Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Draft Is a Writing App with Serious Version and Draft Control

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5993339/draft-is-a-writing-app-with-serious-version-and-draft-control

Draft Is a Writing App with Serious Version and Draft Control

Google Drive/Docs is great at working everywhere and offering instantaneous collaboration. Drive is not so great at letting you review changes and track specific versions of your document. Enter Draft, a writing webapp that works with Drive—and Dropbox, and Evernote, and Markdown.

On its own, Draft is a very nice and minimalist place to write. What sets Draft apart is its collaborative editing powers. You can invite people to pick at your words, but Draft tracks the changes they make and asks you to accept or reject them, individually, while showing the two different versions of the document in side-by-side columns. This way, you can invite more than one person to review your work and keep track of who made which suggestion. You also mark drafts as you write, making it easy to get back to ideas you may have discarded as you went along. That is, suffice to say, nicer than running through Drive's color-coded overwriting and immense list of revisions by username.

Draft packs in a lot of other features without intruding on the writing-focused interface. You can bring in professional copyeditors for important work, write and convert from Markdown, and import and export documents from all the popular cloud services. But my favorite feature involves installing a Draft Chrome extension that lets you click in any text field on the web to open a new Draft, then click again to paste your work back into that field, in HTML or Markdown or regular text again. In fact, that's how I wrote this Lifehacker post.

Draft is free to use, and you can sign in using your Google account.

Slight disclosure: Draft's creator is a friend-of-a-friend, and I had access to a test version of the Chrome extension for a short period before Draft promoted it.

Draft

Read More...

Twitter Cards for apps, products and photo galleries unveiled

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/twitter-cards-apps-products-photo-galleries/

Twitter Cards for apps, products and photo galleries unveiled

Twitter just wrapped up a developer shindig at its San Francisco HQ and trotted out three new content preview cards. When a user links to a page with Twitter-specific markup, a tweet will feature an application's name, icon, description, rating and price within the freshly unveiled App Card and link to its Google Play or App Store page, to boot. Product Cards on the other hand, highlight merchandise with an image, price and even ratings. When tweets link to a photo gallery on the web, the social network will use a Gallery Card to display a collection of four photos, indicating that it points to an image set, and not just a lone picture. The firm rounded off the updates with "mobile app deep-linking," which means that tweets can sport a download link for the app which was used to publish them. Flickr, Foursquare, Path, Vine and others will make use of the new features when they launch, which should be tomorrow according to word from the coder get-together.

Filed under: ,

Comments

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Twitter Dev Blog

Read More...

Hybrid Memory Cube receives its finished spec, promises up to 320GB per second

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/hybrid-memory-cube-receives-its-finished-spec/

Hybrid Memory Cube receives its final spec, promises 15X the RAM bandwidth

The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium has been almost too patient in developing a standard for for its eponymous technology -- efforts began 17 months ago -- but it at last has more than good intentions to show for its work. Its just-published HMC Specification 1.0 lets companies build platforms and RAM with 2GB, 4GB and 8GB chips incorporating the stacked, power-efficient technology, all without compatibility jitters from other supporters. The completed spec is a scorcher when living up to its full potential, too. With eight links, a memory cube can reach a peak 320GB/s (yes, that's gigabytes) of aggregate bandwidth -- more than a hair faster than the 11GB/s we often get from existing DDR3 memory.

The Consortium is teasing us with more. Although we'll have to wait until the second half of the year before HMC 1.0 products appear in earnest, the Consortium already has a next-gen blueprint due in early 2014 that should nearly double individual data link speeds (from 15Gbps to 28Gbps). While we'd like to see the group walk the walk with real products before it talks more talk, there's still a chance that some memory performance bottlenecks could vanish for a good, long while.

Filed under: , , ,

Comments

Via:< /strong> Computerworld

Source: Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium

Read More...

Google and ASUS to release second-generation Nexus 7 tablet in July, says Reuters

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/reuters-google-and-asustek-to-release-second-generation-nexus-7/

Reuters Google and Asustek to release nextgen Nexus 7 tablet in July

Google's next generation of Nexus 7 tablets from ASUS will be Qualcomm-powered and arrive this July, according to Reuters. If its sources are to be believed, Mountain View is aiming to ship eight million units by the end of the year, showing it has a lot of confidence in the upcoming model. Other leaked info claims more screen resolution, a thinner bezel and an unspecified Qualcomm CPU instead of the current model's NVIDIA Tegra 3, possibly to save power. There's no info on pricing or other specs and Google's not speaking at this point, of course -- but if it proves accurate, hopefully the two companies have learned their lesson from the current model's runaway success and will ramp production accordingly.

Filed under: , ,

Comments

Source: Reuters

Read More...

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

On your mark, get set, benchmark! 3DMark Android Edition now on Google Play

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/3dmark-android-benchmark-now-on-google-play/

On your mark, set, benchmark! 3DMark Android Edition now on Google Play

Android just gained another go-to for benchmarking. After failing to hit the 2012 mark for its Android-specific performance software, Futuremark's finally delivering on its promise and making 3DMark available today on Google Play. Typically used as a PC benchmarking tool, the free-to-download app now lets users catalog and compare performance across Windows and Android devices -- iOS and WinRT versions are still listed as "coming soon." There are a few caveats to use, though, as the application requires a smartphone or tablet running Android 3.1 or higher, with 300MB of storage space, a minimum of 1GB RAM and the ability to play nice with OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is about 90 percent of all Android devices, according to Google). Who knows? It could even find a permanent place in our own Android reviews soon. Only time and testing will tell -- check after the break for a video preview of what's in store.

Filed under: , , ,

Comments

Via: Xperia blog

Source: Google Play, Futuremark

Read More...