Microsoft finally updates Notepad

After years of leaving its Notepad app on its own, Microsoft is giving the app a new lease on life. Some of the new features coming to Notepad include the ability to hold down the control key to zoom into text or use your mouse wheel to do that as well as wrap around find and replace. The app will also support extended line endings for both Unix/Linux and Macintosh. Its status bar will now be enabled by default in Notepad. You will also see display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled. Notepad is also getting Ctrl + Backspace support so you can delete a previous word in Notepad. You can even now look for words on Bing by right clicking on the word you want to look up. Performance improvements are also coming to large files. This update is coming later this year in an update codenamed Redstone 5.

Source: The Verge

Ontario government shuts down EV and hydrogen vehicle incentive programs

Vehicles purchased on or before July 11 are eligible and still have 60 days to apply.

Ontario's new conservative government has shut down all incentives for electric vehicle charging stations according to the Ministry of Transportation. The timing of this comes just as the sales of EVs and hybrids are at an upswing with more models. The arrival of the more affordable Tesla Model 3 has generated a lot of sales but a lot of those buyers were counting on the provincial incentives to help defer the costs of their vehicles. This is a step back towards the adoption of EVs in Canada.

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Adobe and Territory Studios reimagine iconic ‘Terminator’ interface for 2018

Adobe was looking for a way to showcase what Adobe XD could do, which is the company’s free UX/UI prototyping software, and an idea the company focused on was redesigning a few on-screen interfaces of Terminator 2. Adobe partnered with Territory Studios to bring this to life. The company is known for its design work for films like The Martian, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War, to name a few. The focus of the project was on the first-person heads-up display (HUD) used by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and how it could be redesigned for this age.

Adobe licensed two specific frames to redesign, both featuring the red-tinted point of view the infamous killer robot. The redesigned frames feature tons of extra details. As Fast Company describes it, it’s like the Terminator got an HD upgrade. “This project definitely started to open up all kinds of new possibilities for XD,” said Talin Wadsworth, creative director and a founding team member of Adobe XD. “I started thinking about features that were really tailored to the work that Territory is doing—different features, different workflows, and maybe in the future more augmented reality prototyping, or virtual reality prototyping. It’s really shifted my perspective and what my hopes and dreams are for what XD can be in the future.” You can watch above the process of how this whole project came about.

Microsoft and artist Mel Chin partner to bring Mixed Reality into art

What will New York’s Time Square look like if climate change remains unchecked? Artist Mel Chin, together with Microsoft, Time Square Arts, No Longer Empty, and Queens Museum, sought to answer this question with Mixed Reality experience Unmoored and Wake. Unmoored shows a submerged Times Square in a future where the ice caps have melted and the oceans continue to rise. You can see this submerged area through a Mixed Reality experience using Microsoft HoloLens or via augmented reality through their mobile phones. Meanwhile, Wake is a sixty-foot animatronic installation you can interact with that “evokes the hull of a 19^th century shipwreck crossed with skeletal remains of a marine mammal.”

Chin’s works will be on display at the Broadway Plaza between 46^th Street and 47^th Street as part of the multi-location Mel Chin: All Over the Place exhibition. You can experience and explore Unmoored using the Microsoft HoloLens until July 13^th or use mobile devices until the exhibit’s end on September 5^th.