Category: The Verge

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Image: Music Fingers

The trend of gadgets that rethink the physical ways we make music is continuing with a little wearable device called Music Fingers. It literally puts music at your fingertips, and lets you tap out beats on any surface.

It’s a clip-like device that’s goes on your finger, and sort of looks like any pulse reader you’d see in a hospital. The clip then connects to the Music Fingers app on your smartphone via Bluetooth, where sounds or loops can be assigned to the clip’s two buttons. Once that’s done, start playing by tapping away.

It’s just one example of a weirdo gadget for making beats — and there have been a lot of attempts at making these kinds of gadgets. There’s Oddball, which is an actual bouncy ball that’s also a drum machine….

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Image: Kicks Condor

Keeping up to speed with the galactic firehouse of daily internet detritus that gets blasted at our eyeballs every minute of every day can be a taxing endeavor. It often involves using RSS readers, Twitter lists, YouTube and Twitch channel notifications, and all-too-frequent email inbox refreshing, among dozens of other methods for staying on top of your favorite internet oddities and sifting through all the junk to find them.

Thankfully, something like Fraidycat now exists.

A free, open source tool released late last year and significantly updated just yesterday, Fraidycat works as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox or as an app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It bundles together all of your favorite internet stuff into one…

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AirBands | Kickstarter

If you have a habit of misplacing your AirPods, this new Kickstarter campaign might have the answer: stick them on your Apple Watch band.

The AirBand is a new silicon band for the Apple Watch that doubles as a holder for your AirPods, with two loops located below the Apple Watch screen. It’s supposed to work with both the AirPods and the AirPods Pro.

The design and concept sound silly. When using it, your AirPods are just dangling there out in the open for everyone to see, and they won’t charge while in the loops. AirPods also come with a pocket-sized charging case, meaning AirPods owners already have something portable in which to store their earbuds.

But it’s practical in some ways. Matt Youngblood, the project’s creator, said the…

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Photo by Brennan King, animation by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

It’s already been a few years since Instagram allowed you to post multiple photos simultaneously in a single post. This small change enabled a lot of creative options. One of my favorites is creating seamless panoramas by simply slicing your photo in two — like this one.

If you want to take advantage of this neat little hack, here’s a quick, simple tutorial on how you can pull it off.

Before you start, you’ll need two things: Adobe Photoshop (or another pixel-based photo editor that lets you work with layers) and an elementary understanding of Instagram’s requirements for sizing photos.

First, about the sizing: no matter which photo you upload, Instagram will automatically resize and compress your images. For example, square photos…

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Qualcomm

Qualcomm has revealed a reference design for its new virtual and augmented reality platform. The headset offers a rough guide for building with the Snapdragon XR2 — a 5G-enabled chipset designed for VR/AR hardware.

The design is a prototype from electronics company Goertek, which has worked with Qualcomm before. It looks a lot like Qualcomm’s earlier XR1 reference design, as the company’s VR/AR (or collectively, “XR”) head Hugo Swart admitted to reporters. But it can show off the XR2’s new capabilities, including support for 5G networks and up to seven cameras — although it still uses 2K display panels for each eye instead of the maximum 3K resolution for XR2.

Qualcomm

Q…

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Back in the heady days of 2016, when VR hype was at its peak amid hardware launches from Oculus, HTC, and Sony, it felt entirely natural for the killer app to be the transformative PlayStation VR conversion of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez. Here was a cult classic that just so happened to be about delving into the very depths of technology itself, with graphics perfectly suited to the high-contrast, low-resolution panels of early VR headsets, and propulsive game design that didn’t have to deal with the tricky problem of how to move your avatar around.

In 2020, the VR landscape has changed. Motion controls are the norm, and expectations are high for next month’s launch of what has to be the most anticipated VR title of all time, Valve’s H…

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There’s no questioning the benefits of Twitter. It’s a convenient way to get your memes, world news, and pop culture hot takes all in one place.

But being an active Twitter user requires sifting through a daily deluge of toxic characters, including white supremacists, bots, deepfakes, the president of the United States, and more. Plus, there’s no denying the stress and anxiety that the fast pace of Twitter’s news cycle, and the strain of constantly debating reply guys, can bring.

Hear me out on this: you don’t actually have to use Twitter. I know it seems like everyone else is using it, but you can be the change you want to see in the world. You can just delete your account.

Don’t worry: it doesn’t have to be permanent. If you find…

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Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Seven candidates qualified for Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s primary on Saturday. It’s their last chance to make their case to voters before Super Tuesday, the day when 16 states and territories open their primary polls to choose the Democratic party’s nominee for president.

How do I watch tonight’s Democratic debate?

The third February Democratic debate will steam for free on cbsnews.com and the CBSN app on Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, PlayStation, Xbox, and iOS and Android devices.

The debate will stream live on Twitter, too.

What time does tonight’s Democratic Debate start?

The debate will begin at 8PM ET on February 25th, and it is expected to last until 10:15PM ET.

Which…

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Photo: Moment

Moment is launching a new iPhone app today that lets you record video, cover it in a retro filter, and send it off to your stories on Instagram, Snapchat, or wherever else, giving it a look that’ll theoretically stand out a little bit from the crowd.

The app is called Rtro, and it’s really easy to dive into. It launches straight to a camera screen. From there, you swipe left and right to move between filters, drag up and down to adjust the filter’s intensity, and tap the record button to capture up to a minute of footage across multiple clips. You can think of it a little bit like VSCO but for video.

Rtro is meant to be a fun way to quickly put together a good-looking story, not some serious filmmaking tool. “We just wanted to make…

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Watches have gotten pretty complicated. Between ultra-fancy mechanical watches and software-laden smartwatches, the things we wear on our wrists have become more intricate than ever. But the Solid State Watch, an art project from design studio CW&T, which is currently looking for funding on Kickstarter, is an ultra-minimalist tribute to simpler days (specifically, the classic Casio F91W-1 digital watch.)

Where the Casio F91W-1 was a fairly simplistic timekeeping device, offering the most bare-bones features of a clock, stopwatch, alarm, and backlight, the Solid State Watch takes things a step further. It takes electronics of an F91W-1 and encases it entirely in a block of solid resin. There are no buttons, rendering the stopwatch, alarm,…

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The beauty of Twitter is that every message is constrained to 280 characters and under, but sometimes you simply can’t get all your thoughts across in just a single tweet. Or perhaps you’re following a live news story and you need to follow the thread to read the news as it develops so there’s context for what happened earlier.

Whatever the reason, sometimes Twitter threads can get long, which can make them difficult to follow. Thankfully, there’s a bot that can help piece those tweets together into one piece of text without all the extra replies from anyone other than the person who originally started the thread. This is called “unrolling” a thread, and it’s created by a tool called @threadreaderapp, which lets you combine tweetstorms…

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Today at Amazon, you can find several gaming accessories for less than they usually cost. There are a few devices that are worth calling out, one of which is Asus’ 24-inch G-Sync-compatible monitor. This 1080p monitor (TN panel, model VG248QG) has a 0.5-second response time, and supports up to a 165Hz refresh rate. Normally around $270, it’s $190 right now.

So long as you’re alright with a 1080p image and the TN panel, this monitor seems to be a good value. It has slim bezels, and unlike most other affordable gaming monitors, this design doesn’t feature an excessive amount of harsh red detailing. What’s more, Nvidia has certified it as G-Sync-compatible, which means this monitor meets its standards for handling variable refresh rate for…

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Crunchyroll is releasing its own lineup of original animated shows. The programming slate, dubbed Crunchyroll Originals, runs the gamut from family-friendly action series to dark supernatural investigations. Of the eight shows announced as part of 2020’s Crunchyroll Originals, half are co-produced shows with Japanese animation studios like Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell) and MAPPA (Yuri!! on Ice).

The move mirrors the strategies of bigger, broader appeal services like Netflix and Disney Plus for more original programs. By releasing exclusive content, companies are no longer reliant on others to produce or license shows. Initially Crunchyroll, and its anime streaming competitors like Funimation, Amazon, and Netflix, would license…

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Yelp

Yelp introduced its Waitlist feature four years ago, but the company keeps adding new add functionality to try to make it more appealing. Today, Yelp is announcing that parties of seven or more can now join the waitlist at participating restaurants, and that people can begin their searches with however many people they plan on joining the meal, rather than having to update it after they’ve already picked a restaurant.

People can also now use the Waitlist feature to indicate their seating preferences, like if they don’t want to sit at a shared table. Android and web users will receive a text (for Android) or a push notification (on the web) when it’s time to join the waitlist. Diners can specify when they want to eat, and Yelp will tell…

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Disney has announced a new publishing initiative for its Star Wars expanded universe, titled Star Wars: The High Republic. Designed as an interconnected series of books, novels, and comics, the series will be set about 200 years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in a “golden age for the Jedi.”

As the company’s press release notes, “This period on the Star Wars timeline will not overlap any of the filmed features or series currently planned for production” — meaning that The High Republic will be limited largely to print stories for now, not the next big-budget Star Wars movie or Disney Plus show. Still, if the stories do well and resonate with fans, there’s no reason to assume that The High Republic era won’t make the jump to film at…

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Samsung’s Galaxy S20 device lineup has become the first to receive USB certification for their support of the Programmable Power Supply (PPS) and USB Power Delivery (USB PD) 3.0 standards, the USB Implementers Forum announced today. It means that the phones should have no problem working with third-party fast chargers, so long as they’re also certified, and capable of providing the specific current and voltage required by the handset. The S20 and S20 Plus support fast charging of up to 25W, while the S20 Ultra supports up to 45W. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 Plus technically also supported USB PD3.0 and PPS, but it apparently didn’t receive a certification from the USB Implementers Forum.

USB PD 3.0 and PPS are a couple of new standards…

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple rumors have heated up in the past week, following the usual spring tradition. Apple doesn’t always have a keynote in the first quarter of the year, but when it does it’s a good time for it to update or announce products that aren’t necessarily central to its business. But the leaks and innuendo so far don’t have the air of inevitability that often accompanies Apple rumors yet, so I wouldn’t block off your calendar just yet.

But if you Want To Believe, the current best guesses point to something happening towards the end (or on the very last day) of March. Or somethings; the iPhone SE 2 (aka the iPhone 9), AirTag location beacons, Apple-branded over-the-ear headphones, an updated iPad Pro with a big square camera module, and even…

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New Xbox One dashboard | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft is rolling out its new Xbox One dashboard design to all consoles this week. The new design focuses on overhauling the home page of the Xbox One dashboard, with frequently used games and apps available immediately. The new Home design also includes the ability to add or remove rows to customize it further, and quick access to Xbox Game Pass, Mixer, and the Microsoft Store.

The Xbox maker has been testing this new home design for more than six months, and it definitely makes it easier to find and access frequently used games on the home screen. This was typically buried away in the past, and you can now turn an Xbox One console on and get right back to where you left off. The new design follows numerous changes to the Xbox One…

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The HyperBoom sits behind Ultimate Ears’ Boom 3 and MegaBoom 3

Ultimate Ears’ Bluetooth speakers are great in most situations, but not for big parties. Its new HyperBoom promises to be. It’s a tall, rectangular, 360-degree speaker that’s powerful enough to fill a room with loud, clear sound, and heavy enough to necessitate a handle to carry it around.

It’s not tough to find a party speaker that can blast music across a room full of loud partygoers. Some even cost less than the $399 HyperBoom. But this speaker is worth checking out for a few reasons. Its understated design lets it blend nicely into your room, and it has an adaptive EQ that automatically adjusts to the layout of said room. Plus, it has a bunch of unique features, some new and some borrowed from Ultimate Ears’ other speakers. Also, it…

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Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge

Apple’s Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR have been out in the world for a while now, but Apple is just now publishing its white papers for the two new devices, which go into far greater detail about the high-end hardware.

The fact that Apple waited months to offer this information is odd, given that there are some important details about the two products, including caveats for third-party compatibility and explanations for some of the design and spec choices Apple made here. It’s the sort of information that you’d probably want before you spend $6,000-plus on a new computer or screen, so it’s good to see that Apple is providing it now.

As one might expect from a technical overview produced in-house by Apple, the two…

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