actually use it. We’ve seen Microsoft try and fail to woo mobile developers before. RIP Windows Phone, we still miss ya.
But for the Duo, it’s even worse than that. We’ve watched Google struggle to get Android developers to make better big-screen layouts for their apps for years to disappointing results. Android tablets have gone the way of the dodo and Android apps on Chrome OS are best used in small doses.
So the way Microsoft appears to have dealt with that reality is one reason that I’m actually more hopeful today than I was yesterday about the Duo’s chances. That’s because even if literally nobody customizes their Android apps for the Duo, it should still work pretty well. Instead of pinning the Duo’s chances on the nearly impossible task of getting Android developers to invest resources in a completely new and untested phone, Microsoft is working with where the ecosystem is today.
The key reason is that Microsoft explicitly says that apps will only open on one screen by default and in fact, apps will not be allowed to open up on both screens — that can only happen if a user drags a window into that state.
Your app by default will occupy a single screen, but users can span the app to cover both screens when the device is in a double-portrait or double-landscape layout. You can programmatically enable full-screen mode for your app at any time, but spanning is limited to user activity for now.
It has the very practical benefit of working better with existing Android apps by default. Instead of being annoyed that many apps are kind of junky and poorly-designed in a tablet screen context, the entry experience will just be two normal Android apps, side by side. Android apps generally look alright on portrait, phone-style screens — and that’s the way they’ll launch on the Duo.
So even in the worst case scenario where only Microsoft’s own apps are aware of the hinge, the Duo will still work. It’s like the theory of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation) in web design, but applied to dual-screen Android apps. It’s smart because, frankly, the worst-case scenario also happens to be the most likely scenario at launch.
Assuming it all works, users won’t be forced to learn a whole series of gestures and layouts and grids and whatever. Instead, they’ll just be able to move stuff around and let the software do the right thing.
It is, pardon the alliteration, programmatically pragmatic.
None of this guarantees that the Duo will be any good or that my relative optimism will be rewarded. I’m just glad that Microsoft isn’t setting the whole situation up for immediate failure from the jump. There’s simply very little chance that a ton of Android apps will be customized for the Duo’s dual screens for launch, but that hopefully won’t matter.
Speaking of things that aren’t guaranteed: Windows 10X. The developer tools for that OS are still forthcoming and the questions about how it will operate are much more numerous than for the Duo. Given how many PC manufacturers are waiting for that OS for their foldables, the stakes for Windows 10X are much higher.
As Tom Warren noted yesterday, we should expect to see more at Microsoft’s Build developers’ conference in May. If there were ever a time for Microsoft to be a little less hand-wavy about 10X, that will be it.
Reading the bullet points in Wyden’s letter really drives home how every successively revealed detail in this story is more eye-popping and mysterious than the last.
No HDMI-in, yet another sign that Microsoft isn’t trying to make the Xbox the central hub of your living room. It’s the right call. This feels vaguely related to the idea of a hub but I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots: the more I look at this big box the more it feels like one of those old HP MediaSmart home servers.
It’s still $1499 and it’s coming out just days before Samsung is expected to announce its own flip phone. But when people think flip phone, they think Razr, so Motorola still has a good chance even though it’s up against a bigger company. A real question in my mind is how big this launch will actually be. Will Verizon, because it has an exclusive, try to make this a huge deal with tons of marketing?
During the announcement, Motorola acted supremely confident in the Razr’s reliability and battery life. How much oomph gets put into the retail launch will say a lot about how real that confidence was.
By comparison, the SARS virus emerged in November 2002, but it took until April 2003 for scientists to get a full genetic sequence. It took several months of disease spreading in Western Africa in 2013 before authorities determined it was caused by Ebola. It took around a year to identify Zika as the cause of illnesses in Brazil in 2014 and 2015.
Incredible story about how we perceive each other online, how platforms like Google affect that, how the platforms themselves can be affected by our actions, identity online and off... I could go on. Even if you aren’t interested in the specific things I just mentioned, I bet that the way this piece tells the story of their collisions and interactions will suck you in.
Simply, it’s somewhere between a cake and an ice cream. They’re constructed using what I can only assume is high-level engineering and some form of dark magic fuckery. The ice cream is warped into these curved, flowing layers that — to the cultured amongst us — delivers an emotion reminiscent of Hokusai’s masterpiece, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa.’ Somehow, this is then sandwiched between atomic-level thin layers of chocolate, and topped off with a layer of deliciousness. And a chocolate powder of some kind.
And the new Huawei P40 Pro color leak makes me want to eat one so fucking bad.
Don’t believe me? First off, how dare you. Secondly, here’s a photo of a mint Viennetta:
Oh my god I want to shove you so deep into my body I turn inside out.
It’s not a surprise that the Huawei P40 Pro color scheme is moving in this direction. I mean, Apple’s iPhone 11 range shifted into more pastel-y tones too, so there’s obviously a trend shift towards this palette. And we all know how much companies love copying Apple.
There’s one important difference though: none of Apple’s devices (even the green one) made me want to take my shirt off, sit down on some plastic sheeting, and slam a whole mint Viennetta into my mouth like the Huawei P40 Pro does.
I don’t know why — I’m not a psychiatrist after all — but that’s just the way it is.
There will be five cameras on the rear: a 64MP primary sensor, a 20MP ultra wide lens, a 12 MP periscope telephoto lens, a macro lens, and a time-of-flight sensor.
As well as two front-facing cameras.
The company‘s slapping a 5,500mAh battery in there too.
The screen will have a 120Hz refresh rate.
And other Huawei P40 Pro color options will include black and white.
Still, these previous leaks lacked a certain, specific magic:
A Huawei P40 Pro color that made me want to get a plane back to England, raid Sainsbury’s, and shovel as many mint Viennettas into my mouth before the police arrive, and are forced to drag me, bellowing and thrashing, from the store.
To conclude: Do I believe leaks like these are driven by the companies in question to try and whip up press interest in their devices, and provide some marketing in the run-up to a launch?
Of course I fucking do.
And I am now part of that horrible cycle? Yes. But do I care when this Huawei P40 Pro color leak has led to me daydreaming about covering my naked, hairy body in a glorious mint Viennetta? Actually, yeah. A bit. Because I don’t live in Britain or Ireland these days and — even if I did — I’m a vegan, so can’t eat the fucking thing anyway.
Ugh.
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Microsoft unveiled its Surface Duo device at the company’s hardware event back in October. The dual-screen device includes two 5.6-inch displays (1350 x 1800) that fold out into an 8.3-inch overall screen. While we saw a lot about the hardware back in October, Microsoft didn’t let anyone play around with the Android software and apps that power the Surface Duo. That’s all changing this week, thanks to Microsoft publishing its Android emulator for developers.
Zac Bowden managed to play around with the emulator and navigation gestures, and Jonas Daehnert — known as PhoneDesigner — has overlaid that footage onto the Surface Duo itself to give us a much better idea of how these dual screens will work in practice.
In the nearly two minute video you can see how apps and Android’s built-in settings will open on a single display fullscreen. Microsoft is making it a user choice to span the apps across both displays, and advising developers to start testing their apps and optimizing them.
While apps and settings menus open fullscreen, you can also see how Microsoft is reflowing how pinned apps on the Android home screen span across the two displays. Once an app is launched, the apps immediately flow onto the opposite display so you’ve always got access to open more. The Android task manager also only appears on one display, allowing Surface Duo users to drag and drop apps onto the second one.
Now that developers can start building Android apps that are optimized for both displays, it will be interested to see just how many really take advantage of having an extra screen. Android tablet apps have been notoriously bad in the past, but Microsoft’s approach means they’ll mostly just run on a single display fullscreen, so you can use them side-by-side. That should, by default, make the experience pretty manageable out of the box, but there are more complicated apps that you’d want to span across both displays that will require some work to avoid the seam in the middle.
Developers can download the new Android emulator from Microsoft and start getting apps ready. It’s optimized for the Surface Duo, and a similar emulator will be available for Windows 10X next month to get Windows developers ready for the bigger Surface Neo hardware. We’re also expecting Microsoft to detail more of its dual-screen plans during a developer webcast next month, and at the company’s Build conference in May.
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