Let's Talk Tech
You can’t even buy one yet!
Microsoft has been sending them out in limited batches via contests, and it’s a very interesting beginning. A first step towards offering up custom hardware interfaces for our tablets and hybrids. No longer shall we be ruled by the tyranny of QWERTY!
Well then, let’s take a look at the Surface Music Kit!
Related:
Audio recording on the Surface 2 for Voice Over and Podcasting!
Developers are moving forward with Chromecast integration, and it’s starting to look really good.
Announced today on the Chrome Blog, ten new apps have been officially added to the Chromecast repertoire. The list of standalone services includes VEVO, Red Bull.TV, Songza, PostTV, Viki, Revision 3, and BeyondPod.
What’s also interesting is the growing list of local streaming apps. Chromecast allows you to share a tab on your computer’s browser, but it wasn’t a great solution for streaming music or video stored on your computer’s hard drive. Now with Avia, RealPlayer Cloud, and Plex this process should get a lot easier.
Alongside recent additions like Hulu, HBO Go, and Pandora, the Chromecast ecosystem is looking a little healthier. Who needs a Nexus TV AmIRite?
Today’s review is on the UTrailme app developed by Dream Team Mobile, which is a live streaming app for both Windows and IOS phones. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter all allow you to share pictures at that moment. Vine let’s you record short video to share. What if you could share a live stream with all of your friends in real time? Utrailme is here to provide you with an app for live streaming of concerts, sporting events or you see something interesting happening that you want to share with your friends.
UTrailme has a pretty slick UI which is very easy to navigate. Setting up this app is quite easy so you can share your live streams directly and automatically post on Facebook, Twitter and VK. You can select your video quality from the setting menu to stream your event in low, medium, high or auto-detect. There are no light or dark themes, and you will not see any pop up ads. Let’s not forget the best part about this app is that it is free! Continue reading “App Review: UTrailme – Live Video Streaming”
Let me introduce you to Nokia MixRadio. I ride my bike everywhere I go and this app keeps the tunes flowing without any interruption of ads. You might be asking yourself: “Isn’t there a Nokia Music app already?” Actually Nokia re-branded the Nokia Music app to Nokia MixRadio with a fresh new UI and features.
Nokia MixRadio offers up a novel way to discover new music and artists. With over 18 million songs available you should have no problem making your own custom mix of music to take with you wherever you go. This app has over 150 prescribed playlists by Nokia’s very own mixologists! You can download 4 playlists which equals about 8 hours of music. Mind you with the free version of the app you still get a ton of streaming music for free however you can only skip ahead 6 songs per hour. If you need even more music you can upgrade the Nokia MixRadio app for $3.99 a month which includes unlimited downloads. Continue reading “App Review: Nokia MixRadio for Windows Phone”
From our Facebook page, Robin asks:
Here’s a question relating to Android… When I plug my Moto X into my Windows PC using the supplied USB cable, it shows up as a storage device and I can copy stuff to/from it with no problems. But when I plug it into a USB port on my wife’s MacBook Pro, it’s not even recognized as a device. How can I access my Moto X from Mac OSX?
Hey Robin,
It’s because Apple can be frustrating about supporting standards like MTP. Apple refuses to natively support the USB Media Transfer Protocol. It’s how you can plug your phone into a PC and see files on your phone and computer at the same time.
There are two different ways to share files between a phone and computer, MTP and Mass Storage. If you use Mass Storage, the storage on your phone becomes a standalone drive for your computer, and your phone will no longer be able to see any of those files. That was fine during the Windows Mobile and early Android days. You’d plug in your phone, and it would essentially become a dead lump of a USB drive. Now though, we don’t want to lose access to our precious communication tools, even for a brief file transfer. That’s why Android and Windows Phone now utilize MTP. It comes with some drawbacks like slower file transfers, and you can only move one file at a time, but your phone wont be separated from its storage while connected to a computer. Given the trade off, I’d rather be able to connect my phone to my computer, and still being able to use it as a normal phone with all of my files and apps intact.
The iPhone just doesn’t work that way, so Apple doesn’t feel any great pressure to support other mobile device file management protocols. As far as they’re concerned you should be using iOS and iTunes.
Google did release an Android file manager program for Mac users which might work for you – http://www.android.com/filetransfer/
If that doesn’t work you might need to look at cloud solutions. The nice thing about Android, it’s silly easy to move files on and off via services like Google Drive, Box, and DropBox.
You could also do a local network sync via an app like AirSync –http://www.doubletwist.com/airsync/ or Air Droid – http://www.airdroid.com/ which will use your home WiFi network. It wont be as fast as a cable connection, but it’ll be faster than Bluetooth.
But yeah. Short story long, this is basically Apple’s fault.
Unifying controls is the name of the game!
Now across all of Google’s products you can initiate a voice search with the phrase “OK Google”. Installing a Chrome plugin will enable this new feature.
Take heart you security conscious folks, the feature is held primarily to whenever a Google search tab is open, but even on a Google search tab, it’ll stop listening after five minutes. I personally think persistent observation is creepy, so I’m happy to see there are user activated controls to keep it in check.
Download the extension for your Chrome browser, and maybe it’ll come in handy while your hands are messy this Thanksgiving! I always seem to need to search for something when my hands are covered in gunk…
If you’re into mobile audio, field recording, voice over, or podcasting, it’s been the dream for a while. The ability to use our consumer tablets as recording solutions.
It still hasn’t come to Android. Plug a USB mic into an Android tablet, and it’ll likely power up, but Android wont know what to do with it. Microsoft might have the hardware to offer up a solution for us mobile audio junkies. Let’s take a look at how recording works on a Surface 2, and what happens to the files you create after you’re done editing.
Blah blah blah abstraction layer… Herp derp blerp API’s…
Long story short, Google is trying to improve the software / hardware relationship our smartphone cameras rely on. This should expand the tool set developers have at their disposal when making photo and video services. Google specifically is discussing better multi-shot tech which should improve sport and burst modes and deliver more flexible HDR settings. An HDR photo depends on a series of pics taken quickly at different exposures. Other smart modes could be improved too, like the ability to take a series of shots to remove distracting elements from your photos.
All well and good from a consumer app-y position, but the idea of delivering RAW files could be really interesting for people who really want to control their photo output, even from their phones.
Continue reading “Google confirms camera RAW support is coming to Android. So what’s that mean?”