Apple News: Now that the iPad’s all grown up, it needs to decide what it’s going to be
First, let me say I don’t think the iPad is in any danger of disappearing any time soon. While there has been a “lull” in sales growth over the past two quarters, Apple still sold more than 13.3 million of the critters in its 2014 fiscal Q3, which is an awful lot of iPads. It keeps it solidly in first place among tablet vendors, and the tablet market as a whole continues to grow. However, my guess is that the iPad is suffering a bit of a late-adolescent identity crisis at the four year mark, in that it remains unclear just what its mission and purpose are in the not-really-post-PC era.
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Technology News: The Amazon Fire’s Fanciest Features Fail to Impress
The Amazon Fire is a good smartphone, but not because of all the high-tech new features Amazon is touting. In fact, some of those features are more wearying than truly useful. The Fire Phone has everything you actually need: fast Internet access, a high-quality camera, good maps, and countless apps, available through Amazon’s own app store. But Amazon has chosen to highlight several more unusual features in its marketing campaign—the phone’s “dynamic perspective” display, Firefly feature, and Mayday support service. Unfortunately, that stuff didn’t impress me nearly as much.
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Programming News: Optional: Java 8’s Way to Deal with Null
For those who have been programming Java or C/C++ for any period of time will know one of the most annoying things is trying to debug a crash due accessing a null object. While the concept of null is needed to make a programming language work, deal with deviations from the normal ‘happy’ path including error handling, it doesn’t contribute towards implementing a solution. Yet we have to spend a fair portion of our time dealing with and protecting against null values to make robust software. Today we will take a look how Optional can improve our code in general followed by a quick look through its API. Null is the default value for an uninitialised class member field or static object, we reassign back to null to free memory. It’s also used for sentinel values such as indicating no data. The problem is when we try to access a null value we get an exception. We are then left trying to work out whether the value was uninitialised and thus the fault of some other code, or whether it was a sentinel value our code didn’t handle properly. Sometimes this leads to the wrong fix being made or dithering over which fix to make.
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Photography News: Adobe developing Aperture to Lightroom migration tool, releases step-by-step transition guide
Approximately a month after Apple announced it is discontinuing Aperture and iPhoto in favor of the new Photos app on OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, Adobe is today taking advantage of the Apple shift with a couple of key announcements. First, Adobe has published a new website detailing the advantages of Lightroom over Aperture. More importantly, Adobe has released a comprehensive, step-by-step transition guide for moving from Aperture to Lightroom. The guide also includes some answers to frequently asked questions.
Read full story => 9to5mac