Microsoft's Outlook for iOS may be getting some company, in the form of an app for fast, lightweight conversations called Flow.Josh Miller/CNET
Microsoft seems to be developing a new application designed to enable "rapid email conversations on your phone with the people who are important to you."
The header of the download page calls the app "Flow by Outlook" and indicates the coming app will be available for Apple's iPhones. The text describing the app:
Use Flow with anyone, it's email: Reach anyone with an email address and all conversations for you and others are also in Outlook. Together, you can use Flow and Outlook interchangeably to participate in the same conversations.
Fast, fluid, natural conversations: No subject lines, salutations, or signatures. Flow is designed for fast, light-weight conversations in real time.
Focus on what's important: Only conversations started in Flow and their replies show up in Flow, not your whole inbox. Focus on your most important person-to-person conversations without the noise.
Flow sounds in some ways like the email complement to Skype Qik. Skype Qik, a video chat app for Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices that Microsoft made available last year, was designed to be "as lightweight and convenient as SMS and IM," according to Microsoft. All that was required to communicate via Qik is a mobile phone number.
I asked Microsoft officials for more information about Flow, including details such as when Microsoft plans to make it available for iOS (and other platforms) and who the target audience is. A spokesperson said the company had nothing to share about Flow.
The problem with trying to review The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is that it requires you to stop playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt long enough to write a review.
This is not easy.
It’s The Lord of the Rings by way of A Game of Thrones, an immense, mature, character-driven fantasy that balances its ridiculously long script with plenty of sword-swinging, spell-flinging action. It requires time, patience, and more than a few reminders to your spouse that when she said she would love you unconditionally, it was letting you play The Witcher 3 every night until the crack of dawn for a month that you had in mind.
What makes The Witcher 3 most remarkable, however, isn’t its potential to derail your marriage; it’s how the game manages to be both intimate and vast at the same time. A massive, open-world game with a great story? Believe it. The Witcher 3 is one of the best role-playing games in years.
You once again play as the titular witcher, Geralt of Rivia, a white-haired monster-hunter tasked to track not a beast but his powerful protégé, Ciri. She’s the closest thing Geralt has to a daughter (despite our hero’s raging libido, witchers are infertile), and she’s being hunted by a group of deadly, otherworldly knights.
If the names don’t ring a bell, you didn’t play the two prior Witcher games (or read the half-dozen Polish novels on which they’re based), and that’s fine. The developers at CD Projekt Red have done an admirable job of keeping the game’s complex politics and character relationships contained just enough to give you a flavor of the lore without drowning you in it. You’ll doubtlessly be lost from time to time — Geralt did what to whom, when? — but it’s never a deal breaker. The Witcher 3 keeps its core plot focused and understandable at all times.
I can’t overstate how important this is. The Witcher 3’s story is meaty and engaging, a gripping detective drama wrapped in a weathered cuirass. The writing is superb, smoothly transitioning between dialogue options despite an impossibly huge narrative tree. Choices abound inThe Witcher 3. Decisions you make in even the most innocuous quest can potentially affect the way the broader story unfolds. It’s as though you’re helping craft the story, not just simply thumbing through its pages.
An example: During one of the many optional “Witcher Contract” quests, which require you to track and kill a terrible beast, I made a few questionable decisions regarding the fate of an evil presence lurking inside a great tree. Should I kill it? Set it free? A dozen gameplay hours later, tragedy struck a character in the main quest because of my decision. I didn’t see it coming. This kind of path branching isn’t exclusive to The Witcher 3, but I can’t remember another game that handled it as seamlessly.
Yahoo Games
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 'Rage & Steel' Trailer
Watch Geralt do terrible things to terrible foes in this intense look at the upcoming RPG. It's due out May 19th for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
Unfortunately, like most games of this nature, The Witcher 3 can’t quite figure out how to wrap itself up. The third act loses focus, running you around the world in an awkwardly long goodbye.
But even managing to charge through the main plot is a feat in itself because of the sheer number of things to do. You can follow the story quests, pick up literally hundreds of side quests, or head toward the nearest “Point of Interest” question mark and get into all kinds of trouble. Or just wander: Head into the woods and pick some herbs for potions, or dive into a lake and see if anything useful is buried at the bottom. It’s even got its own collectible card game; you can waste hours simply trying to win new cards from innkeepers. There are so many things to do in The Witcher 3 that you’ll occasionally zone out while staring at its busy map.
At times, the game world’s size can prove problematic. A moderately helpful fast-travel system alleviates the strain of incessantly criss-crossing the world, but invariably you’ll find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere and having to hoof it back to civilization … only to find out once you get there that you have to return to wherever you were to cue another quest. Note to future open-world game designers: How about a better quest planner? I go to Target, I swing by Starbucks, I stop by the dry cleaner, then I go home. I don’t race back and forth like an idiot. Can’t I sketch out my video game quest schedule too?
The upside to roaming the treacherous world of Temeria is that it’s gorgeous. Gripped in an unforgiving war, the land is teeming with life and death. Frosty mountain passes, sun-drenched wheat fields, smoking battlefields, glistening water lapping at the shore of a mysterious island — the views are breathtaking. It’s also impressively detailed. Every tree and rickety shack and random boulder looks as if it’s been placed there by hand. The Witcher 3 is a master class in world-building.
The voice work, traditionally a bit hit or miss in games of this size, is just as spot-on. From the haughty English of the Nilfgardian emperor (played by Thrones’ Charles Dance) to the warm brogue of the Viking-like Skelligers, I couldn’t find a voice actor I didn’t like.
Geralt’s beard even grows over time. You can shave it. It grows back.Follicular simulation! This is a beautiful video game.
And a deadly one. Combat in The Witcher 3 is straightforward but satisfying, featuring attack-and-parry swordplay alongside a handful of upgradable battle spells. Smashing away can be effective on grunts, but when you face a tougher foe, you can resort to the comprehensive bestiary to get tips on what potions, spells, and bombs might work best. The magic in particular gives you a real sense of power; watching wisps of flame arc from your fingertips never gets old.
You’ll tangle with all kinds of wildly creative, grotesque enemies, but it’s the big, scary ones that stand out. Whether it’s grounding an archgriffon with a crossbow bolt, leaping in and out of range with your sword as it lunges at you with its razor-sharp talons, or flanking a cyclops and deftly dodging its earth-shaking fists, TheWitcher 3 provides no shortage of heart-stopping melee moments.
At times, however, you’ll be fighting with the controls. The loose auto-locking means you’re often stuck swinging at the wrong enemy. Cliffside walks are unnecessarily harrowing, thanks to Geralt’s fidgety walk. Simply standing in the right place to trigger the “Press X to interact” signal can take an inordinate number of tries. The game’s mechanics aren’t quite as polished as its world.
The good news is that you’ll calibrate to these nuances within a few hours, which means you’ll be pretty comfy for the remaining 195 or so. But The Witchers 3′s size isn’t the reason you should play it. Play it for its world, its craftsmanship, its startling ambition, and its tremendous delivery. Play it because games of this quality and scope don’t come along often. Just play it.
Apple itself confirmed the acquisition on Sunday through the following statement sent to the New York Times and others: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."
Coherent Navigation's strong suit is high-precision navigation systems, or High Integrity GPS. Coherent Navigation combines signals from traditional mid-Earth orbit GPS satellites with those of low-Earth satellites from global satellite communications company Iridium, as described by 9to5Mac. Iridium's satellite system provides voice and data coverage for phones and other devicesacross the Earth's surface, ZDNet explained. As such, Coherent Navigation's GPS is designed to offer a higher degree of accuracy, stronger signals and greater resistance to interference as compared with other GPS products.
So why would Apple buy this business? A few clues may shed light on the reasons. The LinkedIn profile for Paul Lego lists him as the CEO of Coherent Navigation from April 2013 to present but also a member of the Apple Maps team from January 2015 to present. That would imply that Apple may use the company's technology to further enhance its Maps app, which was initially dinged after its 2012 launch for inaccuracies, omissions and other faults. Since then, Apple has worked to improve the app to compete with rival Google Maps.
Other employees of the San Francisco Bay Area company have also jumped over to Apple, as noted by ZDNet. The LinkedIn page for co-founder William Bencze shows him as working for Apple on wireless technologies and location/motion engineering since April. The page for fellow Coherent Navigation co-founder Brent Ledvina reveals that he's also been at Apple since April and has been working in the wireless area on location technologies.
So Apple may be using the technology of Coherent Navigation and the know-how of its former employees in a few different areas, but all designed to advance its own mapping and location services. With the same goal in mind, Apple has purchased other mapping and navigation firms over the past several years, including PlaceBase in 2009, Locationary in 2013 and Hopstop, also in 2013.
The coolest things about video games is how they can vary in terms of visuals and complexity. One day you're playing complex, visually breathtaking games like Grand Theft Auto V that marry slick gameplay and fantastic storytelling, and others, much like today, you can find yourself mulling over something as trivial as Solitaire that was bundled with every copy of Windows since 1990. Why you might ask? The game turns 25 this year. And Microsoft, the company behind it, plans to celebrate this milestone with style and flair befitting one of the older games around.
"It was 25 years ago that Microsoft Solitaire debuted on Windows, and to honour the decades of fun it's given us all, we're celebrating with two big competitions. First, an internal competition among Microsoft employees kicks off [Monday] to determine who leads the leaderboards here. Then, in early June, the same challenges used in the tournament will be released in the game for the world to play," a post on the company's blog stated.
You can download the Microsoft Solitaire Collection for Windows and Windows Phoneto hone your skills.
Before Farmville and Candy Crush became the de facto choice for passing time at work, Solitaire was what most made do with. It would be no surprise that there would be more than a few highly skilled players of the game given that it's been around for over a quarter of a century.
And on the topic of Candy Crush, the game will join Solitaire as one of the preloadedgames with Windows 10 when it hits later this year.
If you intend to score higher marks in exams, then the best solution is to tuck your phone away in a locker where it can't distract you, says a new study from the London School of Economics.
Although many parents want to be connected to their children, teachers complain the devices are nothing less than a distraction. Some schools already have bans in place.
For the study, researchers Richard Murphy and Louis-Philippe Beland at the London School of Economics looked at the test scores of 130,000 students in 91 British schools, according to Christian Science Monitor.
The schools had a variety of cellphone policies, which the researchers compared to test scores for 16-year-old students.
"We found the impact of banning phones for these students equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days," the researchers noted.
The researchers found that students' scores increased 6.4 percent when schools banned phones. And the effects were more palpable in case of underachieving students whose test scores increased 14 percent.
"The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy," as per the study.
Murphy and Beland's study reinforces that distraction is detrimental to students' test scores, and since smartphones are the latest preoccupation, better keep them away.
