drag2share: Googleâs killer Android L feature: Up to 36% more battery life thanks to Project Volta

source: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/02/googles-killer-android-l-feature-up-to-36-more-battery-life-thanks-to-project-volta/

When the next version of Android arrives, don't be surprised if your phone can run longer on a single charge. Project Volta, part of Android L, is the reason. Google devoted an entire session at Google I/O to Project Volta, which optimizes power consumption on an Android device and also provides some developer tools to help make more battery-efficient apps.

While Android L is only available in a developer preview, we can already see the potential of Project Volta thanks to Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. He used the same standard and repeatable battery test Ars typically uses to measure Android device battery life. The findings with Android L? Amadeo's Nexus 5 phone lasted two hours longer with Android L as compared to Android KitKat, a gain of 36 percent.

So what's the secret sauce in Project Volta that makes Android L more power-efficient? It's a number of different things that quickly add up to more battery life. In the Project Volta session at Google I/O, Google said it scrutinized how different components use power, and for how long, in various but typical circumstances.

Passing data through the cellular radio obviously causes a spike in power usage, for example, but the radio doesn't drop back to a sleep state for several seconds. Turning on the phone's display just to check for new notifications can quickly gobble up battery power as well. After examining these and other use-cases, Google determined that for every one second of "active" use on a typical phone, standby time is reduced by a full two minutes. If you have 50 apps that are active for a second, then — say for synching, polling or showing notifications — that's 100 minutes of standby time gone.

Enter Project Volta, which groups and schedules certain tasks in a more efficient manner. It also includes new APIs for developers to take a similar approach and reduce the overall number of power-intensive activities needed for their apps to work. There's a new network activity awareness API, for example, so that apps can determine if the cellular radio is active, in which case an app can "piggyback" on the connection instead of later waking up a sleeping radio.

That's just one of many Project Volta enhancements; you can hear about all of them in this recording of the Project Volta session from Google I/O 2014.

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Apple May Be Killing iPhoto, But It Sounds Like The New Photo App Will Be A Lot More Powerful

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apple-will-upgrade-photos-for-os-x-2014-7

Last week, Apple announced it would halt development on two of the company’s signature photography applications, Aperture and iPhoto, instead shifting its focus to the new Photos app introduced at WWDC last month.

For those worried the Photos app might not be robust enough to handle the needs of professional users, Ars Technica’s Sam Machkovech learned from an Apple representative that the new Photos app will include “professional-grade features such as image search, editing, effects, and most notably, third-party extensibility.”

Here’s the full statement from Apple:

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.

You read that correctly: Though Photos may eventually introduce some great features for professional and casual photographers alike, Photos for the Mac won’t be available when OS X Yosemite ships this fall. It will instead release at some point in 2015.

However, the inclusion of third-party extensibility in the new Photos app will be a nice touch. 

For those uninitiated, Apple introduced “extensibility,” or app extensions, at its WWDC keynote last month, which is Apple’s way of letting applications talk to each other and even project software elements into other ! apps whi le still maintaining a highly secure environment. 

In the case of Photos, this means app developers will soon be able to build sharing options within the Photos app to link to their own applications. For example, this could let users apply photo-filters from third party apps that aren’t available in the new Photos app.

The new Photos app will offer plenty of tools to keep your photos looking beautiful and organized, and it’s all tied together with a search engine that lets you explore your photos based on the date or time the photo was taken, its location, or by albums or favorites. You can also drag and drop your photos to customize the order in which they’re displayed, and all of your changes will immediately auto-sync across all your devices.

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Google snatches up streaming service Songza

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/01/google-buys-songza/

Google has just purchased music streaming service Songza and, while the exact terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed, it reportedly involves what financial experts refer to as "a boat load of money." Apple boosted its streaming music presence by picking up Beats. So it only makes sense that Google would have to fire back with an acquisition of its own. Like Beats, Songza relies pretty heavily on actual human curation to build playlists. The newest member of the Mountain View family uses contextual data about you to decide the best playlist for you at any given time. These lists are put together by DJs, musicians and music critics rather than some algorithm that looks at meta data like genre or BPM. These lists can get you pumped for a work out or just get you through a slow work day, but what they're not is a Pandora style infinite radio station.

For now, the service will continue as normal, but expect to see it curated lists and powerful data stores brought to bear on Play Music and YouTube. See, Songza knows not just what people listen to, but when they listen to it, what the weather is like and where they are. Imagine this coming together with the rest of Google's contextually-driven services. You could wake up one morning and Google Now will have already selected a playlist for you from All Access. Seeing as how it was a rainy Monday morning and you had along commute ahead of you, Google decided a set of tunes hand picked by Morrissey would perfectly match your mood.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Google

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Source: Google, Songza

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drag2share: Swatch's robot-made wristwear offers classic Swiss time at a tiny price

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/01/swatch-sistem51/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

For many watch lovers, Swiss mechanical movement is the gold standard. However, it's also staggeringly expensive -- it's all too common to spend several hundred (if not several thousand) dollars just to see "Genève" on your wrist. That's what makes the US launch of Swatch's Sistem51 so special. While the watch still behaves like a conventional Swiss automatic with visible mechanisms, it's built using a fully robotic process that gets rid of the elaborate hand-crafting that drives up the price. As a result, you'll only pay $150 for the privilege, or about as much as an ordinary quartz timekeeper.

The Sistem51's transparent, brightly-hued look isn't for everyone; you probably wont wear it to a high-brow social function. However, it does have a few technical advantages over some pricier watches. There's a 90-hour power reserve to keep it ticking when idle, and the sealed body should keep out the dust or moisture that could lead to a costly repair. Just be ready to make a pilgrimage if you want one as soon as possible. The Sistem51 is only available at Swatch's Times Square store in New York as we write this, and the West coast will have to sit tight until the July 8th launch in San Francisco. It may take considerably more time to reach other parts of the country. If you've already been waiting ages to brag about owning a watch with Swiss mechanicals, though, it won't hurt to hold out for a little while longer.

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drag2share: Google's trippy Cube experiment lets you play DJ with six videos at once

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/02/googles-cube-experiment-presets/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

If you're bored with regular music videos, there's now something a little more interactive from Google called The Cube. It sprang from the Creative Labs division, which has done similar experiments in the past. As shown in the embed below, you can manipulate the box by grabbing it with a mouse or finger and revealing different videos on each face, along with different parts of the music mix. As you move between several bizarre scenarios -- like a psychedelic face and a woman on the phone in a bath -- the music also mixes in rhythmic sync. Google cooked up the idea at a conference earlier, and hopes to demo more projects on it in the future. It works on a computer or recent Android handset with the latest version of Chrome. After trying it ourselves on a Nexus 5 with Chromecast, we'd recommend sitting down first, though.

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