In my recent #SGGQA Podcast I bemoaned the amount of gestures on Wear watches which required me to swipe the screen. There’s a near permanent cross of fingerprint grease in the middle of any Wear watch face.
Google must have been listening to my show, as they’ve sneakily revealed new gesture and wrist action controls for the next Android Wear update.
The last update introduced a twisting action to help you scan through cards and notifications. This now extends to dropping the quick settings located at the top of the watch. The App menu can be accessed by “dropping” your wrist quickly while holding your arm in front of you.
The arm drop can also be used to slide through notification cards. A pivot up action can slide yo back out of a card, and a quick wrist shake takes you back to your home watch face, kinda like clearing out an etch-a-sketch.
These might sound like small improvements, but anything which prevents me from having to use both hands to control a device designed to simplify my interaction with notifications will be a welcome change.
Mobile photogs and cinematographers know the pain of setting up shots and trying to pull off great images when they lighting doesn’t cooperate. The flashes on our phones are often insufficient for “nice” lighting, and the fact that they’re so close to the camera sensor can create issues with reflections.
The company had a successful run on Kickstarter, and now the Cube is available for purchase through LumeCube.com or through WalMart and B&H. Alongside the Cube, they’ve also released mounting kits for connecting the cube to a DSLR hotshoe or adding a GoPro style mount to multiple Cube lights. Nice to see it’s already well accessorized.
Customer data is valuable, tracking trends and brands. It’s largely how users “pay” for services like Facebook.
RAW photos are just what they sound like, the RAW data captured from the camera sensor. These are very large files, chock full of info, but often don’t look that great, and the larger file sizes make them more difficult to share. Snapseed now let’s you tweak a shot from the RAW info, then compress that into a smaller JPG file to share.
