5 hidden Google gems you aren’t using—yet

For a tool most of us use every day to find stuff on the web, Google has more than a few helpful tricks up its sleeve that aren’t super apparent unless you know where to look. Here are a few I’ve found recently that have saved me countless clicks, spared me visits to garishly designed apps, and generally made things a little less complicated. Order up some food There are enough food-ordering services out there that you might starve before flipping through them all to find something you want. Instead, just navigate to orderfood.google.com , and you’ll be presented with a map of nearby restaurants that offer pickup and delivery. Google pulls in listings from popular apps and services and lets you browse by category if you’re in the mood for a particular style of food. Once you’re ready to order, you can do so via a clean, easy, very Google-like interface instead of being shuttled off to a third-party app or site Read More …

This new Apple Watch camera lets you shoot from the wrist

The Apple Watch has never had a camera. Apple may never add one. But one company is giving the Watch the power of sight via a watchband accessory called the Wristcam . As watchbands go, the Wristcam is a bit of a beast; it looks thick and rigid on the wrist. But there’s a lot of technology inside. The band packs two cameras—an 8-megapixel world-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing selfie camera. Both use Sony sensors (like the iPhone), and both capture high-definition photos and 1080p video. A large button on the band activates one or the other of the cameras (you double-press to switch between the cameras, single-press for photos, and long-press for video) Read More …

Remote court is now in session. But will defendants get a fair trial?

For a long time, Judge Michael Christofeno just didn’t see a place for online hearings in his courtroom. “I needed to see people in person in my courtroom or I wasn’t going to be able to have the capability to get a sense of how they’re testifying, their demeanor, whether they’re telling the truth or not, whether they’re being candid with the court,” says Christofeno, a circuit court judge in Elkhart County, Indiana. He was also concerned about operating and maintaining control of hearings in an unfamiliar medium. But the judge’s opinion changed when the county looked to reopen courts that had been largely shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. It’s been a problem across the country. The New York Times recently reported  that criminally accused people have been languishing in New York jails, in some cases contracting the virus, while only a handful of trials have taken place during the pandemic. Even participants in civil cases had been left anxiously awaiting their days in court, Christofeno says Read More …

These are Apple’s best apps of the year—for a year like no other

For almost as long as there’s been an App Store, Apple has published a list of the year’s best apps. Once iPhone-centric, it has expanded to cover the iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac, and now spans everything from purely practical wares to games and streaming entertainment. Apple’s 2020 list—which it’s unveiling today—includes 15 honorees. Some are natural picks: Zoom, for example, is the iPad app of the year. Others you might not know about yet. (Or at least I didn’t.) The company says that it considers technical innovation, user experience, design, and cultural impact—and that this year, it gravitated toward candidates that helped us get through all the disruptions that have made 2020 a challenge, even for those of us who have been pretty lucky, all things considered. The list, in its entirety: iPhone App of the Year: Wakeout (Andres Canella, U.S.) iPhone Game of the Year: Genshin Impact (miHoYo, China) iPad App of the Year: Zoom (Zoom, U.S.) iPad Game of the Year: Legends of Runeterra (Riot Games, U.S.) Mac App of the Year: Fantastical (Flexibits, U.S.) Mac Game of the Year: Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, U.K./Estonia) Apple TV App of the Year: Disney+ (Disney, U.S.) Apple TV Game of the Year: Dandara Trials of Fear (Raw Fury, Sweden) Apple Watch App of the Year: Endel (Endel, Germany) Apple Arcade Game of the Year: Sneaky Sasquatch (RAC7, Canada) App Trend of the Year: Shine for helping users practice self-care (Shine, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: Explain Everything Whiteboard for helping bring remote classrooms to life (Explain Everything, Poland) App Trend of the Year: Caribu for connecting families to loved ones (Caribu, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: Pokémon Go for reinventing the way we play (Niantic, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: ShareTheMeal for helping users make a difference (United Nations, Germany) When I chatted with a few of the winning developers earlier this week, the most striking thing I learned was that 2020’s major news stories—the world-changing stuff not obviously related to the app business—had an impact on all of their businesses, each in a different way. Read More …

Inside the controversial rise of a top Twitter COVID-19 influencer

E ric Feigl-Ding picked up his phone on the first ring. “Busy,” he said, when asked how things were going. He had just finished up an “epic, long” social media thread, he added—one of hundreds he’s posted about society’s ongoing battle with the coronavirus. “There’s so many different debates in the world of masking and herd immunity and reinfection,” he explained, among other dimensions of the pandemic. “We at FAS, we’ve been kind of monitoring all the debates and how we’re seeing signals in which the data goes one way, the debate goes the other,” he said, referring to his work with the Federation of American Scientists , a nonprofit policy think tank. He rattled off a rapid-fire sampler of hot-button COVID-19 topics: the growing anti-vaxxer movement, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and antibodies, the body of research suggesting masks could decrease viral load, along with a quick mention of the debate among experts about what airborne  means. This whirlwind tour through viral COVID-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus—a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate—was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS. The thread was widely criticized by infectious-disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the preprint had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density ; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet—but his influence has only grown. At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on COVID-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to more than a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist Read More …