Business

Optical character recognition purveyor IRIS has launched its next-generation IRIScan Book 3 and the IRIScan Book 3 Executive. These portable scanning solutions are battery‐powered, enabling mobile users to easily capture paper documents, receipts, photos and more without the use of a computer....

Flickr Pro users have been informed by Yahoo about the future of the once-premium accounts. As long as the user's account is kept in good standing, customers paying $25 per year for unlimited storage will be allowed to keep the plan indefinitely, with no plans for the Pro benefits to be purged....

Flickr Pro users have been informed by Yahoo about the future of the once-premium accounts. As long as the user's account is kept in good standing, customers paying $25 per year for unlimited storage will be allowed to keep the plan indefinitely, with no plans for the Pro benefits to be purged....

Unity has announced that its mobile game development tools are now free to use for smaller developers. The Unity platform is popular amongst iOS and Android developers, but its creator previously charged $800 to publish a game to the App Store or Google Play. Under the new rules, that barrier has been lifted....

Onkyo has revealed the full-featured 9.2-channel TX-NR929 Network A/V Receiver, providing nine channel entertainment to the company's mid-range lineup. The new model is positioned between the 7.2-channel TX-NR828 Network A/V Receiver also seeing release today, and the company's existing audiophile-grade flagship products. Onkyo's TX-NR929 and TX-NR828 are both THX Select2 Plus certified....

Unity has announced that its mobile game development tools are now free to use for smaller developers. The Unity platform is popular amongst iOS and Android developers, but its creator previously charged $800 to publish a game to the App Store or Google Play. Under the new rules, that barrier has been lifted....

CS Odessa has posted a minor update for ConceptDraw Project, the developer's project management software. The v6.4 release adds new resource types, which should let organizers better describe both resources and resource behavior. Separately, new filters can be used to generate custom views of a project, which in turn can be saved for later use....

While it’s possible to make the technical argument that your privacy is safe, on the TV, it’s possible for a nefarious hacker to take over the camera in your living room. Hyperbole, Embellishment, and Systems Administration Blog read more

When Jony Ive took over the role of leadership for Apple’s Human Interface in October of last year, many speculated that the style of Apple’s design language across iOS and Mac OS X would also shift towards a flatter, more clean style. This speculation was fueled mainly by Ive’s feelings towards skeuomorphism and his minimalist design aesthetic. In April, we reported that iOS 7 would have a fresh, yet familiar interface, embracing a flatter style thanks to Jony Ive’s new leadership. In order to get an idea of what we might see in iOS, lets take a look at some examples of how Apple’s design aesthetic has already changed since Jony Ive took over. iTunes Emails Starting with today’s emailing, Apple has completely redesigned the look and feel of its iTunes promotional emails (Thanks, Nicholas). While perhaps not as stark of a change as something like the podcasts app update,  this redesign falls in line with many of Apple’s other recent interface changes, primarily the use of lighter typography and less visual noise. Podcasts App Apple launched its dedicated Podcasts app for iOS in June of last year to much controversy. One of its headline features was the prominent reel-to-reel playback interface that took over much of the UI. What was thought by many to be a Scott Forstall influenced design choice was removed in March, when the Podcasts app received a major redesign, losing all reminders of real world, physical objects. It’s new interface is much more subtle and clean, and while it loses some of the charm of iOS, puts forward a clear vision for Apple’s new style. iTunes MiniPlayer iTunes 11.0.3, which was launched last week, was a fairly minor update, aside from a new MiniPlayer design which sheds some of the traditional iTunes feel in favor of a flatter design. When viewing large thumbnails of your album art, gone is the glossy title bar and playback controls, replaced with a fairly plain and utilitarian flat black UI. 2013 WWDC Announcement When Apple sent out its promotional emails for WWDC this year, they created quite a stir around the web thanks to the design of the graphic. Compared to past years, 2013′s announcement is much cleaner and flatter, thanks mostly to its plain, stark typography and lack of heavy textures and rich details. Apple’s trend toward thinner, more modern fonts started last year with iOS 6, and has been becoming more prominent throughout their branding ever since. When Apple ditched Google Maps in favor of their own solution in 2012, they decided to display the map data in Avenir, a slim, modern font new to iOS. This typography also made it over to some of Siri’s results panes. In addition, iOS 6′s updated weather application also shed its heavy typography in favor of a more elegant look. Similar fonts can be seen on Apple’s iPhone 5 webpage. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to see more fonts of this nature appear in iOS 7. Overall, Jony Ive has only been in charge of Apple’s Human Interface for a few months, and it’s hard to tell in exactly which way he’ll take software design. However, if the changes we’ve already seen are any indication, Jony Ive is taking the same approach to software as he does to hardware: taking an already great product and refining its design down to its purest form.

Where do I put the betamax? Ok, so if you’ve been paying attention to the gaming space today, you’ll know that Microsoft unveiled its new gaming console, the XBox One. This next generation console is going to play video games, control your TV (sort of), and act as a DVD/Blue-Ray player. It’s got a Kinect motion sensor box on top, which can not be disconnected and it won’t play XBox 360 discs. This is all well and good, and represents a step forward in Microsoft’s quest to own the living room, even though a lot of us don’t have the time, space, or extra cash to spend on a huge entertainment hub these days, anyway. That’s really not what bothers me, though. The XBox One is just uglier than anything I could have imagined. Heck, my ten year-old son, not a maven of design in any way, saw pictures of the new XBox, and chuckled. “Why is it bigger than the XBox 360?” he asked. “It looks the same, just more square.” Which really made it all hit home for me: design matters. The case design of the XBox One is firmly rooted in the past. Which makes a lot of sense if you consider the reveal today, full of the same games and the same brands with better graphics. Take a look at this beast. It looks like a relic of the early 1990s, with the squared corners, tall, thick profile, and those odd cross hatching lines that must be for cooling purposes but just end up looking like a 1980s science fiction author’s idea of a cyber-deck. I suppose I could live with such a big fat presence in the living room if it didn’t completely remind me that the days of the monolithic gaming console/entertainment hub are coming to an end. Microsoft showed its hand today–echoed in the flat, unimaginative design of the XBox One. The looks of this monstrosity are shouting loud and clear, “We’ve run out of ideas, so we’re going to do more of the same.” What Microsoft, and to a lesser degree, Sony and Nintendo, really needed to do for this new generation of consoles was take a quick look around them at what’s already happening. These mega-gaming corporations have missed something essential. The gaming population is no longer congruent with the console population. We connect Apple TVs and Roku boxes to our huge HDTVs to watch on-demand shows while we multitask on our iPads. We fund innovative startups like Ouya because we want something different, dammit, and the XBox One just isn’t it. Same as the old boss. The design of an electronic entertainment hub says a lot about its purpose. Microsoft wants to dominate the space in our hypothetical living rooms, and the XBox one says so loud and clear, with the immensity of its casing and the huge Xbox logo front and center on each component piece. Do we even have stereos like that anymore? Maybe audiophiles do, but not the rest of us. If the console makers want to expand their business, this is not the way to do it. Hire someone like Jonathan Ive, or–better yet–someone brand new and fresh, who knows that the way a product looks will define what that product feels like to the consumer. Design a console that reflects our current and near-future gaming and entertainment reality, full of mobility, openness, and choice. Bring a console to life that gets what Ouya is trying to do, that understands the as-yet-unfulfilled promise of Apple TV and iOS gaming, that can breathe new life into the Steam ecosystem and play well with others. Sadly, I don’t hold any hope for this to happen withint he big three gaming companies of the last few generations of console hardware. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are treading water, paddling for dear life to stay afloat in a rapidly changing world. Will Microsoft sell a lot of these fugly XBox One consoles? Probably. Will the current conservative model of gaming and design inspire the next generation of gamers and developers to reach new heights and explo