Intel's new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors promise longer battery life for thin and light notebooks

Intel's stepped up chip production on lower powered processors that can offer longer battery life. Under fire from ARM processors slowly creeping up to thin laptops and 2-in-1's, Intel's new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors "raise the bar for connectivity, performance, entertainment, and productivity." The U-series chips introduce support for integrated Gigabit Wi-Fi for up to 12-times faster connectivity speeds, support for USB 3.1 Gen 2 transfer speeds, and built-in support for voice services like Alexa and Cortana.

Slim and light laptops and 2-in-1's running these processors can last up to 16 hours with power optimized systems running up to 19 hours. These chips will ship in the fall and could appear on new laptops and tablets released during that period.

Apple celebrates seven years with Tim Cook as CEO

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It's been seven years since Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs passed on the reins to Tim Cook. It was a bittersweet passing of the torch as Jobs was in advanced stages of Cancer and then-COO Cook, who had already served as pinch hitter for Jobs in years past, was reluctant to replace his friend and mentor.

Since then, Cook has represented Apple and steered the company to its greatest heights culminating in the recent trillion dollar valuation, a first for a technology company. Cook has also been a positive force for good, opening up Apple to charity and causes which he believes in.

Click to read more ...

Apple Music tests out Android Auto integration

For the first time ever, Apple Music is integrating with Android’s car-based platform. Beta version 2.6.0 of the app (which you can find on Android Police) brings Apple Music integration into Android Auto. You have to make sure you have the latest version of Android Auto running, too. Once you have both, Apple Music will now become a top option for streaming in your car. You can stream radio or specific songs. We welcome this integration, especially since it brings options that you might not have access to at the moment. Right now, Apple Music doesn’t work with other Google products, so you still can’t integrate it with Google Home and Chromecast.

Source: The Verge

Adobe XD opens up for collaboration with third party developers

Today, Adobe announced that Adobe XD is opening its platform to enable users to customize their tools with an ecosystem of community and partner-built plugins. Adobe XD now tightly integrates with designers’ existing workflows via other popular collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams (Adobe’s preferred collaboration service), Slack and Jira Software Cloud, making it easy for designers to collaborate with stakeholders across their organizations.

The open platform will be made publicly available later this year, but Adobe is already working with early developer partners to build plugins for XD, including Microsoft, Trello, UserTesting, Airtable, Dribbble, Silicon Publishing, Slope, inMotionNow, Astute Graphics, Anima and Google Cloud, along with its own Behance and Stock services.