Apple has opened the doors to the iOS 13 public beta, along with iPadOS 13, and if you're feeling ambitious you can try out the upcoming iPhone and iPad software on your own device today. The full release of iOS 13 isn't expected to occur until this fall, alongside the launch of Apple's newest iPhone models, but this public beta offers a - potentially buggy - preview.
Apple has released the first public beta of macOS Catalina, the latest version of its Mac software announced at WWDC 2019 earlier this month. While Catalina - aka macOS 10.15 - isn't expected to be fully released until later in the year, this public beta allows those feeling brave or ambitious (or some combination of the two) to try it out in advance.
Today Slack hit Wall Street and closed at over 48% in its first day of trading. If you do not know what Slack is, chances are you work with people that you see five days a week. Slack is a chat system with which business place employees communicate - through an app, usually. This system is successful because they got to this space nearly-first and did the right things at the right times over the past several years.
Adobe's Lightroom has found its way into the Mac App Store, offering subscription access to the popular photo editing and organization tool. It's the first software from Adobe's full-featured Photoshop family to find its way into Apple's official download store for macOS.
When Microsoft finally sucked it up and abandoned its homegrown web browser engine for Chromium, it opened a veritable floodgate of features. Not only did it get a browser that works with the majority of the world's web pages, it even gained support for popular extensions right off the bat. It also acquired the ability to be everywhere, even on Apple's macOS. And, almost coming full circle, it has started to support even its old systems, namely, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
The Web is both a wonderful and frightening place where one can learn things and also learn things they probably shouldn't. While there are many helpful souls on the Internet, there is also no shortage of people ready to take advantage of others' innocence or ignorance. In fact, there are just too many potentially harmful sites for a single entity to keep track of. That's why Google is now enlisting Chrome users to report such sites to its Safe Browsing list.
Microsoft has unveiled Presenter Coach, a new feature in PowerPoint that helps users improve their presentation skills. The company points out that public speaking is already nerve-racking for many individuals, and that can make it harder for them to offer a great presentation without the right skills. Using the new feature, users are coached on pace, the words they use, and more.
When Microsoft bought popular list app Wunderlist, there were fears that it would sunset the app and service just like it did with Sunrise Calendar. Microsoft didn't leave these users hanging and did confirm the inevitable but not until it has made its own replacement is ready. That day may now be fast approaching as it announces that Microsoft To-Do is finally available in the last missing platform: macOS.
There is no shortage of malware around the world but the most vicious kind are the ones that hold people's precious files for ransom. Even worse are the ransomware that demand payment from victims knowing fully well that there is actually no way to recover those files. One of the most recent and most egregious is the GrandCrab strain of ransomware. The good news is that its principal owners and operators have announced their "retirement". The bad news is that they're doing so because they claim to have already earned $2 billion from the operation.
This week the folks at Samsung released a software update for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. This update was just over 700MB in size and included Security Patch Level: June 1, 2019. In addition to the standard device stability improvements and bug fixes, Samsung delivered significantly improved camera performance, along with the first implementation of Night Mode.
Windows 10 updates have become a game of chance. You almost never know when an update will break something and make your PC unusable. While Microsoft does try to fix things after the fact, often the damage is already done. Now Microsoft is taking the initiative to warn users that an upcoming update may cause Bluetooth devices to lose their connection to Windows PCs. And, no, isn't a bug but a feature.
Windows may still be the operating system on desktops and laptops, by choice or not, but Microsoft's biggest profit comes from the wholesale licensing of the OS on enterprise, government, and educational computers. Those, however, are slowly losing ground especially with the latter two categories. That has mostly been because of the increasing costs of Windows licenses. That has caused not only governments but even CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, to move away from Windows and proprietary software at large.