Hasta La Gadget!

The much-delayed 25th film in the 007 franchise is set to finally hit theaters in October.

The gesture was a dig at New York fans who have booed the underperforming ballclub.

Strava, a fitness app that makes it easy to track your running and cycling sessions, has made a key safety feature free for all users. Going forward, anyone who uses the activity tracking app can enable Beacon, a tool that will share the user’s real-time location with the people they choose. This makes it easier for partners, parents, and friends … Continue reading

Ghostrunner was one of the best surprises of 2020. It’s a stylish first-person platformer that takes the best elements of Titanfall’s parkour mechanics and adds a cyberpunk twist to the proceedings. It’s also a challenging game that demands precision and purpose from the player. Make a single mistake, and you’ll need to replay a section of a level again. That can get frustrating fast, so developer One More Level is adding a new feature called Assist Mode.

Assist Mode introduces three options you can toggle on and off. You can opt to shorten your character’s ability cooldowns, slow down the game to give you more time to react and play with an extra life to make mistakes less punishing. Accessibility modes are becoming more common in video games, and it’s always good to see another developer find a way to allow more people to enjoy their work.

For experienced players, there’s a new feature called Wave Mode that is essentially Ghostrunner’s take on a roguelike. You’ll need to complete 20 rounds in succession, with each one featuring different enemies — even when you attempt the same one multiple times. Make it all the way to the end, and you’ll earn a fancy new katana for your character.

Both Assist and Wave modes are available today for free on the platforms where you can already buy Ghostrunner. That includes PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store and GOG. When the game makes its way to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 28th, it will come with those modes included.

LinkedIn is ditching Stories. The company will shut down the feature by the end of September, a year after rolling it out. As it turns out, ephemeral posts aren’t a perfect fit for every social network. Perhaps with ROI and KPIs in mind, LinkedIn says its users want videos that stay on their profiles permanently, not ones that vanish.

“In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting,” Liz Li, LinkedIn’s senior director of product wrote. “Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise.”

As such, the company’s going back to the whiteboard. It’s taking what it learned from Stories (such as users wanting creative tools to liven up videos in a professional way) to create a “reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational.”

Just about every major social network hopped on the Stories bandwagon after the likes of Snapchat and Instagram found huge success with the format. Although the feature has proven a hit on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, Stories haven’t taken off on every platform. Twitter recently shut down Fleets, its take on Stories, less than nine months after launching the feature.