Apple has brought augmented reality to its Swift Playgrounds app designed to teach kids the basics of programming and maybe even groom them into the next generation of iPhone developers. The move means kids can incorporate Swift Playgrounds’ cartoon characters — protagonists who follow students’ programming instructions — into their Swift Playgrounds projects. The technology uses Apple’s ARKit technology. Apple …
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Here’s a common practice: You open an existing document in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint, make some changes to it, then save it using a different filename. That leaves the original alone, but gives you a modified copy. Just one problem: Microsoft’s Office 365 no longer works that way. Because of an incomprehensible change pushed out not long ago, any …
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If all the rumors are right, you won’t be able to escape foldable phones if you try. The latest scuttlebutt is that Apple is on track to join Samsung and Huawei in a growing group of device makers planning to make a foldable phone. While Samsung’s may arrive by the end of 2018, a foldable iPhone is said to be …
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The minute Apple announced an education-focused event in Chicago for March 27, the betting on new hardware announcements focused on refreshed iPads. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting the company “plans to show off a new version of its cheapest iPad that should appeal to the education market.” While once considered a potential powerhouse for education, the iPad has been …
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The federal spending bill signed by US President Donald Trump on Friday does more than fund the budget. It also makes it easier for law enforcement agencies to demand access to online information no matter what country the data is stored in. Lawmakers added the CLOUD Act (PDF), which stands for Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, to the …
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CNET’s Cheapskate scours the web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. Find more great buys on the CNET Deals page and follow the Cheapskate on Facebook and Twitter! Enlarge Image The DJI Spark, shown here in Meadow Green, is even better when flown with the remote …
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“Hey Cortana, play My Daily Mix playlist.” Microsoft shuttered its Groove Music service at the end of last year and attempted to shift users to Spotify. As part of Microsoft’s embrace of Spotify, you can use Cortana to control the action in Spotify just as you had been able to do previously with Groove Music. The Cortana/Spotify integration is slick, …
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I’m standing in front of a mirror, looking at an avatar of a woman that isn’t me. “Blink,” I’m told. But it’s not working for me. One eye is permanently shut. Maybe it’s my glasses? I try lifting the goggles away from my face a bit. Now, it tracks. I roll my eyes around, and my virtual eyes in the …
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It looks like the blockchain bug might have bitten Google. The tech colossus’ cloud computing group is working on a service that could let customers use the heavily hyped transaction processing technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Blockchain is a potentially disruptive technology to track assets and transactions in a digital record held collectively among many computers instead of a single centralized …
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Moore’s Law, the principle that chips are supposed to get smaller and faster every few years, is faltering. But one company, Xilinx, thinks that’s actually good news for a new type of flexible processors it expects to sell next year. You’ve heard of Intel, Apple and Samsung, some of the biggest chipmakers around. But you probably don’t know Xilinx unless …
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