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.

Bose crashes smart speaker and soundbar party with new products

Anyone would be foolish to count out Bose in the smart speaker and soundbar market. The company who spearheaded hi-fi consumer audio for decades simply waited for the dust to settle and is now launching its own Alexa-powered smart speaker as well as a smart soundbar.

Newly released from Bose are the Home Speaker 500, Soundbar 500 and Soundbar 700 which all have Amazon Alexa built-in and will supposedly allow for Google Home and whatever bits of Siri and AirPlay 2 Apple is willing to share with third-party manufacturers.

Coming in OCtober, Bose's Home Speaker 500 will cost US $399.95, while the soundbars begin at $549.95.

Source: Engadget

A deeper look at the Samsung Galaxy Note9 DeX running on the HP Elite X3 Lap dock

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Here's a more extensive walkthrough of how the Samsung Galaxy Note 9's built-in DeX functionality works with an HP Elite X3 Lap Dock. This Lap Dock was designed for a Windows Phone using Continuum to enable certain apps and services to extend to the lap dock screen, keyboard and trackpad. It works quite well for native Google apps but third party applications like Netflix and Instagram do not scale the whole size of the screen.

The HP Elite Lap Dock also doesn't seem to work with other USB Type-C devices (it didn't work with a MediaTek processor powered Planet Computers Gemini or a Microsoft Surface Go). I no longer have my Note9 review unit so I cannot test functionality on the Lap Dock any further, but it was interesting to see how much of it did work.

Tesla wins case against Ontario government for customer's EV rebates

Looks like Tesal was right to challenge the Ontario government's reneged reabates for buyers of Tesla electric cars while it allowed competing companies to continue offering green rebates.

"We're pleased with the Court's decision to strike down the [Ontario government's] transition plan as unfair and unlawful," a Tesla representative said in a statement Monday night. The Ontario government is reviewing the ruling.

This all happened a a result of Ontario Premier Doug Ford's move to scrap the province's Electric and Hydrogen Vehicle Incentive Program (EHVIP) launched by the previous Liberal government. The program offered buyers rebates of up to $14,000 on qualifying vehicles.

Click to read more ...