Laughzilla the Third (2012)
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Funny Stuff : The First Cartoon Book from The Daily Dose. Available on Lulu. |
UC Health’s mobile diagnostics van is partnering with the Salon Professional Academy to host Mammograms and Manicures, an event providing vouchers for a free manicure to all women who receive a mammogram on the van between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14, 2014. For women 40 and older, mammograms are recommended every year […]
“Shuffler.fm is a music discovery service designed to help users navigate the music shared by blogs in a visual way,” wrote TNW’s Martin Bryant way back in 2011, just as it had launched for iPad. Almost a year later, it brought the Flipboard-esque browsing experience to iPhone too.
Now, however, Shuffler.fm says its “doubling down on its curation, filtering and context vision”, by launching an all-new standalone iPad app called PAUSE, serving up a quarterly review of the best new music. For launch today, PAUSE kicks off with the best of 2013: A Year In Music, and then will offer four editions throughout 2014.
Basically, PAUSE is a curation of the already-curated music service, so this in theory should offer the crème de la crème of the best new music. It highlights the best songs, videos, albums and charts, as well as some of the best music writing from the likes of Pitchfork, The Fader, Fact magazine, Resident Advisor, XLR8R, DUMMY, among others.
PAUSE is live in the App Store now, though we’re told that there is currently issues with the audio links – this will be remedied in an update that should be pushed out in the next few days.
Related read: 17 mobile apps to help you discover new music
Google today announced a new Google Now feature: setting and referring to relationships for your Android contacts. Instead of scrolling through your contacts, or referring to them by their name, you can now just say “Ok Google, call Mom” or “OK Google, send a text to my wife.”
I don’t have a wife, but when I asked Google to “call my wife” it prompted me to pick a contact that would then be set under that term. Unfortunately, when I tried setting someone up as “Captain Awesome,” it wouldn’t let me and simply performed a Web search. This is separate from the Google Search for Android update released just last week, which added smarter time-to-leave cards as well as the “OK, Google” hotword option in the UK and Canada.
Image Credit: KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/Getty Images
Out of nowhere, Radiohead has released an intriguing app called PolyFauna for iOS and Android. Developed in collaboration with Universal Everything, a UK-based digital art and design studio, it places you inside a 3D world which you can adjust by physically moving your smartphone or tablet.
Lead vocalist Thom Yorke says the visuals and sound effects are inspired by the song Bloom, which Radiohead released in 2011 as part of its eighth studio album The King of Limbs. “It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious,” he said.
It’s an unusual app. Each environment is fairly primitive, but the shapes and colors are so striking and unusual that you can’t help but be engrossed by what’s on-screen. Your only objective, of sorts, is to seek out the red dot that’s quickly darting across each world. If you can track it for long enough, the marker will fly toward you and shatter the screen, triggering the next stage.
While you’re inside each virtual landscape, you can also swipe across the screen to create new 3D objects and save your work with an in-app camera, although it’s unclear exactly where these images are stored.
This isn’t the first time Yorke has experimented with technology to promote his musical efforts. Atoms for Peace, another group which he performs in, teamed up with Soundhalo last year to give fans instant access to live recordings. Conversely, Radiohead produced a traditional print newspaper in 2011 called ‘The Universal Sigh’ to promote King of Limbs.
➤ PolyFauna | App Store | Google Play
Google has announced an update to Google Search Appliance (GSA), its enterprise-focused product that lets companies search across all their content.
Version 7.2 of GSA builds on version 7.0 which launched back in 2012, but introduces a series of key new features that promise to make it easier to find documents, organize data and generally improve productivity. This is in addition to a redesigned admin console, enhanced language support and “advanced sorting”.
In a nutshell, GSA draws on Google’s search technology, but instead offers a customized incarnation with business-specific features. In a blog post this morning, Brent VerWeyst, Product Manager for Google Enterprise Search, outlines what the refresh entails. Essentially, it now lets users test and tweak their ‘entities’ – key attributes such as author, data and product-type – before the indexing begins.
In addition, it’s looking to make searches more universal. While GSA has always been about making all files searchable from a single box, with version 7.2 the connector framework that enables this has been made more flexible, with users able to build customized connectors that better suit their needs.
Finally, version 7.2 also now supports wildcard character searches for when you don’t know the full name or title of the item you’re looking for. This means you only need to know part of the name to be able to execute the query.
Feature Image Credit – Getty Images
