Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Facebook adds support for 360-degree videos

360-degree video has arrived on Facebook.

The social network is beginning to add the immersive videos to the News Feed, the company announced Wednesday. The videos will be viewable from the web and from Facebook's iOS and Android apps.

The videos, first announced at Facebook's F8 developer conference, are filmed with a special camera setup that captures q full 360-degree view of the scene. Much like the 360-degree videos on YouTube, you can change your view of the video by dragging you finger (or cursor, if you're on a browser) around the screen or holding your phone at a different angle.

The videos will be available on the web and Android app first and will roll out to the iOS app "in the coming months."

Facebook is partnering with a select group of publishers on the videos — including Disney and Lucasfilm, GoPro, Vice and Saturday Night Live — to start but says it will open up the videos to more people "who are at the cutting edge of exploring this medium" in the next few days.

The eventual plan, it seems, is to open up the video to all users, not just filmmakers and media companies.

"In the future, imagine watching 360 videos of a friend’s vacation to a small village in France or a festival in Brazil — you’ll be able to look around and experience it as if you were there," Maher Saba, Facebook's engineering director for video, writes in a statement. "Along with updates from your friends and family, you will also be able to discover amazing new content on Facebook from media companies, organizations, and individual creators."

But 360-degree vacation videos may be farther off for most Facebook users. Though consumer level cameras, like RIoch's new Theta S, are increasingly common as Google and others move to adopt the immersive videos, relatively few people have access to the equipment necessary to make these videos.

The videos also have big implications for the company's virtual reality ambitions. Facebook users will eventually be able to view the videos through the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality headsets; the videos were created as a collaboration with the Oculus team, The Verge reports.

The social network is also rumored to be working on a standalone video app for the 360-degree clips and executives have made it clear they see virtual and augmented reality as the next big medium for Facebook to tackle.

"When Facebook was founded, it was primarily a text based site: there was status posts and there were wall posts," Jay Parikh, the company's VP of global engineering and infrastructure, said at the company's @Scale engineering conference last week. "We’ve moved in to a world where most of the world today is focused on photos. But we’re quickly moving into this world where I think, in the next couple years, most of the experience on Facebook is going to be about video. It doesn’t just stop with videos ... what we see happening in the next couple years is bringing augmented reality and virtual reality to the experience that is on Facebook."

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Last week, ABP went beyond releasing extensions and launched a standalone Adblock Browser for Android and iOS that has built-in blocking capabilities. Before we take a look at the browser itself, it is worth noting ABP’s interesting (and some call it controversial) business model. ABP signs contracts with companies that agree to its acceptable ads guidelines. Ads from these companies are allowed to pass through the ABP ad filter.In part two of this series on the state of ad blockers, I take a look at a new product from a well-known company whose earlier product has been available for nearly a decade: Adblock Plus (ABP). Adblock Plus develops extensions for web browsers which can block tracking, malware sites, and, of course, ads.

In a 2014 interview, ABP lead investor Tim Schumacher said that only the largest companies pay for these contracts. “Adblock Plus has been experimenting with different models,” he said. “I can’t talk about specific contracts, but in some cases it was performance-based and in other cases it was more of a flat fee. More that 90% of companies don’t pay at all.”

The first thing you should know about the free Adblock Browser is that, unsurprisingly, it works better on recent devices with faster processors. For example, it ran slowly on an iPad 2 with a 32-bit processor in my tests. So, slow, in fact, that there is not much speed advantage to using Safari with ads displayed. However, on a iPhone 6+ with a faster 64-bit processor, Adblock Browser rendered the mostly ad-less web pages fast enough to be interesting and useful. On the Android side, I tested it using a Nexus 4 and Nexus 6.

Here’s the use case that makes Adblock Browser interesting and useful for me: I generally use Google’s own Chrome browser on Android devices and read web pages with ads. However, I often find interesting news items in my Google Now feed. And, some of the sources are either unfamiliar to me with possibly heavy handed ads or are from interesting sources with known heavy ads. So, I have links from Google Now handled by Adblock Browser.

A single ad blocking filter is selected by default: ABP’s own EasyList. ABP describes it as: “The EasyList subscriptions are lists of filters designed for Adblock Plus that automatically remove unwanted content from the internet, including annoying adverts, bothersome banners and troublesome tracking. The subscriptions are currently maintained by four authors.” You can use the Ad Blocking setting option to choose filters for other languages.

The “More blocking options” page lets you select options such as disabling tracking. Surprisingly, the option to disable malware domains is turned off by default.

The “Acceptable Ads” option is turned on by default. As I noted earlier, this allows ads to be displayed from companies who sign a paid or free contract with ABP to agree to display non-intrusive ads.

Finally, in the Privacy settings window, you can choose to turn off cookies and tracking (which are, by default, allowed). It also provides controls for remembering passwords (off by default), and clearing private data manually. There is also an option to clear the cache upon a manual exit using the Quit option. However, I didn’t see a Quit option in the Android app, and I didn’t see this cache setting in the iOS app.

It is worth noting a few differences between the iOS and Android versions of Adblock Browser. The iOS version lets you choose between DuckDuckGo (the default) and Google as its search engine. You can choose from a much larger list of search engines in the Android version. URL suggestions are turned off by default, but can be turned on. The Android version has a large number of display options, including enabling zoom on pages that normally do not allow zooming on mobile devices. The Android version also has an option to save a web page as a PDF file (Settings -> Page -> Save as PDF).

The recently released free Adblock Browser for iOS and Android makes it easy for non-technical people to reduce the number of mobile web ads they see and protect themselves from known malware sites. It is one more tool that makes it easier for anyone to have an arguably improved mobile web experience.

If you missed part one in this series, check out: Ad blocking for the masses, part one: uBlock Origin. Finally, stay tuned for part three, where we will take a closer look at Apple’s Content Blocking Safari Extensions that will be made available in the iOS 9 update released September 16.

IMAGE: GOOGLE

Google launched a new version of Gmail for Android Tuesday, bringing two simple but pretty important features: the "block sender" and "unsubscribe" buttons.

The unsubscribe option was previously available on the desktop version of Gmail, but now you can get off that annoying mailing list from your Android device as well. As for blocking a sender completely, that's new both on Android and the web.

The "block" option is in the message's right side corner menu, just below the "print" option. Tap it and you'll never hear from that sender again (their emails will go directly to the spam folder). If you want to unblock someone, you can do so in Gmail's Settings. "Unsubscribe" is located in the app's top-right corner menu (while you're viewing a message), below the "Mark important" option.

Check out how this all works in Google's handy gifs, below.

Both features will be gradually rolling out to users, with "block" coming to the web in 1-3 days, while both options could take longer than three days to appear on Android

Google is introducing a new logo today. Just a month after unveiling a major restructuring of the company, Google is updating its image, too. The new Google logo is still a wordmark, but it's now using a sans-serif typeface, making it look a lot more modern and playful. The colors are also softer than they used to be. The logo bears a bit more resemblance to the logo of Google's new parent company, Alphabet, as well. Alphabet's wordmark has a similarly unadorned look, and this update makes the two companies' design language fall more inline.

As Google's video introducing the new logo notes, the wordmark has been evolving ever since it was created in 1998. But this is easily its biggest change since 1999, when Google first cleaned up the lettering and settled on its four colors. Since then, the logo has just been flattened out more and more, with today's update representing a huge leap. In addition to changing up the wordmark, Google is also changing the tiny "g" logo that you see on browser tabs. It's now going to be an uppercase "G" that's striped in all four of Google's colors. Google says that the new design will be rolling out across all of its products soon — in fact, it's already on Google's homepage, with a cute animation that wipes away the old logo and draws in the new one.

THE NEW LOGO IS MEANT TO REFLECT THE NEW WAYS PEOPLE VISIT GOOGLE

So why did Google decide to make the change? In a blog post, Google discusses how much technology has changed how we interact with its products and with the internet at large. It doesn't really settle on a specific reason that a redesign was needed, but it says that this logo should better reflect the reality that Google is no longer a site you visit on a desktop computer — it's a huge collection of sites, apps, and services that you visit on PCs, Chromebooks, smartphones, and anywhere you can find a web browser. Google writes that its new logo is meant to reflect "this reality and [show] you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens."

Making the logo look good on small screens seems to have been a major consideration. The new, simpler lettering is supposed to scale better to smaller sizes, making the wordmark more distinct and easier to read. It's also supposed to be easier for Google to display on low-bandwidth connections: Google says that it's made a version of its logo that's "only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes." Given that one of new Google CEO Sundar Pichai's big goals is to bring the internet — and Google, of course — to areas of the globe that don't already have it, that small difference is definitely going to be an important one.

You can also see the new Google "G" beginning to appear across its services. Among the more notable is Google+, which is now represented by a big colorless version of the new G.

New tutorial series about Minix 3.1.8

Hello everyone!

As you might not know, I live in Portugal and I am studying computer engineering at FEUP, in Oporto.

I'm currently taking a course called Computer Labs. To sum it up: we start with an image of a Linux micro kernel called Minix. We run it through VMPlayer on Ubuntu.
From there we mess with registers and program the basics for all the devices from scratch: graphics card, timer, keyboard, mouse, rtc, uart. We must program them in interrupt or polling mode.

If you are wondering if that is easy: well it depends. Most of the times, we rage quit. Other than that, once you get how things work (on the lab before the last one), things should start to make sense?

All this to announce a new series of tutorials, where I'll explain how to set up the virtual machine, how to use Eclipse to code stuff via Remote System Explorer, basic Minix commands and how to do... stuff!

The course is near the end and my final project is almost done. It looks good I must say!
So yeah, this series will be useful for me because I'll get to review every detail from the very start. I'll record my progress so I can check it in the future if I need to.

Actually, I think this series will be of great value for future students who need to take the course or a similar one, and for my friends who didn't quite understand things properly at first and will have to take the course again next year.
Whichever the case is: good luck!

I'll start the series soon!

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Click here to go back to the index post.

Famo.us FlexGrid in CoffeeScript with Meteor

Did I just post something similar few hours ago? Indeed very similar. But this time, this goes on a very different scale. The same demonstration is now reactive with datasources coming from a MongoDB, your session or any reactive dictionary that Meteor can provide.

But wait... There's more. Actually, this is not a piece of code that you will paste into your Meteor project. It's a plugin. One command and one line of templating and it is set. One line of templating means: in just one single line of code.

This is all made possible thanks to the efforts of Gadi Cohen's excellent package's Famous-Views and his community (in which I contribute a bit).

Basically, here is how it works. Famo.us components are registered in the Meteor's templating engine. It can be regular components or home made ones. Using your favorite templating language, being Spacebar or Jade, you create the layout of your app. You connect your reactive datasource in your templating if they are already available or via small template helpers à la Meteor. It's like Famo.us/Angular with a full stack JS framework. And if you are using Jade, it is like drawing the Famo.us rendering tree with your code and connect it with reactive data source.

As an example, here is the code required for creating the example displayed in the video:

// This is pretty basic for every mobile app. 
head
  title FlexGrid test
  meta(charset='utf-8')
  meta(name='viewport', content='width=device-width, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no')
  meta(name='apple-mobile-web-app-capable', content='yes')
  meta(name='apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style', content='black')
  meta(name='apple-mobile-web-app-capable', content='yes')
  meta(name='mobile-web-app-capable', content='yes')
body
  // Every Famo.us apps starts with a context.
  +famousContext id="mainCtx"
    // The code is divided into reusable templates
    // looking very much like web components.
    +flexGridExample

template(name='flexGridExample')
  // Now we create our 'render tree'.
  +Scrollview id='scrollview'
    // Here is the FlexGrid: it's indeed a single line of code!
    +FlexGrid id='flexgrid'
      // Here, I connect my datasource: a reactive array.
      +famousEach items
        // I use the available values in each item of the array
        // Note that CSS styles can be passed as reactive value,
        +Surface class='surf' properties=color
          // Or as reactive content.
          p= name

Simple. The community has also brought some others nice plugins that speeds up the creation of your app. The number of plugins available is growing fast.

Minix

Final result preview

I thought it would be appropriate to have a preview of the final result of the project covered in these tutorial series in it's index, so here it is:

Introduction
You can actually skip this and head to the first tutorial right away.

Tutorial 1
How to install Minix and setup VMware Player

Tutorial 2
RSE and Minix commands

Tutorial 3
Setting up a project with some useful scripts

Tutorial 4
Adding graphics to a project

Tutorial 5
Adding keyboard input to a project

Tutorial 6
Adding a timer to a project

Tutorial 7
Adding a mouse to a project

Tutorial 8
Loading bmp images

Tutorial 9
Creating a state machine and a main menu

Tutorial 10
Creating the game state, adding a moving background and ground

Tutorial 11
Adding flappy and the mario pipes

Solution Online

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Facebook adds support for 360-degree videos

Ad blocking for the masses, part two: Adblock Browser

Gmail finally lets you block annoying senders

Google's a new logo

New tutorial series about Minix 3.1.8

Back to index

Famo.us FlexGrid in CoffeeScript with Meteor

[Minix] Posts index

Minix

Final result preview

Table of contents

Main menu screenshot