IT Digest: Apple WWDC 2013, iOS7, New Generation of Game Consoles, PRISM Project and Much More!

What is the freshest news from the world of informational technologies? Find out in our weekly digest from the 14^th of June.

Top Seven News:

Apple WWDC 2013

New announcements from Apple gave finally come. All the latest innovations announced by Apple + Apple reveals iOS 7, New Mac Pro, OS Mavericks, MacBook Air, Airport Extreme, and iTunes Radio. In addition, Apple announced iWork for iCloud to compete with Google Docs and Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks from Apple.

iOS7

iOS7 should be mentioned separately. iOS 7 new design from Apple and Jony Ive iOS 7 redesigns. What we want to see in iOS 7 + iOS 7 and the transition to flat. Individual thoughts: iOS 7 went too far in the other direction, New Apple look doesn’t fully embrace flat design. As a bonus: iOS Human Interface guidelines.

New generation of game consoles

Microsoft and Sony have finally showed their new products at E3 exhibition held in Los Angeles recently. A few details: Sony finally unveiled PlayStation 4 console for $399 while Microsoft showed controller features of the updated XboxOne. Just to compare: Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4. Know more about PlayStation 4 & XBox One relevant games.

PRISM Project

The Earth is under the hood: Mozilla launches massive campaign on digital surveillance while ordinary users demand government action to subdue Internet surveillance. Some more details: “Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides…” presentation and Troll the NSA special project. Bonus: a funny webpage for those who are tired of remembering passwords of their accounts (PRISM Internet Backup Service).

CSS3 animations

Liven up your website with splashes of modern CSS3 animations. For inspiration you can use the samples from here for blocks and from here for the buttons, and from here for a list of products.

Request Quest

Do you know about the specifics of the browser performance in the area of the FE development? Try to pass this simple and funny test is funny, and maybe you will draw something new there.

Top 5 future technologies

Science fiction writers and futurists like to predict the future. Despite most of their predictions are just fairy tales, there are a number of promising technologies which are currently under development and can become rather popular in the future.

News:

1. Mobile UI ‘Obsidian’ from Intel for Tizen — Intel is currently working on its own mobile user interface codenamed ‘Obsidian’. The UI is planned to be brought to the mobile OS Tizen and possibly to Android soon. Screenshots and some video of Intel’s Obsidian project from reliable sources demonstrate a set of the unique UI touches. The screenshots show that the UI is still in its early stages of development, but seems to have a replicated design of Android and Windows Phone with its closely-packed icons.
2. Google to buy Israeli start-up Waze for $1.3 billion — Google is rumored to finalize its deal in purchasing the Israeli company Waze for $1.3 billion. Created in 2008 with 36+ million users all around the globe, the Waze application is a free social GPS service, which allows drivers to know information about traffic jams, police speed traps, and other location-specific alerts. One of the contract terms from Waze is to remain its developing center in Israel for the next three years.
3. Civil liberties groups and Internet companies demand to stop NSA spying — on Tuesday a broad coalition of 86 organizations and Internet companies including the Defending Dissent Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, Mozilla, and many others sent a letter to Congress demanding careful investigation and reform because of the recent rumors related to unchecked global surveillance. The letter was accompanied by the launch of stopwatching.us, a global petition demanding an inquiry into the scope and scale of spying activities.
4. Facebook unveils hashtags — according to Facebook the company announced the launching of an ability to follow conversations via hashtags. The hashtag that looks like the # symbol and was first popularized on Twitter, can be included by users in their posts in order to follow specific topics of conversation within a social network’s changing streams of user comments.
5. Google announce Changes in rankings of smartphone search results — according to Tuesday’s post on Google’s webmaster central blog, the search giant is ready to introduce algorithm changes that will result in higher rankings for websites that follow Google’s Mobile SEO recommendations, and lower rankings for those websites that do not comply with these guidelines.
6. Previous versions of Twitter apps stop working due to the retirement of API v.1 — on Wednesday some Twitter users found out that the apps they’ve used before became completely unavailable.  According to Twitter officials it is related to the fact that the company started retiring their old API v.1 and switching to the new API v.1.1. The new API puts some limitations on 3rd-party clients, so now it depends on whether or not the developer of your favorite application updated for this change to make it available for you.
7. Foursquare debuts time machine — users can now re-live all their old Foursquare check-ins with a new feature codenamed Time Machine. Launched on Thursday, the Time Machine innovative tool allows users to visualize all their past check-ins over the years, and discover new favorite places. When visiting the website and logging in, the user is taken back in time exactly to their very first check in. From there, the user obtains an ability to click through all the check-ins one by one, or press play to view a time-lapse sequence of the places they were before.

Apple WWDC 2013:

1. Apple reveals iOS 7, New Mac Pro, OS Mavericks, MacBook Air, Airport Extreme, and iTunes Radio — on Monday at the WWDC keynote event Apple unveiled a the most significant updates of the company’s hardware and software including iOS 7′s major features, MacBook Air with latest Intel CPU, the whole new, completely redesigned Mac Pro, a new OS X codenamed Mavericks and much more….
2. Apple announced iWork for iCloud to compete with Google Docs — at WWDC keynote event, Apple announced iWork for iCloud, expected to be released in Q3-Q4 2013. The application initially available just for developers includes both Mac and iOS versions of the Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps. The new web versions of the apps are designed to run right in the browser via iCloud.com to be ready to compete directly with Google Docs and other suite of web apps from Google.
3. iOS 7 new design from Apple — iOS 7 includes a new UI with new colors, icons and transparent layers.It is worth to note that the new clean and flat design is the result of a huge power struggle between two chief designers from Apple, namely Ive and Forstall, who was behind development of Apple’s iconic software look in 2012 + the poll results on the new look for iOS 7.
4. All the latest innovations announced by Apple — the post includes the detailed description of a wide variety of new products and software updates including iOS7 introduced as the most revolutionary update since 2007 when iPhone was first unveiled. In addition, the annual conference in San Francisco for Apple developers revealed a new OS for Mac PC called OSX Mavericks and a Pandora-like internet radio service iTunes Radio.
5. Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks from Apple — the latest version of Mac OS X was announced at WWDC 2013 on Monday, named OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Codenamed 10.9 Mavericks brings a host of new features and apps to Macbook laptops and iMac desktop PCs. The most interesting new feature is promised to be the support for multiple displays so long-awaited by Mac users. Moreover, the support for full screen applications was also added, so according to Apple the users with an HDTV or Apple TV will be able to use that as a second screen soon.

Next-Generation Consoles:

1. Sony finally unveiled PlayStation 4 console for $399 — Sony unveiled its new console on June 10, just 24 hours before E3 conference started (June 11-13). A few tiny details on the console’s specs, games and controller were already unveiled before, but the real console was not shown until the very last moment. Although no specific release date was mentioned yet, the company promised to launch the console into mass production soon.
2. Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4 — at E3 video game conference on Monday in Los Angeles, both Microsoft and Sony had opportunities to demonstrate the abilities of their next-generation consoles – the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, respectively. And the results did not keep users wait long. It seems that many gamers have already chosen its winner, and it is certainly the PlayStation 4 + Playstation 4 owns Xbox One video.
3. Xbox One controller features — Microsoft released a detailed list of Xbox One controller features, including impulse triggers, higher quality headset audio, a new d-pad, and much more. According to Microsoft, the company made 20 research studies all around the globe involving more than 500 users to decide what improvements to make over the Xbox 360 controller. The final design introduces over 40 technological advancements and was finally approved just after 200 prototype versions were dismissed.
4. Microsoft details Xbox One used games, necessity to be always online, and privacy policies — after few weeks, Microsoft has finally detailed how exactly the Xbox One console handles used games, its always-online mandatory feature, and the user’s privacy.  The first fact is that used games are available on the console but with a number of restrictions. According to Microsoft, the company is not going to charge users fees for playing used games, but publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.
5. PlayStation 4 & XBox One games — the post includes all the games announced for PlayStation 4 and XBox One. The data are received from both Microsoft and Sony at E3 2013 and are not officially confirmed yet.

Other Design News:

1. Mobile Android and iOS app icons for design inspiration.
2. Misconceptions of responsive design.
3. The principles of typography: back to basics.
4. Typography inspiration.
5. Principles of flat design.
6. Flowing isocurve in custom geometry.
7. How to make a split-flap text display in Photoshop.
8. Create a Mosaic, BBC inspired.
9. 10 best Photoshop tutorials of May 2013.
10. A responsive micro-wireframe template in PSD format for UI and UX designers.
11. Curated videos for web designers.
12. Google Visual Assets Guidelines – Part 1.
13. New and really clever logo designs.
14. Flat design and fonts.

Browsers:

1. Safari became official at Apple WWDC 2013 — together with its OS X Maverick in WWDC 2013 Apple introduced an updated Safari 7 that now includes design tweaks, iCloud Keychain, memory, social and general performance improvements. The Safari 7 is expected to be integrated with the OS X Mavericks and the browser is known to have an improved reader list. Safari 7 needs less CPU power and memory in comparison both to its earlier versions and the current versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
2. Google announced the end for Chrome Frame support — according to an engineer Robert Shield, being unveiled in 2009 Chrome Frame promised to become a modern engine to replace old and slow versions of IE. The browser allowed programmers to bring better experience to more users, even those who did not have an ability to move to a more capable browser. At the current moment when the most people use modern browsers, Google decided to finish support of Chrome Frame as an out-lived one. Google refers to all developers with apps that steer users to Chrome Frame to upgrade to a modern browser.
3. Chrome now validates JSON — an innovative feature in Chrome to validate your JSON and to detect errors in a modal if such exists. The same can be done with the online tool JSON Lint, but the new feature seems to be rather effective and useful.
4. The impact of web-browsers on the system power consumption — Microsoft unveiled a study of system power consumption with the use of the popular Windows 8-based web-browsers. The estimation was made by measuring the energy consumption when running model scenarios with the popular web-resources, such as YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Amazone, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, etc. on the laptop and the desktop PC.

Amazing Websites’ Design:

1. riotindustries.com — striking CSS3 2D and 3D effects with custom navigation.
2. apple.com/mac-pro — a promotion page from Apple.
3. mahedineyahia.fr — parallax effect to achieve pseudo-video effects.
4. adamrudzki.com — a portfolio website with full-screen sliding, keyboard navigation and a bunch of animations.
5. dieselblackgold.com — a website with the entertaining implementation of the main menu.
6. masswerk.at/404 — space invaders on page 404.

Design It:

iOS7:

1. Designed by Apple in California.
2. Jony Ive iOS 7 redesigns.
3. What we want to see in iOS 7.
4. Will Jony Ive let a flat design for iOS 7 fall flat?
5. iOS 7 and the transition to flat.
6. iOS 7 went too far in the other direction.
7. Falling Flat by Jeff Escalante.
8. New Apple look doesn’t fully embrace flat design.
9. Jony Ive put Apple’s marketing team in charge of iOS 7 icon design.
10. iOS Human Interface guidelines.

A Bunch of Design Freebies:

1. iOS 7 GUI psd.
2. 25 appealing tags PSD designs.
3. Vector: 20 free infographic vector element kits.
4. Brushes: 25 fractal brushes for Photoshop.
5. Patterns: free Photoshop patterns for download.
6. Icons: huge collection of flat icons, free flat icon set.
7. Fonts: 25 beautiful free headline fonts, Attentica 4F, Tenso – an economic running sans serif, new Cyrillic fonts.

Services:

1. Clipping Magic — remove image backgrounds.
2. New Dropbox build touts screenshot auto saves and ‘Move to Dropbox’ feature.
3. Watch video lessons & take time-synced notes side by side using VideoNot.es.
4. Meet dpi.lv — more than you probably wanted to know about screen DPI.

Demo:

1. Motion blur when scrolling.
2. Cube Slam – a Real-time WebRTC Chrome game.
3. Google launches Cube Slam to Show off the power Of WebRTC and WebGL.

Development:

1. Speed up your mobile website.
2. The “When Can I Use” web widget.
3. Irregular shap rollovers with Canvas and PNG.
4. Google Chrome experiment – Racer.
5. Fries – to create sexy Android-like UI using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
6. Front-end ops.
7. Secrets of the browser developer tools.
8. How to design responsively.
9. Secrets of the browser developer tools.
10. Irregular shape rollovers with Canvas and PNG.
11. The “When Can I Use” web widget.
12. Adaptive ≠ Responsive.
13. The mobile-first web.
14. Tracing paint operations in Chrome Canary.
15. How to make web audio stylophone.
16. picnicc – custom builds made easy.
17. How does the new Mac Pro site work?
18. Web Developer Checklist – get the Chrome extension.
19. Gone in 60 frames per second: a Pinterest paint performance case study.
20. Better performance with requestAnimationFrame.

CSS:

1. How to enable support for Sass in Chrome.
2. Magic CSS3 animations.
3. Creative Button styles.
4. Pizza Time Hovers.
5. CIKONSS 1.0 – pure CSS Responsive Icons – IE friendly.
6. IE 10 specific styles.
7. CSS box-sizing for noobies.
8. Using CSS attr and content for Tooltips.
9. How to convert CSS to Sass & SCSS.
10. CSS stacking with display:table.
11. Auticons – an icon font and CSS set that harnesses the awesome power of attribute selectors.
12. IE 10 specific styles.
13. Fuck yeah Hovers !!
14. Understanding 3D transforms.
15. 7 CSS snippets to borrow from HTML5 boilerplate.

JavaScripts:

1. TrigenSoftware / wakeloader — a source loader for JavaScript.
2. Codeblock.js – editable, runnable javascript code blocks.
3. Hitch — a small JavaScript prollyfill engine which provides an extension model for CSS and HTML.
4. Swiper — a mobile touch slider & framework with hardware accelerated transitions.
5. The JavaScript behind touch-friendly sliders.
6. CSS Flexible Box Layout gets Best New Web Technology 2013 NetAward!
7. hopscotch — a framework to make it easy for developers to add product tours to their pages.
8. GitHub-Notifier — browser extension that displays your GitHub notifications unread count. Available on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari.
9. AngularJS-Learning — a bunch of links to blog posts, articles, videos, etc for learning AngularJS.
10. AngularJS 1.2 and beyond (video).
11. Built-in memory management for ngRepeat.
12. Angular reader — a simple Atom feed reader app that shows off some new features in AngularJS.
13. Changeable vector graphics with SVG and AngularJS.
14. AngularJS — Part 8: Iterators and data.
15. Easystar.js — asynchronous pathfinding API for HTML5 games.
16. The use of requestAnimationFrame.

Fun & Entertainment:

1. Google Glass gets dissected and disassembled.
2. Baidu Eye: China’s Answer to Google Glass.
3. Top 5 future technologies.
4. Google Earth brings improved imaging to ocean viewing.
5. RoboRoach surgery instructions.
6. What’ll make the iWatch tick.
7. How NASA is using WordPress to promote Open Source technologies.
8. Corning’s Gorilla Glass could make cars lighter and more fuel efficient.

PRISM Project:

1. Mozilla launches massive campaign on digital surveillance.
2. People demand government action to subdue Internet surveillance.
3. A funny webpage for those who are tired of remembering passwords of their accounts (PRISM Internet Backup Service).
4. “Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides…” presentation.
5. Troll the NSA special project.