Year: 2020

When Slack first launched in 2013, the product was quickly embraced by developers, and the early product reflected that. To get at advanced tools, you used a slash (/) command, but the company recognizes that as it moves deeper into the enterprise, it needed to simplify the interface.

Today, the company introduced a newly designed interface aimed at easing the user experience, making Slack more of an accessible enterprise communications hub.

Jaime DeLanghe, director of product management at Slack, says that the messaging application has become a central place for people to communicate about work, which has grown even more important as many of us have begun working from home as a result of COVID-19.

But DeLanghe says usage was up even before the recent work from home trend began taking off. “People are connected to Slack, on average, about nine hours a day and they’re using Slack actively for almost 90 minutes,” she told TechCrunch.

To that end, she says her team has been working hard to update the interface.

“From my team’s perspective, we want to make sure that the experience is as simple to understand and get on-boarded as possible,” she said. That also means surfacing more advanced tooling, which has been hidden behind those slash commands in previous versions of the tool.

She said that the company has been trying to address the needs of the changing audience over the years by adding many new features, but admits that has resulted in some interface clutter. Today’s redesign is meant to address that.

New Slack interface. Screenshot: Slack

Among the new features, besides the overall cleaner look, many people will welcome the new ability to nest channels to organize them better in the Channel sidebar. As your channels proliferate, it becomes harder to navigate them all. Starting today, users can organize their channels into logical groupings with labels.

New nested channel labels in Slack. Screenshot: Slack

DeLanghe is careful to point out that this channel organization is personal, and cannot be done at an administrative level. “The channels don’t actually live inside of another channel. You’re creating a label for them, so that you can organize them in the sidebar for just yourself, not for everybody,” she explained.

Other new features include an improved navigation bar at the top of the window, a centralized search and help tool also located at the top of the window and a universal compose button in the Sidebar.

All of these new features are designed to help make Slack more accessible to users, as more employees start using it across an organization.

Apple just dumped a bunch of hardware news online via press release. That’s just the world we live in right now. We’ll probably be seeing a whole lot of this in the coming weeks and months, as companies adjust to the new online reality. Along with with a new MacBook Air and update to the Mac Mini, the company’s creative pro-focused iPad Pro got a couple of key new features.

A number of the additions, including the $299/$349 (depending on model) Magic Keyboard are aimed at the company’s longtime desire to push the iPad beyond a tablet, into something more akin to a super portable productivity device.

At the center of the latest push is the forthcoming iPadOS 13.4, which brings with it  laptop-style cursor and mouse support. The update will be available on the new Pro, for use with the trackpad on the keyboard case. Some good news, too, for those not willing to shell out the money for a new models: it’s also coming to most iPads released in the last few years.

But iPadOS, for better and worse, is not MacOS. As such, the company’s taken a different approach to the familiar desktop cursor model. Per the press release,

Rather than copying the experience from macOS, trackpad support has been completely reimagined for iPad. As users move their finger across the trackpad, the pointer elegantly transforms to highlight user interface elements. Multi-Touch gestures on the trackpad make it fast and easy to navigate the entire system without users ever lifting their hand.

Clearly these sorts of updates were a big motivator behind forking iOS and iPadOS, as the iPad increasingly seeks to blaze its own path in the nebulous territory between mobile and desktop. We may not yet have a touchscreen Mac, but for users who are considering turning to the tablet as a primary computing device, Apple’s certainly eases that transition.

The new iPro is available for purchase today, and the Magic Keyboard arrives in May. iPadOS is set to arrive somewhere between the two, on March 24. The update will make the system compatible with the latest version of Apple’s Magic Mouse and Trackpad, along with some third-party bluetooth mice.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a new coronavirus test that produces results around three times faster than the current fastest testing methods, and that requires only relatively simple technical instrumentation. In addition to these benefits, the researchers behind the test’s development say that it  could even help detect patients affected by coronavirus in earlier stages of infection vs. current methods, and that its results can can “read by the naked eye,” which makes it more accessible to a broader range of healthcare facilities and professionals.

The Oxford-developed test can provide results in only half an hour – the fastest current methods that focus on viral RNA, like this one does, produce results in between 1.5 and 2 hours. The new tests have already been validated using real clinical samples of the virus at the Shenzhen Luohou People’s Hospital in China, and though they’ve so far only been used on 16 samples, evenly split between those positive for the virus and those that contain none, they’ve demonstrated a 100% success rate, which is a very reassuring result.

The biggest impact of this test, should it prove effective at scale, is that it manages to sidestep some of the existing limiting factors that apply to the existing early test methods. Scientists currently have to isolate COVID-19 RNA (the instructions for coding DNA), and then perform a process through which that RNA is actually turned into DNA – followed by testing the DNA in a microbiology laboratory setting by trained technicians using a specialized polymerase chain reaction machine.

The Oxford test, on the other hand, requires only relatively simple equipment for both conducting the test and for interpreting the results, which unlocks the possibility of deploying it in hard to reach areas or in local facilities that lack specialized equipment and personnel. The team that developed it is also working on the possibility of making it even more flexible with an integrated hardware design that could make it possible for it to be “used at clinics, airports or even for home use.”

This is still an early technology that’s coming out of a lab, which means that there are still a number of steps required before it becomes approved for broad use. Still, testing equipment doesn’t face quite as many hurdles as do treatments and antivirals, which can obviously have a much more direct impact on human patients, and given the current situation it’s likely everyone involved will want to expedite the next steps in terms of testing and validation.

Testing, and the ability to so accurately and in large numbers across a population, is a key element of any effort to counter the spread of coronavirus, and to evaluate the efficacy of the measures put in place to do so. Currently, the U.S. is far behind other countries in terms of its testing efforts, for instance, with the White House confirming that only under 60,000 tests had been conducted as of yesterday based on available data.

Testing is also focused on only the most severe and obvious cases, which means that large swaths of potentially asymptomatic carries who feel just fine are going untested. That has a huge impact on any effort to accurately track the transmission of COVID-19, and, as a result, of tracking the impact of measures like isolation, social distancing, and shelter-in-place tactics.

SpaceX has successfully launched and deployed its sixth batch of 60 Starlink satellites, further growing its constellation for the internet broadband system it plans to launch for customers starting later this year in the U.S. and Canada. This brings SpaceX’s total Starlink constellation size to 360 spacecraft, extending the company’s lead as the world’s largest private satellite operator.

The launch this morning used a Falcon 9 first stage booster that flew for its fifth time, marking a record for the company when it comes to re-use of this component of its launch system. The launch also included yet another recovery attempt for the booster, but unfortunately the first stage did not met the landing as planned.

That’s not the only way this mission furthered SpaceX’s reusable rocketry goals: The fairing, or protective covering that encloses the satellite cargo, has also flown previously – on a SpaceX Starlink launch from last May. SpaceX will also attempt to recover this fairing once it falls away from the cargo and returns to Earth, with an intent to catch both halves using two ships positioned at sea and equipped with nets to gently catch the fairing as it parachutes back to the surface. That recovery attempt will take place around 45 minutes after launch, and we’ll update this post with its results.

SpaceX currently is managing to refurbish its Falcon 9 boosters in roughly eight weeks, and will continue to look to improve that, and eventually achieve even more rapid reusability with its Starship spacecraft, a successor to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy being developed right now by the company in Boca Chica, Texas.

This is already SpaceX’s sixth mission of 2020, and its fourth Starlink launch of the year. Expect more to follow quickly as it ramps towards launch of service, beginning with North America in 2020 and parts of the rest of the world next year.

Apple has announced new iPad Pro models in a press release. In addition to better specifications, Apple is also releasing a new Magic Keyboard with backlit keys, a trackpad and a hinge that allows you to move the iPad freely.

The iPad Pro looks more or less like the existing iPad Pro. You can choose between an 11-inch display and a 12.9-inch display. It features an eight-core A12Z system on a chip — the previous version came with an A12X Bionic system on a chip.

The new iPad Pro features a 10MP ultra-wide camera sensor as well as a LiDAR sensor on the back of the device — LiDAR sensors can be useful for augmented-reality apps for instance. There’s a standard 12MP camera sensor as well. The microphones have been improved and Apple promises “studio-quality” sound.

Wi-Fi and LTE should be slightly faster, like on the iPhone 11 Pro. On the display front, the iPad Pro supports a refresh rate of 120 Hz and True Tone like previous models as well as a wide range of colors thanks to P3 support.

Apple also says that the thermal architecture has been improved, which should let you run demanding apps at peak performance for a longer time.

But let’s talk about the trackpad. 9to5mac previously noticed references to full mouse cursor support in iOS 14. It turns out that Apple will release that feature before iOS 14 this fall.

By default, Apple shows a rounded cursor. But the cursors changes depending on what you’re hovering over. If you’re moving a text cursor for instance, it becomes a vertical bar. If you’re resizing a text zone in a Pages document, it becomes two arrows. In other words, it works pretty much like a cursor on a desktop computer.

The new trackpad will support gestures that let you switch between apps, open the app switcher, activate the Dock or Control Center.

Third-party apps already support the trackpad without any change. But developers can release updates to improve support thanks to new APIs.

The keyboard of the Magic Keyboard now looks more like a traditional keyboard with separate keys. There’s a USB-C port, which recharges both the keyboard and the iPad attached to it. This way, you can recharge your device and plug another accessory to the iPad Pro itself.

The new keyboard accessory will be available in May and will cost $299 or $349 depending on the size of your iPad Pro. Yep, that’s an expensive keyboard.

The iPad Pro will be available next week — orders start today. There are two finishes — silver and space gray. The 11-inch iPad Pro with 256GB of storage costs $799. The 12.9-inch model with 256GB of storage costs $999. You can add cellular support for an additional $150. There are also more expensive options with more storage (512GB and 1TB).

Apple today announced the Mac Mini will ship with more standard storage space. Starting at $799, the base model Mac Mini now ships with a 256GB SSD, up from 128GB previously. The CPU, GPU and system memory remains the same from the previous model.

This refresh is a slight but welcomed bump to Apple’s least expensive Mac. With the updated specs, the Mac Mini offers a bit more bang for the buck but the specs still lags sorely behind similarly priced pre-packaged Windows PCs.

The $799 Mac Mini runs an Intel Core i3 CPU with a clock-speed of 3.6Ghz. It also sports an Intel HD Graphics 630 GPU and 8 GB of RAM. The $1,099 package ups the specs to a 3.0GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and a 512GB SSD hard drive.

Both of the new models ship on March 20. Apple Store pickup is currently unavailable as Apple closed all its stores outside of mainland China in response to the coronavirus.

Apple just offered up a new version of the the MacBook Air with some souped up internals, including a 10th-generation Intel processor and double the storage. Honestly, the big news here for many is probably the updated keyboard, doing away with a couple of generations of misfires on that front.

Starting at $999 (or $899 for education users), the latest version of Apple’s perennial favorite thin and light promises up to double the performance, from Apple’s numbers, courtesy of the new silicon, configurable to up to a 1.2GHz quad-core Core i7 with Turbo boost up to 3.8GHz.

That’s bolstered by Intel Iris Plus Graphics, which the company says are up to 80 percent faster than their predecessor. The systems start at 256GB of storage — double the previous model. That’s configurable to up to a 2TB SSD.

Perhaps the update, however, is that the the Air is getting the same Magic Keyboard mechanism that was introduced with the 16-inch MacBook Pro last year. The new scissor mechanisms offer more travel than earlier, maligned MacBook keyboard and should hold up much better. Per the released the system is made from 100% recycled aluminum and is available in gold (pictured), silver and space gray. It sports a 13-inch Retina display and can support an external 6K monitor, making it the first Air to do so.

Last year Lynk — then called Ubiquitilink — showed that from now on, every phone can be a satellite phone. But they’ve spent the last year honing the product and have just demonstrated the real thing: Sending a plain old text message from a “cell tower in space” to a normal phone on the surface.

Of course there are “real” satellite phones, but these expensive, complex devices establish a dedicated link using frequencies not used by normal mobiles — and of course, they’re quite expensive and bulky. The whole idea of Lynk is to provide similarly globe-spanning connectivity without anyone having to buy a dish, an accessory, or even a new phone.

It works, as founder and CEO Charles Miller explained to me last year, very much the way normal cell signals work. It turns out that when your radio beam goes straight up instead of passing through buildings and the landscape, it can easily reach low Earth orbit. The problem comes with the physics involved in synchronizing the signals — doppler shift and other factors.

That’s the problem Lynk set out to solve, and has lofted three satellites to test. A fourth is on the way, but the third was perfectly capable of their first public demonstration of what could eventually be a universally accessible data service.

“This is the first time we actually sent a message from space to a standard, unmodified phone,” Miller said. “We did it in the most visible way that people can understand, an emergency alert.”

You can watch the video of the text being received below. Bear in mind these guys are sitting out in the Falklands, a location where cell coverage is essentially nil but which happens to be an ideal location for receiving a satellite signal. They get pretty excited.

What’s happening is the satellite is passing overhead, establishing a 2G cell signal with the phone, and transmitting the text message with the correct encoding to create an alert. With a relatively small network of such satellites, one could alert the entire world in just a few minutes, if one had something important enough to say.

Importantly, however, the connection is two-way. It’s not demonstrated above, but your phone would be able to send a text via the same signal, when no other signal is available. That would be great for disasters, remote areas, and other outlier situations.

“There’s some interesting kinks to making it work,” Miller said. “We already knew we could do it — physics and engineering don’t lie if you know what you’re doing. We’ve had it working in the lab for a while, but getting it to work in reality, flying real hardware that connects to real hardware on Earth, is harder. People are skeptical, so we just had to prove it.”

Lynk’s device aboard the ISS.

The fourth satellite, with which Lynk plans to demonstrate more capabilities to its telecom partners (which Miller was very careful not to mention by name), is already up on the ISS and will be put into its own orbit soon. Further launches are planned for the fall.

“We’ve just launched satellite after satellite because that’s the best way to learn,” said Miller. “You’d never learn this stuff in books or computer analyses or simulations. You’re almost always going to have hiccups.”

The plan, though subject to the usual space-based business contingencies, is to announce partners around the world this year and perhaps even begin limited service. There’s a ton of paperwork, as you might imagine, because Lynk essentially has to get regulatory approval in every country that it plans to offer service in — which is to say, pretty much all of them.

Commercial partnerships will be present, of course, but Miller was quick with assurances that this would not hamper the system’s use for emergencies. 911 texts, alerts, and other applications are cut out of the exclusivity contracts.

Miller is highly optimistic about the market potential here. 5G, he pointed out, is costing billions but consumers couldn’t care less. “Really it’s just incremental, slightly faster speeds for people who already have connectivity, going from 4G to 5G. People say they want it, but they aren’t willing to pay for it. Telecoms are starting to realize that,” he said. “Going from zero G to 4G, that’s not incremental. For a person with no connectivity, some connectivity can be life changing.”

Japanese-made flu drug favipiravir (also known as Avigan) has been shown to be effective in both reducing the duration of the COVID-19 virus in patients, and to have improved the lung conditions of those who received treatment with the drug, based on results of clinical trials conducted with affected patients in both Wuhan and Shenzhen by Chinese medical authorities.

The trials involved 340 patients in total, and since they drug has already been developed and approved for use in treating flu, it has a “high degree of safety,” according to China science and technology ministry official Zhang Xinmin, who spoke to reporters on Wednesday according to The Guardian. The tests showed a reduction in the period during which patients tested positive for the new coronavirus from 11 days down to just four, and showed improvements in the lung condition of around 91 percent of patients treated with favipiravir, compared to just 62 percent for those without among the trial participants.

The Chinese studies are not the only attempt to test the efficacy of the drug in COVID-19 treatment – Japanese doctors are bonding their own studies. A Japanese health ministry source told Japanese newspaper the Manichi Shimbun that the drug so far has been given to around 70 to 80 people, but that early results suggest it isn’t effective in treating those with more severe symptoms where the virus has already multiplied to a much greater extend.

Still, a treatment that is effective in reducing the duration of the presence of the virus even in milder cases, and in lessening the impacts in moderate symptomatic patients, would be a huge benefit to the ongoing fight against the coronavirus. Any approvals for use of favipiravir would of course require further clinical testing, followed by approval of widespread use by each country’s relevant medical treatment regulating body.

Other drug treatments have been tested for COVID-19 treatment, and are in the process of development, but no antiviral has yet been approved or created specifically for dealing with the new coronavirus. Other drugs that have shown early promising signs include remadesivir, a compound developed by Gilead Sciences that has shown some promise as a general antiviral.

Grappling with the spread of misinformation on the platform, WhatsApp today announced two initiatives to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Facebook -owned instant messaging service announced WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub — for which it has partnered with the WHO, UNICEF, and UNDP — to offer simple, actionable guidance, general tips and resources for users around the world to be better informed about the disease and hence reduce the spread of rumors.

WhatsApp said it is working with the WHO and UNICEF to provide messaging hotlines for people around the world to use directly. These hotlines will provide information and will be listed on the WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub.

The messaging firm said it is also donating $1 million to the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). The $1 million grant will help in fact-checking for the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, which spans more than 100 local organizations in at least 45 countries.

The grant will support training to use the advanced features within WhatsApp Business, including the WhatsApp Business API. Expanding the presence of these IFCN certified fact-checking organizations will help ensure local communities are aware and responding to potential harmful rumors.

The announcement today comes days after it became apparent that WhatsApp, which is used by more than 2 billion users, is again grappling with spread of misinformation worldwide.

“We are also pleased to be able to partner with the Poynter Institute to help grow the amount of fact-checking organizations on WhatsApp and to support their life saving work to debunk rumors. We will also continue to work directly with health ministries around the world for them to provide updates right within WhatsApp,” said Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp, in a statement.

In a statement, Baybars Orsek, Director of IFCN, said, “the timely donation from WhatsApp will help the fact-checks published by the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance to reach wider audiences and, in consequence, help people sort facts from fiction during this avalanche of information that WHO called an ‘infodemic’. The International Fact-Checking Network also looks forward to discovering ways to understand the spread of health related hoaxes on WhatsApp in different formats and to make tools available for fact-checkers to detect and debunk misinformation on the messaging app.”