Title: Scientists Generate Insulin-Producing Cells in Diabetic Mice
Category: Health News
Created: 2/6/2014 12:35:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/7/2014 12:00:00 AM
Dilbert readers – Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.
Mozilla launches Accounts, an improved Sync feature, and a customizable UI to Firefox Aurora
Feb08
on February 8, 2014
at 12:32 am
Mozilla has announced several new features today designed to continue the Firefox browsing experience to any device you use. The company has announced that Accounts will be coming to the browser, along with an improved Sync feature and the ability to customize the user interface. All of these things are available to test now in Firefox Aurora.
With Firefox Accounts, users will be able to capture their login credentials for various services, their bookmarks, history, and any open tabs and bring it with them to any device. This new feature is a part of Firefox OS and is said to match Mozilla’s mission of helping the Web become a more mobile platform. The work on Accounts stems from programs that the company set up last year as a means of making things more accessible in the cloud.
Firefox Accounts has some marked similarities with Google’s Chrome OS in that both companies now offer users a way to carry their preferences over to multiple devices without having to waste time worrying about setup logistics.
Mozilla has also released an update for its Sync feature — the service that lets you take your bookmarks, tabs, and personal information with you. It’s now been made more secure — users will find that it has client side key stretching, end-to-end encryption, and a public key cryptography and the BrowserID protocol. All of these measures are intended to protect user information in the event the computer or Mozilla’s servers have been compromised.
The updated security measures are currently being added to Firefox, and will soon be incorporated into Firefox OS.
Lastly, Firefox Aurora has received a nifty feature that allows users to customize the user interface. With its Windows, Mac, and Linux versions, you can prioritize features in the menu, toolbar or tab bar by dragging them to wherever you want. You can also remove any browser buttons, including add-ons, based on your preference.
In addition, the entire interface has been redesigned in order to help make finding things easier:
Firefox Aurora includes a redesign of the browser interface to help you get things done, faster. Tabs have a new fluid and streamlined shape and non-active tabs blend into the background to make it faster for you to find and focus on the tab you want. A new menu contains the most popular features including copy, paste, zoom, as well as add-ons all in one spot with easy to identify visual icons.
All of the above features are available today in Firefox Aurora.
Photo credit: JOSEP LAGO/AFP/Getty Images
Sofa’s co-founder and former art director relaunch their static site generator as Cactus for Mac
Feb08
Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, veterans of the acclaimed Dutch software firm Sofa, have released Cactus for Mac, an attractive OS X version of their open-source static site generator.
Sofa attracted plenty of attention a couple years ago for the work it did on apps like Kaleidoscope and Versions. In fact, it got the attention of Facebook, which acquired the team in 2011. Sofa sold its apps to developer Black Pixel and moved to Palo Alto/Menlo Park.
After two years at Facebook, Bok and van Dijk decided that they wanted to go back to working for themselves, so they left to start a company. To start off as they struck out on their own, the pair dusted off their Cactus project and created a Mac version of it.
The idea behind Cactus is that it allows web designers to go back to hand-coding websites by creating an auto-refreshing local version of the site for you to view in your browser as you work on it. Once you’re ready to deploy, it’s extremely simple. However, this type of tool only works with fairly static websites, though you can still rely on Javascript to add dynamic features like comments and forms.
Sofa created Cactus while working on design-centric website templates for their clients.
“Slowly, we started to figure out that it was kind of a hassle to let designers set it up. If you want to use a template engine, you would need to set up a whole environment with Ruby and Django. It was a hassle,” Bok told The Next Web.
After the Facebook acquisition, the team released Cactus as open source software. However, the project had limited reach because it relied on terminal commands.
“After we quit Facebook, we looked at this thing and thought, ‘Hey, this is something that could become pretty big if we make it more accessible for web designers,’” Bok said. “We made it into an easy Mac app with a nice interface so it became an entire workflow.”
While Bok and van Dijk worked on the app last fall, Apple shook up the design world with the release of iOS 7.
“It was pretty interesting to see how the design world responded to that mostly aesthetic change, so we took some of the cues of iOS 7 and mocked them up on the desktop to see how far we could push that,” van Dijk said. “We figured it would be nice to wrap the whole app in the minimalistic design.”
The new Cactus app, which costs $29.99 in the Mac App Store, includes boilerplate templates for blogs, portfolios and profiles. The app is integrated directly with Amazon’s S3 hosting service.
While at Facebook, Bok and van Dijk had the opportunity to reach over a billion people with their work, but they eventually decided they wanted to work on something smaller.
“We’ve always enjoyed building stuff for a little bit less people that really, really enjoy what you’re building,” Bok said.
Cactus is the first step in their return to entrepreneurship, but the team plans on creating more tools and consumer products over the next few years. Thanks to Facebook, they can take their time choosing their next endeavor.
“We have the luxury to pick a problem that we like before we go all in,” Bok noted.
Image credit: Curioso / Shutterstock
Lei Zhang is the US General Manager of Chukong Technologies, an international mobile game publisher and developer based in Beijing.
For those who are keeping their eyes on it, the Chinese mobile gaming market kicked off 2014 with a bang.
The Chinese government estimated the mobile gaming economy generated almost $2 billion last year (and may underestimate its value as much as $300 million), Asian e-commerce titan Alibaba announced that it would be taking on its fellow $100+ billion rival Tencent in the mobile gaming space, and China Mobile started rolling out iPhones.
It’s an exciting time to be involved in Chinese gaming because the maturing mobile market is creating new (and highly lucrative) opportunities for savvy developers.
At Chukong, we believe there are four areas that we expect will define the Chinese mobile gaming space in 2014: consolidation of stores and platforms, developer-driven advancements to game engine development, the emergence of HTML5 as a powerful platform, and of course, Tencent WeChat further stretching its muscle as a gaming platform.
Fewer storefronts, easier distribution
Fragmentation is a well-known boogieman in mobile game development. If you’ve ever built a game for Android, you will be familiar with the headache of making your app work on the myriad devices and configurations (a reason so many choose to go iOS first).
Device fragmentation issues in China are compounded by the hundreds of separate Android app stores that have emerged in the absence of the Google Play Store, making it even harder to get noticed.
But market maturation – and the money that follows – has sparked a wave of acquisitions and consolidation, our first trend for 2014. 91’s acquisition by Baidu and PP Assistant’s acquisition by UCWeb are cases in point, and we expect more deals like Wandoujia’s $120 million funding round to happen over the course of the year.
That said, consolidation will still leave dozens of app stores alive and well in China, and these will continue to require extensive resources for managing distribution compared to western counterparts. But dozens is better than hundreds, and streamlined distribution channels will simplify the process of entering the market for outside developers.
For devs interested in China, keeping an eye on the winners and losers of these app store mergers can be challenging. Building relationships with the top marketplaces early, however, can make all the difference.
Engines built by the people, for the people
Within China, the mobile gaming boom has caught the attention of local developers and has spurred a large market for powerful, easy-to-use game engines. Though the opportunity to build tools for Chinese developers has been overshadowed by the multi-billion dollar noise in mobile deals and acquisitions, there is a lot of money to be made here.
As a result, Chinese developers wield increasing purchase power and demand cutting-edge platforms that keep pace with hardware developments. Hoping to tap into this grassroots community, Unity announced a 2D engine specifically marketed to Chinese developers in December.
At Chukong, we answered the demand for seamless access to Android and iOS ecosystems with Cocos, a mobile-focused development platform originated from open-source 2D engine Cocos2d-x that now includes a complete suite of developer tools (animation editor, scene editor just to name a few) and a 3D extension.
Competition in the mobile game engine market is fierce, but it is also ripe for innovation that will only benefit developers.
HTML5 browser-based gaming beast
Partly related to the cross-platform support by development tools and partly related to the existence of huge entry-point apps in China (such as WeChat and UC browser), expect HTML5 and browser-based gaming to surge ahead in 2014. The platform will claim a significant portion of mobile developer attention, particularly with the focus of game design on analytics and optimization.
Mobile game development has, at this point, been almost entirely quantified — the success of a game is measured in weighing Cost per Install against ARPDAU, advertising and discovery spends against development costs, and more. App analytics have made microscopic analysis of an app’s successes and failures possible, and the vast majority of mobile game design is about optimizing a user’s experience from the moment they download an app to when they make a payment.
Purist arguments about game design for art and entertainment aside, game optimization sits at the heart of mobile revenue these days.
HTML5 revitalizes the potential mobile Web-based gaming by offering developers the same powerful tools they get from native mobile apps in a package that does not require downloads. This creates a powerful channel for discovery that cuts across the fragmentation issues of the Chinese app marketplace.
Furthermore, the potential for players to try games without downloading them removes a huge (and costly) hurdle in user acquisition. HTML5 has been growing for a number of Chinese developers specifically because of the fragmentation problems that exist, and we expect the number of devs using HTML5 to swell soon.
WeChat’s impact in gaming
Finally, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The last quarter of 2013 was characterized by WeChat games dominating the App Store’s grossing chart in China.
The trend will not likely slow down in the foreseable future with WeChat pumping more games into its pipeline and aggressively rolling out peer-to-peer electronic payment to its huge user base. This was evident during Chinese New Year, when families traditionally exchange monetary gifts.
We expect Tencent will take about 20 to 30 percent of the total mobile gaming market share in terms of revenue. However it’s yet to be seen whether WeChat will open up to become a true gaming platform or remain a closed, curated publisher.
Related to Tencent’s sudden rise in mobile gaming, you should also keep a close watch for Alibaba’s defensive attack. With WeChat payment and ecommerce initiatives clearly threatening Alibaba’s core business, the e-commerce giant’s move into the mobile game distribution space should be a good news for developers and publishers alike, bringing more options and potentially better bargining opportunities.
The story of the Chinese gaming market is, first and foremost, one of growth — our conservative projections show that it may double in value this year to $4 billion or more. Growth, in turn, will drive smaller trends like market consolidation, user-driven engine development, and the emergence of HTML5, that offer opportunities for ambitious mobile gaming companies to strike gold.
In many ways, the Chinese market will remain too wild in 2014 for developers to access it with impunity, but the market’s growth suggests that opportunities will become much easier to access in the very near future.
Image credit: Shutterstock/tristan tan