Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/15 - Palm is Back! Sort of...

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

The future of Photoshop is here today, Palm is back to bring us a tiny phone, Apple makes another acquisition, and why we’re doomed to a future of genetic surveillance. Links: FINALLY: REAL PHOTOSHOP ON THE IPAD (The Verge) Adobe launches new AR and drawing tools (TechCrunch) Adobe launches Premiere Rush, a cross-platform video editor (Venture Beat) Apple acquires music analytics startup Asaii (Axios) THE NEW PALM IS A TINY PHONE TO KEEP YOU AWAY FROM YOUR PHONE (The Verge) GENOME HACKERS SHOW NO ONE’S DNA IS ANONYMOUS ANYMORE (Wired) Blockchain isn't about democracy and decentralisation – it's about greed (The Guardian) Tweetstorm about Google+ from @morganknutson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the tech meme right home from Monday, October 15th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the future of Photoshop is here. Palm is back to bring us a tiny phone. Apple makes another acquisition and why we're probably doomed to a future of genetic surveillance. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, Adobe held its annual Adobe Max conference, showing off prototypes of new apps and releasing updates to its existing.

apps. So we're going to dive in now to three of the biggest key announcements. First up, Real Photoshop on the iPad. Writing for The Verge, Dami Lee had a week-long preview using Real Honest to Goodness Photoshop CC running natively on an iPad. Under the hood, it's the same code base as the desktop app ported to run on the arm architecture and with an overhaul of the user interface to make it touch-centric. Not every feature, of desktop Photoshop is available, but it's a solid starting point and cross-platform file compatibility, including edit history, is built in so you can round-trip files from iPad to desktop and back without losing anything. A big part of the news here is Adobe's reinvention of the

PSD file for the modern era. The new Photoshop document format is called Cloud PSD, and quoting the article here, will turn using Photoshop into something much more like Google Docs, end quote. While cloud PSD is still something of a mystery, it wasn't available to test yet, it promises to make seamless round trips between devices the norm and further push users to store their projects in Adobe's Creative Cloud. While longtime Adobe users, like Chris Higgins, might groan, seeing this as similar to Adobe's move last year pushing Lightroom users to move their giant photo libraries into the cloud, Adobe says this time it's different, and they're probably right. Lightroom, which is now available in both cloud-centric and classic local storage versions, is all about managing big groups of photos.

On the other hand, Photoshop is much more about handling individual files, so there shouldn't be a need to upload, say, 10 terabytes of raw photos to the cloud before you get started on your latest Photoshop creation. And if the cloud PSD format allows you to keep the same file open on multiple devices, this could open up opportunities for users who have both a desktop and a tablet. and use them both. Photoshop CC for iPad will be available sometime in 2019.

It will be bundled into existing subscription pricing for Adobe Creative Cloud members. Adobe did not announce whether there would be a way to get a one-time purchase or iPad-only subscription, though. If you want to deep dive into this topic, check out today's Vergecast, which features 40 Minutes with Scott Belski,

Adobe's chief product officer, all about bringing Photoshop to the iPad. The second tidbit of Adobe Max News comes today, courtesy of Frederick Lardinwa at TechCrunch. He shows off a pair of new tools that are in private beta as of right now, Project Arrow, which is a tool for building augmented reality experiences, and Project Gemini for painting and drawing on the iPad. For now, Project Arrow is in private beta, but we got a tantalizing preview of how it integrates with Adobe Dimension,

which is Adobe's 3D mock-up tool, and of course Photoshop, which can be used for creating and importing media into a Project Arrow AR experience. Adobe positions Arrow as a way for designers to create AR experiences without having to learn tools like the Unity Game Engine. It also uses the new USBZ file format

for augmented reality that Apple introduced in June, and yes, Arrow runs on the iPad. And Project Gemini is yet another drawing app for the iPad. It builds on the painting engine from Photoshop, which obviously is now ported to the iPad, and tosses in a handful of other tech from other drawing tools in the Adobe Arsenal, including Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw. It includes the much-loved time-lapse recording feature from Sketch, and, take note, digital artists, includes Kyle Webster's dynamic brushes, allowing for painterly control in the digital realm. This app is yet another good reason to woo comics artists

and illustrators to the iPad for professional work. Of course, Project Gemini is also still in private beta. Adobe has a blog post asking interested illustrators to apply to join the beta. But there is no word yet on a wider release date. Finally, the third announcement from Adobe Max is the most predictable, but also by far the biggest deal for video editors. Adobe is bringing Premier Rush out of beta today, releasing the first real versions to Windows, MacOS, and iOS.

with Android coming next year. According to Kyle Wiggers at Venturebeat, Premiere Rush offers color correction, audio, and motion graphics tools on mobile, plus, of course, plain old video and audio editing. It also focuses on the thing mobile users want most, an easy way to output video to YouTube, also Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Twitter, Snapchat, or just to an MP4 file right from the mobile device. The ability to shoot, edit, and post from the field is key for many. users and high-end tablets are sure looking like viable tools, even essential tools for creative professionals, at least right now. The biggest problem for video editors working on mobile is where

exactly the video footage comes from. Mobile devices are not known for having tremendous amounts of local storage. Premier Rush allows you to work from video stored on the device, like the footage you just shot with your iPad or whatever, but it can also pull video and audio from Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and stock footage from Adobe stock. You can get 100 gigabytes of Creative Cloud storage from Adobe for $10 per month as an individual. Prices go up for teams and enterprise users, and you can expand that all the way up to 10 terabytes. How much does 10 terabytes of cloud storage cost? Adobe's website says, call for details. That's pretty helpful. Premier Rush is cross-platform, allowing projects to be open across all the platforms it supports,

So if you need to take a project from your mobile device and open it on a Mac or PC, no problem, as long as your footage is available in the cloud. So what's the theme for all these announcements? Two things. First, real professional software from Adobe running on mobile devices. And when I say mobile devices, I mean iPad first. Everything else a little later. We're talking full-featured, file-compatible, shared code-based apps,

available on tablets and phones, which is a huge deal. It proves that these devices aren't just for consuming media. They are truly first-class devices for creating media as well. The second theme is cloud storage. Adobe would sure love it if creative pros stored all their assets like photos and videos in creative cloud. Apple sure has been on an acquisition spree, or at least news of these acquisitions has just leaked all at once. Axios reports that Apple paid less than $100 million to purchase a sigh. Two-year-old Asai uses machine learning to analyze streaming music.

In other words, it's an analytics tool that uses real-time streaming data to surface hot new tracks in real-time based on people's listening habits. All the better to help feed those hot new tracks into Discovery Playlists, for example. So think of the Discovery Weekly playlist on steroids. Spotify, as you may remember, has its own Rise program to help place emerging artists on Discovery Playlists. In other words, we could see a future where, Apple signs its own new artist to become a sort of Apple record label. Wait a minute. Wasn't there already a record label named Apple?

And didn't Apple the computer company have to strike some deal with Apple the record label just to use the name Apple in the first place? Wikipedia, guys. Well, this news excited my wife this morning when I told it to her because she used to have a Palm Pre and she is desperate to keep her phones small. There is a new phone with the name Palm. out there. Yes, this company paid TCL for the rights to use the name recently, and yes, this new phone is tiny. The new palm phone has a 3.3-inch LCD display. The whole device is only 50 by 97

millimeters, so about the size of a credit card. It weighs 62.5 grams. It looks like a tiny, tiny, iPhone 10. But now, here's the catch. It's not supposed to be your main phone. I'll let Deter Bone explain, quote, it's a sidecar for your phone. You should almost think of it more as a thing to get instead of a connected smartwatch than a second phone. In fact, thinking of it as a smart watch is a good move since that's precisely how Verizon, and only Verizon, is selling it, as an add-on for existing plans. You can't just go buy the thing on its own or unlocked as your primary phone, end quote. So, sorry, Lisa, this is not the answer you're looking for because I know you're definitely not looking for a second phone to augment your already too big phone.

The new palm has a low-end Snapdragon 435 processor, 3 gigabytes of RAM, and 32 gigabytes of storage. It's got a single USBC port. And there's no real home screen, just a scrolling horizontal grid of apps. You use this new palm with Verizon's number share feature. It shares the phone number of your existing phone, and it routes texts and calls to the palm that way.

But it has a prominent setting in it called Life Mode. When you switch the palm into life mode, it enables a sort of do not disturb and low battery setting and turns the antennas off. Cellular and Wi-Fi only come on if the screen is on. The idea of this is to allow you to focus, I guess. Honestly, I'm a bit perplexed by this whole concept. It's an Android phone, so there's nothing Palm about it. No Palm people were involved in making it, and I guess,

guess the concept is like an Apple Watch with a cellular antenna. You can maybe take the Palm out with you on the go when you don't want to lug your big phone around all the time, which, again, is a problem that could be solved by making smaller phones. And it wouldn't even have to be this small. Chris Velasco adding Gadget said it's a bit of a challenge to type on. But by the way, Steph Curry is an investor in Palm, and he's been consulting with them about design and accessory development, so expect him to be promoting this $350 sidecar for your main phone all over the place. His first tweet about this came in this morning and said, hyped to bring Palm back and share everything we've been working on since day one.

Hashtag let's go. Hashtag live in the moment. But that message was tweeted from an iPhone. Now a story that answers the question, what happens when my relatives sign up for a DNA mapping service and I don't. Earlier this year, you might remember we heard about police finding a suspect in the Golden State Killer case using public DNA databases and a piece of the killer's DNA. So how long is it until everybody can be identified using this technology? Megan Malteni, writing for Wired, dives into the world of computational biology. Here's the key quote from the story. Interlocking family trees, connecting people through bits of DNA, have now grown so big, that they can be used to find more than half the U.S. population.

In fact, according to new research led by Yanev Ehrlich, published today in science, more than 60% of Americans with European ancestry can be identified through their DNA using open genetic genealogy databases, regardless of whether or not they've ever sent in a spit kit, end quote. A big part of this story is that, at least right now, DNA databases are disproportionately composed of data from people of European descent. Erlich and his colleagues analyzed a DNA data set including 1.28 million anonymous people trying to identify them as if they were potential crime suspects. Within that group, they found that 60% of the searches found at least one match, a third cousin or closer. From the story, quote, that level of relatedness was all investigators needed to track down the Golden State killer and the 17 other cases that have so far been solved with this approach, known to law enforcement as long range, familial searching, end quote. But it's not just a matter of DNA. When you try to match a random

American's DNA with these databases, you get a lot of possible hits. To positively identify someone, you need a little more data about them. But, and you probably saw this coming, lots of personal data is available online in big databases. By using public records databases, researchers showed that various factors could trim down the match using a home location, actually just a hundred mile radius of a person's home. Their approximate age within five years and their sex. If you happen to have a specific birth year for the person you're trying to ID, a match is almost guaranteed. The scientists also tried finding a single anonymized person who was married to someone whose DNA was in the dataset. Within a day, they identified the target correctly. Take note, spouses. In a separate but related paper,

scientists explained how they could match up DNA profiles in law enforcement databases, which were previously thought to be unlinkable to consumer databases because they store different parts of a person's DNA. But, turns out, you can link these together. When you merge DNA databases, suddenly the wealth of personally identifying information grows, and so does the ability to find people within it. As more people take DNA tests, this technique of searching by relationship only gets easier. To wrap up this story, here's the money quote from Andrea Roth, Director of UC Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology.

Quote, I think the bottom line is now everybody is about to be under genetic surveillance one way or another, unless we regulate the government's ability to conduct genealogy searches, end quote. Finally today, sort of a mini long reads section, I want to point you to two things that you should read without too much comment from me. You'd have to say this has been coming for some time because he's been getting in high-profile debates. if that's the word with prominent people in cryptocurrencies, but the famous economist, Noriel Rubini, has finally published his official take on crypto, and, well, the title of the piece says it all.

Blockchain isn't about democracy and decentralization, it's about greed. The blockchain in the end says Rubini is just a glorified Excel spreadsheet. And check the very last link in the show notes today, because it's a link to a tweet storm from Morgan Knutzen, who is currently a designer at zero. The TweetStorm is about Morgan's time working at Google and specifically on the Google Plus project.

The thread is still ongoing. He's been adding to it for several days, but, well, it's just some really juicy goss. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to work at Google, and especially to work at Google in the era when the word came down from on high, that everything we do will now be social, definitely read this essay.

As I say, it's very gossipy, but I found it also really fascinating, and you should probably read it quickly before someone encourages him to take it down. Hat tip to my good friend Laurent Bristiel for sending this my way on Twitter. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. The show was written today by myself and Chris Higgins, who is a bona fide video production nerd. So if that Adobe stuff was unusually erudite and well-informed,

You can thank Chris. Talk to you all tomorrow.