Hasta La Gadget!

With the PlayStation 4, unlike the PlayStation 3 before it, Remote Play functionality on Vita is handled on a system level. Though Sony’s asking developers to take into account the Vita’s different button setup and additional input mechanisms that the portable console has, the actual act of enabling Remote Play is handled by the PlayStation 4 itself. “On PlayStation4 , it just happens. You just make a PS4 game, it supports Remote Play,” Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida told us in an interview at E3.

We’d asked whether Sony’s “mandating” Remote Play functionality from developers, and Yoshida first explained how it worked on the PlayStation 3 to offer some context. “The single biggest issue, why there are not many PlayStation 3 games that support Remote Play, was that it was optional — the system didn’t do much. The game has to set aside some memory or CPU to be able to do that, and usually, memory is the most precious resource that [development] teams fight amongst each other for. So when it comes down to the priorities, these are features that are very easy to drop,” he told us. The idea with PS4 is that, by offloading responsibility for Remote Play support to the console itself, developers are freed up to make the control tweaks necessary for a comfy experience playing a PS4 game remotely on Vita.

“Please make sure that when you play your games on Vita, the control is good. That’s the minimum thing we’re asking them to do,” he added. All that said, not every single PlayStation 4 game will work with Remote Play — “Maybe not Just Dance,” Yoshida offered with a laugh when we asked. That’s a pretty reasonable exception if you ask us, and it sounds like only games that require the PS4 Eye or Move (or some other such input method that’s impossible to emulate on Vita) are on that excepted list.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, Software, HD, Sony

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I’ve been using Google Reader for about eight years, if memory serves me well. The service has never been perfect, but it allowed me to skim and read thousands of articles everyday for my job. It’s something that can become quite unmanageable if you don’t keep up to date with them every day. Just like many users, I was pretty shocked when Google announced that it was sunsetting the service. It had become a central part of the way that I read many articles, and I had trouble thinking of another way being able to accomplish the same thing.

In the last few years, I had noticed that performance had become an issue for Google Reader. Many times, it made my Firefox browser crash, repeatedly. Nevertheless, none of the other services of this kind accomplished its goal so effectively. Recently, about two years ago when I got an iPad, I started using Flipboard to access my feeds. I was able to cut down the time it took to read my feeds significantly, and Flipboard rarely crashed. The problem I have experienced with Flipboard is that it has trouble fetching large amounts of articles, let’s say 1,000+. I’d have to repeatedly fetch them a few times to get them all. Even then, I might miss a few.

Google Reader will shut down on July 1st, 2013. As such, I checked out a number of RSS reader alternatives. Naturally, I was procrastinating – it’s something that I do quite well. However, when I checked out Feedly, I was pleasantly surprised. It was quite fast, migration was seamless and there were a lot of nice, new features that made perusing feeds a lot better.

The day that Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader, I opened a Feedly account. I didn’t really use it much until this week. I made the switch over from Google Reader to Feedly this week, using the mobile iOS and Android apps (there’s also a robust browser-based version).

I noticed a few kinks, which will probably get addressed pretty soon, since Feedly’s dev team is frequently releasing updates. For example, when I’m looking through my feeds, from the welcome screen, or I look through the All tab, the app doesn’t mark these as read (This can be easily fixed by checking the Auto Mark Read option in the Advanced Settings tab). Also, whenever I move away from the app in Android, Feedly refreshes and boots me away from my current position, which is annoying. But otherwise, Feedly rocks. It’s really fast, the card view is what I prefer, but you can have different list views to quickly skim many articles on one page, which is easy to do on a large screen like many of the new Android phones.

So if you have been procrastinating, don’t do it anymore. In order to migrate painlessly from Google Reader to Feedly, just log into your Google Account on Feedly and it will do it for you. No fuss, no muss, it’s just very simple. After July 1st, it’s probably going to be more complicated, like exporting your data from Google Reader through Google Takeout and importing that file.

Today, Google announced it’s making some improvements to its social network, both on the web as well as on the Android and iOS apps. The company’s own Vic Gundotra has — appropriately — taken to Google+ to share that notifications have been improved all around, making them “much easier to use across mobile and desktop.” Additionally, these notifications now tout a new bell icon which lets users know when stuff is waiting to be glanced, plus there’s a tray that manages read and unread items — in other words, they’ve become a lot less obtrusive and cumbersome.

The Android application, meanwhile, has been updated with the option to delete pics from within the “Photos” view, while other under-the-hood improvements were added to the menu in order to make it “more consistent with other Google apps.” The rejuvenated notification system is expected to be rolling out over the next few days, however the Android app is available now at the Google Play link below.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile, Google

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Source: Google Play, Google+

Line is updating its iOS app with a trio of features designed to keep you nestled to the free messaging service for as long as it can. The biggest addition is an in-app browser, which negates the need to switch over to Safari (etc) when someone shares a link. Users will also discover German, Italian and Portuguese language support, not to mention a choice of themes — including a tasteful pink version that’ll sit well with your smartphone, game console and sports car.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Apple

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Line (App Store)

The next generation in Google mobile OS has been suggested to be coming this October with the ability to run on a much wider variety of devices than Android 4.2 Jelly Bean currently does. This information comes from a source that speaks on how the Project Butter updates in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will expand

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