Category: Features

Meet the developer suing Apple for failing to clean up the App Store

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Kosta Eleftheriou, an iOS app developer, says there’s a simple way to investigate whether an iPhone app might be a scam. The first step is to ignore the app’s average star rating and featured reviews, which he says are too easy for developers to artificially inflate. Instead, you should look at the full list of written reviews, sort them by “Most Recent,” and start searching for patterns. Glowing reviews filled with bad grammar and nonsensical sentences are a bad sign, but the real tells are the one-star reviews. If you spot users complaining about astronomical in-app purchase prices or features that don’t work as advertised, the app is probably much worse than its stellar score lets on. “You’ve got to make sure that you do a little bit of work,” Eleftheriou says. “You want to investigate.” Eleftheriou has done plenty of his own App Store sleuthing in recent months. After discovering that a shoddy imitation of his popular FlickType keyboard app was charging customers hundreds of dollars per year in subscription fees, he launched his own crusade against App Store scams in general. On Twitter, he regularly flags apps that appear to be purchasing fake reviews and tricking users into making expensive in-app purchases, and he’s called out Apple for not doing enough to stop them. Up to now, I've been in the “Apple *wants* to do the right thing” camp. Read More …

Employee surveillance software is here to stay, even when we go back to the office

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For many people, switching to work remote was a hopeful chance to escape the prying eyes of upper management. No longer would they feel pressure to act busy when bosses walked past, or feel guilty about logging into Twitter (even if it is for work purposes). But despite the physical distance, businesses are keeping closer tabs on employees than ever before. The use of performance monitoring tools has jumped significantly over the past year, as managers try to improve team visibility and track output. Even before the crisis, 62% of organizations were using monitoring tools to collect data on employees’ behavior during work hours.  After a year of remote work, those tools have become securely integrated into companies’ day-to-day. Although a return to offices is approaching, managers are unlikely to roll back software that’s provided insight, especially as many businesses will continue to offer work from home as an option. But there’s a fine line between surveillance and management, and there’s an even finer line between legitimate reasons to monitor staff and an illegal intrusion on people’s privacy Read More …

Google’s latest Nest Hub promises to help you sleep better

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Google is announcing a second edition of its Nest Hub smart screen. The most flashy upgrade? Sleep tracking. The new Nest Hub will be available for preorder on March 16 and on shelves on March 30 for $100. It will come in four colors (chalk, charcoal, a bluey mist, and a reddish sand). Among the other updates will be a new machine-learning chip, so it can better remember your various gestures and favorite commands, and a third microphone, so it can hear you shouting across the room. And it will come with support for Thread, a protocol that will one day make Nest Hub interoperable with devices from Amazon, Apple, and other smart-home players. But today’s announcement is really about sleep. The Nest Hub launched in 2018 as the Google Home Hub and was rebranded the following year . It’s tried to stand apart from competitors such as Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook’s Portal by being ultra-useful. Its most beloved feature is that it can conjure recipes (and really any tutorial) on demand. In concert with other smart-home gadgets from Google and others, it can do all the basic things you expect from a home hub, such as control lights and show you video from your surveillance system. But Google wanted to make it even more useful. In this update, the company added its Soli motion-tracking technology to the Nest Hub, giving it the ability to read gestures. (A creation of Google’s ATAP lab , the Soli technology debuted in 2019’s Pixel 4 phone .) Users will now be able to use gestures to halt an alarm or pause music. The technology is also the basis for the Hub’s new sleep feature. [Photo: courtesy of Google] The Nest Hub has previously introduced some features to help you go to sleep and wake up, such as white noise at bedtime and an alarm that gradually nudges you awake. Now the radar-based Soli technology can follow your movement as you slumber, allowing you to track your sleep. Google product manager Ashton Udall says the Soli technology can detect big body movements and is capable of “sub-millimeter detection of movements like your chest moving in and out while you’re breathing.” Nest Hub also tracks coughing and snoring, and is equipped with a temperature gauge and an ambient light meter, so it can see how your environment changes while you sleep. The company has taken care to ensure the Nest Hub tracks only you, even if you share your bed Read More …

4 little-known Kindle tricks to elevate your e-book experience

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Whether you’re using one of the Kindle apps or a dedicated Kindle reader to enjoy your e-books, you’d be forgiven for not looking too closely at many of the platform’s available features beyond flipping pages backward and forward. But there are a handful of cool, useful, but otherwise under-promoted little tricks you might find handy. Let’s take a look. Lend to a friend Many of the Kindle books you own can be digitally lent out to someone else for 14 days, which is a really fun way to share a good read with a friend. The process feels a little clunky the first time through but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be flinging books to your friends and family without worrying about dog-eared pages or battered bindings. Use this link to see all the Kindle books you currently own and click the three-dot button in the Actions column next to a book you want to lend out. If the book is available to lend, you’ll see a “Loan this title” link that, when clicked, will let you send the book to other people else via their email address. A recipient then has seven days to accept the book and 14 days to read it, during which time you won’t be able to access it yourself. The book will be returned to you during the 14-day window if your recipient finishes it early or automatically once the time expires. And choose your recipient wisely: Any given book can only be lent once, so make sure to use your newfound powers sparingly. Send non-Kindle content to your Kindle That 50-page work proposal that you don’t feel like reading on your laptop? You can read it on the eye-friendly e-ink screen of a Kindle reader instead (or via one of the Kindle apps, if you’re so inclined). Each of your Kindle devices and apps has a unique email address that you can use to send yourself Word documents, web pages, images, and PDFs. To find the email address for your device or app, visit your Devices page on Amazon’s site and then choose your Kindle devices or your Kindle apps to view their respective @kindle.com email addresses. But wait! There’s more. You can also sling stuff to your Kindle devices and apps directly from the Chrome web browser, by using a dedicated desktop app for Mac and PC, or from an Android device to a Kindle reader. Visit Amazon’s Send to Kindle page for more details and instructions Read More …

For the first time in years, someone is building a web browser from scratch

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For more than two decades, building a new web browser from scratch has been practically unheard of. But a small company called Ekioh has its reasons. The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is developing a browser called Flow , and unlike the vast majority of browsers that have arrived in recent years, it’s not based on Google’s Chromium or Apple’s WebKit open-source code. Instead, Flow is starting with a blank slate and building its own rendering engine. Its goal is to make web-based apps run smoothly even on cheap microcomputers such as the Raspberry Pi. There’s a reason companies don’t do this anymore: Experts say building new browsers isn’t worth the trouble when anyone can just modify the work that Apple and Google are doing. But if Flow succeeds, it could rethink the way we browse the web and open the door to cheaper gadgets. That at least seems like a goal worth pursuing Read More …