Apple News: iBooks Can Read Out Your Books To You In OS X Mavericks, Here’s How
EBooks and other book offerings through the Kindle or iBooks remove a lot of that publishing overhead and allow readers to quickly get access to great content wherever they are. The next step in that progression is to remove the need to actually read the book yourself and have it auto-read out loud by the system. Offering a text-to-speech function within electronic devices is certainly nothing new, even in the electronic book world. Amazon has offered this kind of feature through their Kindle devices for quite some time. Not everyone actually uses the Kindle hardware to consume their digital media however, and it seems to be Apple who are bringing in new users with their iBooks option on iOS and OS X. A workaround to reach a similar reading-out-loud achievement has been to use the Voice Over support with the Accessibility options on the device. This actually works but brings with it a myriad of additional issues.
Read full story => RedmondPie
Technology News: Sports Make Final Call on Technology
My print column this week examines how technology is aiding sports officiating by using cameras and advanced software to zero in on the location of batted, kicked and smashed balls. The use of that technology raises the question of how much to acknowledge about the technology’s limitations — and different sports are answering it in different ways. At big tennis tournaments such as the World Tour Finals in London this week, players dissatisfied with calls made by line judges or umpires can appeal to a technology created by Hawk-Eye, a Basingstoke, U.K., company owned by Sony. Hawk-Eye uses a set of cameras to estimate where the ball hit the court and whether it was on, inside or outside of the lines.
Read full story => WSJ
Programming News: Pair Programming
Pair programming is a controversial agile development practice. It involves two programmers working on a pairing station. A pairing station consists of two monitors, two mice, two keyboards and a single processing unit. So, technically, it is a shared computer system. The pairing system has all the tools required for development. The two programmers have distinct roles. One of them is the driver, who types the code and the other is the navigator, who goes through what the driver is doing. The latter analyses the code in a holistic fashion and decides whether the driver is moving in the right direction. The navigator may thus interject the driver for suggestions and/or corrections. The two switch roles frequently.
Read full story => A Free Blogger
Photography News: Watch This: 100,000 Photo Time Lapse From Around the World
Anyone who has ever shot a time lapse knows how much time and preparation it takes. That’s a big part of what makes Matthew Vandeputte’s 100,000 image project so impressive. It runs just shy of two-minutes, but it contains amazing time-defying footage of various places from all over the globe. The video is currently dominating on Reddit and, ahem, otherwise going viral around the web. It’s a great way to spend the last few minutes of your work week.
Read full story => PopPhoto
