Without knowing anything about gameplay, and based purely on first-impressions, “Star Wars Outlaws” and “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” look interesting.

The fact that they are both available for PS5, Xbox, and PC doesn’t hurt either 🙂

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-outlaws
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/avatar/frontiers-of-pandora

Guess we’ll find out if they are any good sometime towards the end of this year and the beginning of the next (hopefully)?

#Games #StarWars #Avatar #Console #PC

Dear ACL Community, If you are PhD student, postdoc or are preparing for your PhD right now after http://M.Sc., we invite you to share your experiences and thoughts on working in the field of NLP. We plan to present the main results of this survey at the upcoming ACL'23 , Toronto & in a future publication, of course always in anonymous form. The online survey will take about 5 minutes to complete. To participate, please click on this link https://lnkd.in/gzmRhamu
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Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, and James Earl Jones, who provided the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars in 1977, met for the first time on a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.

@nicemicro As I said before, you are thinking only of your own use cases 🙂 If you don’t like the tech (or the company) that is totally fine. That’s your prerogative.

I can think of several use cases that are actually solved by SharePlay. But of course, then people say things like “That’s a niche case” 😛 But it’s always a niche case when it’s not the one you want …

For example, watching movies together on a big screen when you are on a plane (which I do want), watching together on a huge screen when you travel around a lot and can’t cart around a big TV with you, working together on code on multiple large virtual monitors instead of crowding around a single tiny screen. These are just a few. There are quite a few variations on these that I can think of too …

@Jrogger Ah 🙂 I figured it might be that — I mean non-name order. I mostly have things in name order and so this doesn’t hit me most of the time. But then again, I switched to PathFinder a long time ago because of issues like this and the inability to customise a lot of options …

@nicemicro Each to their own 🙂 I’ve realized when talking to people online that a lot of the time, they imagine that everybody else’s situation is the same as theirs. Not saying that this is the case here, but it’s hard to know what works for somebody else and why …

Not sure why you get “dystopian vibes” about sharing content but then again, consider the fact that people said that radio, TV etc. also would destroy society when it first appeared 🙂

When I was young, the only way to watch a movie with somebody else was to go to the movie theatre. Then TVs and VHS came along and you could watch a movie at home. Was the change dystopian? I guess that depends on your viewpoint and your own needs.

As I said, each to their own 🙂

Installed iPadOS 17 on my iPad and thought that I discovered a new setting “Use Large App Icons” only to realize that it’s there on iOS 16 too 😛

For some reason, I never noticed this setting. But it’s rather useful when you’re as old as me and icons aren’t that easy to see. So, just mentioning in case there are others who didn’t know about this setting.

The Settings app section is different in iOS 16 — I believe it’s called “Home Screen & Multitasking” instead of “Home Screen & App Library” but the setting is the same.

#iPadOS17 #Apple #iPadOSBeta #LargeIcons
Screenshot of the “Home Screen …

@kn Given that I’ve been watching Apple keynotes since at least 2016 (or maybe 2017) hoping for an announcement about the headset, that sounds about right 🙂

@gruber

@gruber For media consumption by yourself, $3500 is certainly a bargain. But what if you want to consume with others? Does Apple have a plan for this? That’s what I’m curious about …

Sure, SharePlay is there. And Apple seems to be beefing up SharePlay with the latest OS releases, but how well will it work? Will it work when there is no Internet? Will it allow some sort of peer-connectivity if there is no network for instance? That’s probably what will tip the scales, at least for some of us 🙂

@nicemicro That certainly is one take on it 🙂 But what interests me is not the phone/communication factor, but being able to share an activity (like watching a movie) together.

And not on the phone, but on something like VisionPro where the activity would normally be considered a solo activity but where SharePlay could allow two or more people to watch the same movie, talk about it, and even pause/resume at the same point …

As somebody who moves around a lot, but who still consumes content with others, I find this very interesting 🙂

Also, you don’t have to go as far back as the 19th century to see telecommunications in action connecting people hundreds of miles apart, I’ve seen that in action in my lifetime. In fact, as a kid I used to have to go next door to make a phone call to my parents who were hundreds of miles away since the people with whom I lived did not have a phone 😛

When Apple first introduced SharePlay a couple of years ago, I was certain that this was to support their to-be released AR headset 🙂

But then time passed and nothing much appeared to happen with SharePlay. In fact, I had almost forgotten about it since adoption of SharePlay seemed to be mostly limited to streaming service apps or music apps, and that was about it ... Even amongst streaming apps, the ones I used like Neflix or Amazon Prime did not have SharePlay.

But this year, it appears that SharePlay is back with a vengeance 😛 Check out the following WWDC session to find all the new functionality being added to SharePlay:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10239/

My Favourite? SharePlay over AirDrop so that you can start shared activities with people in the same room by just bringing your phones together — no need to start a FaceTime call!

The thing I don’t know at this point is, will SharePlay work if there is no network (or at least, no Internet)? I’m guessing not, but I’m curious to find out.

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SharePlay #SharedActivities #VisionPro

@mikenichols I think I missed that one — so now you’ve made me add another item to my watch list 😛

@AngelaPreston Personally, I think you just want it perfect and that it’s not procrastination 🙂 At least, that’s kind of how I work too, at least for some things ..

I go over things multiple times in my head when I’m composing a paragraph or a reply to somebody. Instead of just sitting down and writing, I’d go over phrases or sentences in my head till I’m sure that I’ve got the right tone before I actually write something.

@jmichalicek I get that 🙂 I often feel as if I should be using tech more effectively but can’t think of how. So, all this time I’ve been using Xcode Playgrounds for trying out little bits of code but never as part of a project to quickly try out views and stuff. So this session was a revelation to me.

It’s interesting (at least to me) how sometimes we just get stuck in a certain mental model and can’t get beyond that. So, I guess talking to other people is important since you can learn a lot from them and how they use tech — I’ve been working remotely for like 18 years now and so don’t get to talk to a lot of folk 🙂

@Jrogger Just curious, but when you said “folders on top all the time” for Finder, did you mean have folders as the top items in list view? Or something else? If the former (unless you are looking at this differently) that’s already there in Finder …

I just have to remember how I enabled it though since I remember it being hidden away somewhere … Let me see … Ah yes, in Finder Settings > Advanced … “Keep folders on top” does it.

@davemark

@mikenichols I’d be interested to hear what you think once you do 🙂 Personally, the more I see of new Xcode 15 features, the more I want to use it as my daily driver right now …

@ratkins Haven’t tried that, I’m afraid 🙂 I rarely use an iPad and am mostly on my MBP. But will test this at some point once I switch to iOS 17 beta and let you know …

My guess is no since I don’t recall this being mentioned during WWDC and if it was possible, I’m fairly certain they would have mentioned it.

@vegetarianzombie I wanted to play around with the Game Porting Toolkit too but just haven’t gotten around to it — so much of fun stuff coming out of WWDC this year 🙂

@sgamel It puts all your localisable resources in one table — as an Organization-freak, I find just that aspect really appealing 🙂

Plus, it shows you resources which are stale (because they are no longer in use) and auto-manages adding new resources or removing resources which have not been translated. Seems very, very nifty to me. I really want to start using it right now just to see how well it all works …

Even if you are not looking at translating your app to support other languages, you owe it to yourself to take a look at String Catalogs in Xcode 15 🙂

With String Catalogs it’s easy to set up number and noun agreements (1 book vs. 2 books) or noun adjective agreement for languages which have gendered nouns (such as French, Spanish, Portuguese) very easily.

Just for the number-noun agreement part, I used to litter my code with ternary operators. But it’s so much easier to set up with String Catalogs. And that part is the least of the functionality of this new feature 🙂

Check out the following WWDC 2023 session to find out more:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10155/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #Strings #Grammar #StringCatalogs