Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/14 – You Get A Photoshop! You Get A Photoshop! You Get A….

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Adobe and Photoshop are leaning into freemium. Massive and controversial layoffs at Coinbase. Firefox is blocking stuff by default now. Meta announces more tools to make the Metaverse safe from trolls and worse. And why those pro features in iPadOS are only for iPads with M1 chips and above. Sponsors: KeeperSecurity.com/techmeme Links: Adobe plans to make Photoshop on the web free to everyone (The Verge) Coinbase is laying off 1,100 employees as Bitcoin prices continue to fall (The Verge) Firefox enables its anti-tracking feature by default (Engadget) Meta adds voice controls for Horizon Worlds, which defaults to live chat with strangers (TechCrunch) Apple Lets You Move WhatsApp Chats From Android to iPhone (CNET) Apple resized the iPad's workflow with Stage Manager (TechCrunch) 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 for Tuesday, June 14th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Adobe and Photoshop are leaning into Freemium. Massive and controversial layoffs at Coinbase. Firefox is blocking stuff by default now. Meta announces more tools to make the Metaverse safe from trolls and worse, and why those pro features in iPadOS are only for iPads with M1 chips and above.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Might Adobe be about to go all in on freemium? The company has apparently begun testing a free-to-use version of Photoshop for the web in Canada. Some features will eventually be subscriber only, but maybe we can all get a free version of Photoshop soon, like so many Oprah Car giveaways, quoting The Verge. The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes this service as Freemium and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to pay. subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop's

core functions. We want to make Photoshop more accessible and easier for more people to try it out and experience the product, says Maria Yap, Adobe's VP of Digital Imaging. Adobe first released its web version of Photoshop in October, delivering a simplified version of the app that could be used to handle basic edits. Layers and core editing tools made the jump, but the service didn't come anywhere close to including the app's full breadth of features. Instead, Adobe framed it primarily as a collaboration tool, a way for artists to share an image with others and have them jump in, leave some annotations, and make a couple small tweaks, and hand it back over. In the months since, Adobe has made a handful of updates to the service, and it's also started to open it up beyond collaboration use cases.

Before someone had to share a document to the web from the desktop app, but now any Photoshop subscriber can log in and start a new document straight from the web. Adobe's goal is to use the web version of Photoshop to make the app more accessible and potentially hook users who will want to pay for the full version down the road. The company has taken a similar route with a number of its mobile apps, including Fresco and Express. The web version of Photoshop is a particularly important offering since it opens one of the company's most powerful tools up to Chromebooks, which are widely used in schools, end quote. Also, I mean art, photo, and graphic editing suites.

Something of a commodity right now. there are tons of free or cheaper versions of this sort of app floating around out there. There's also Canva eating Adobe's lunch, and heck, didn't I quote someone recently who said that TikTok aside from being a social network is the only sort of Photoshop Gen Ziers ever need. Coinbase says it plans to reduce its head count by around 18% or around 1,100 people seeking to, as it says, stay healthy during this economic downturn, saying, the company, quote, grew too quickly, end quote. Quoting the Verge. Just four months ago, Coinbase supposedly spent $14 million on a Super Bowl ad that consisted almost entirely of a

colorful QR code bouncing around the screen, pointing viewers to a website where they could get $15 in Bitcoin just by signing up. Now its fortunes have turned so sharply that it will lay off about 1,100 employees or 18% of its workforce, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Four days ago, CEO Brian Armstrong responded on Twitter, to an employee petition calling for the removal of Coinbase execs, calling it, quote, really dumb on multiple levels, end quote, and encouraging employees unhappy with the situation or proposed solutions to quit. The employee petition cited issues that don't seem nearly as dumb as Armstrong claimed, calling out the company for, quote, aggressively hiring for thousands of roles despite the fact that

it is an unsustainable plan and is contrary to the wisdom of the crypto industry, end quote. It didn't mention the Super Bowl promotion, but it did note the overpresent. prioritization of certain projects. That starts with the Coinbase NFT platform that launched with what appears to be exceptionally bad timing, considering a drop in activity in the overall marketplace, and which has failed to catch on among people who trade in the digital tokens. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that company executives, including Armstrong, his fellow co-founder Fred Ersam, President and C.O. Emily Choi, and CPOG, CFOG, had netted $1.2 billion in share sales since Coinbase's IPO in April 2021. The company's share is opened at a price of

$382 a share and are currently trading at about $52 a share. This staff reduction comes after Coinbase started rescinding job offers that had already been accepted by candidates. The sudden change left even some visa holders in limbo, as well as others who'd bypassed other opportunities or arranged to leave their previous jobs. In a report yesterday, Motherboard counted over 300 people whose offers were rescinded, end quote. Yeah, I've been hearing about those rescinded offers all this week, which made me think layoffs were probably inevitable as well, and I heard about the layoffs this morning from a Wall Street Journal headliner alert on my phone. But apparently, if I were a laid-off Coinbase employee, I wouldn't have heard anything about this until I tried to open up my laptop

this morning and realized I had been locked out of my accounts. Lots of folks on Twitter are saying getting locked out of your devices and accounts sucks as a way to find out you're out of a job. And I want to stress, I emphasize with the folks laid off. But I'm wondering if Coinbase feared disgruntled employees doing things like, I don't know, stealing people's crypto. Quoting Ivan the K on Twitter, my two Satoshi's on this, they must have very poor internal security if they were compelled to do an RIF this way, end quote. Firefox has turned its total cookie protection feature on by default on desktops after launching it as an opt-in feature back in 2021, quoting a gadget. All Firefox users on desktop will now be protected by the browser's total cookie protection feature by default.

Mozilla calls it the browser's quote, strongest privacy protection to date because it confines cookies to the site where they were created. That means it keeps cookies isolated preventing tracking companies from being able to access them to monitor your activity without your consent. Without the feature, websites can, quote, reach into the cookie jars that don't belong to them, as Mozilla puts it. That gives them more information about you in order to serve you specific ads based on your activity. Mozilla launched the feature in 2021 and previously enabled it by default only when users switch on Firefox's privacy mode. Now, all Firefox users on desktop can enjoy the benefits it brings without having to toggle anything on. Earlier this year, Mozilla also brought total cookie protection to the

Firefox Focus browser for Android devices to combat web tracking on mobile. To note, Microsoft's Edge also has tools to block tracking cookies, but users have to manually switch to strict mode to be able to prevent most cookies from tracking them across websites. Duck, Duck Go's browser has a focus on privacy, but its search agreement with Microsoft prevents it from blocking certain trackers. As for Google, the tech giant pushed back its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative to mid-2020. end quote. Meta has announced a voice mode setting for Horizon Worlds, letting users garble voices

from strangers rolling out in the coming weeks, because like everywhere else on the internet, in the Metaverse, you got to be ready to battle trolls and worse, quoting TechCrunch. Meta might soon want everyone to hop into its playful virtual realms, but some users are set up for a shock. In the service of pushing people to socialize in Horizon Worlds, the virtual social network has voice chat enabled by default. As anyone, particularly any woman who's played an online multiplayer game in the last decade can attest, chatting over live audio with people you don't know is often a harrowing experience and one that opens the floodgates for harassment and hate. Nonetheless, Mehta's virtual social world doesn't disable the voice chat options off the bat, a strange decision for a

company that should be at least a little self-aware that its online platforms have time and time again been used to spread hate. Now the company is adding voice mode, a new set of controls for voice chat that will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Voice chat is inexplicably still enabled by default, but will soon come with some more granular options that let users opt in to disable audio from nearby strangers. There's also a new option to garble strangers' voices, turning them into unintelligible, friendly sounds, basically meta's version of Simlish. With garbled voices on, avatars around you will be able to see that you can't hear them

via a mic icon with a strike-through. You can raise a hand to your ear to hear what they have to say. without needing to add them to your friends list, but really, why would you do that? In March, Meta introduced a feature called Personal Boundary to keep a small four-foot buffer of space between avatars in Horizon Worlds. The option, which was presumably implemented to address obvious concerns about spatial social networks and sexual harassment, is on by default for strangers, end quote. Mark Zuckerberg himself has also announced that WhatsApp users can securely transfer their chat history from Android to iOS while maintaining end-to-end encryption,

expanding on iOS to Android support. Quoting CNET. If you use WhatsApp and want to move from an Android phone to an iPhone, the fact that you can't move your WhatsApp message archive to iOS becomes a huge stumbling block. It might not seem like a critical issue, but there are over two billion people who use WhatsApp globally as their main contact with friends and family. Switching to an iPhone typically means that they have to abandon years' worth of photos and conversations and their WhatsApp message. My colleague Claire Riley even took to carrying around two phones to solve the problem, her new iPhone and an old Android phone that had her WhatsApp history and media. Fortunately, there's now a remedy. Move to iOS. An Android app Apple created. The app already helps

people move their contacts, calendar, SMS messages, and photos from an Android phone to an iPhone. As of Tuesday, you can now move your WhatsApp data from Android to iOS 2. The majority of WhatsApp users are on Android, and it will be interesting to see if this convinces more people who use WhatsApp to switch to an iPhone. Move to iOS encrypts WhatsApp data, which has to be authenticated on your iPhone before you can pick up where you left off. A beta version of WhatsApp for Android currently offers support for the process, end quote. Finally today, Matthew Panzerino at TechCrunch sat down with Apple's Craig Federigi to discuss the big move toward a more pro-working environment in iPad OS. Federeghi says, among other things, that Stage Manager is exclusive to M1 iPads because it requires

the M1's better GPU, virtual memory, storage, and RAM for a seamless experience. Quote, Stage Manager is the centerpiece of this year's enhancements to multitasking on iPad. The feature presents sets of up to four apps per group in a system-managed tile formation. The groups are arrayed to the left, allowing you to quickly tap between these workspaces. It's essentially a much more visible and persistent version of spaces, the Mac feature that allows for multiple desktops to hover off to the sides of your screen on MacOS. If you didn't even know spaces existed, you'd be forgiven because it's fairly obscure and does not have many, if any, visual clues to anyone who's never visited the mission control screen. The idea of allowing

a single window to take focus on the screen has deep roots at Apple, says Federigi. First was the single application mode in the early days of MacOS 10 beta. And years later, an internal prototype of an experience that felt like stage manager. This approach to workspace management does appear to be very obviously iPad-centric, but Federigi says that two independent teams at Apple, one working from the iPad side and one working from the MacOS side to try to make multiple workspaces more obvious and friendly, arrived at a similar concept and met in the middle. This means he says that both perspectives are represented in this approach. He acknowledges that there will likely be a group of people that have 40 years of Mac history behind their expectations, that there will be people

who will expect the feature to act a certain way, and that it's wildly different, and by nature, this won't be a tool immediately used by many Mac loyalists. It takes people some time to adapt their muscle memory and their expectations, and then optimize their flow for a new set of tools. I mean, this is for iPad users, and on the Mac, it's for the subset of users who find they want to work that way. If 20% of the users on the Mac end up saying that this is another great tool in the quiver for them, Federigi says, that's fantastic, end quote. Federigi says that there were a bunch of things Apple had to do in order to line up the necessary rails to get Stage Manager and the other recent enhancements to multitasking for iPad out to users. So even though it was obvious people were ready for more capability, especially on iPad Pro, some groundwork needed doing.

Split View, side over, and now Stage Manager all required that developers support full app resizing in Apple's own frameworks. Apple needed to build infrastructure support to mediate multiple apps running at the same time on the screen as well, and there were hardware needs too. Building to M1 was critical as well, says Federigi from the start. The iPad has always maintained this extremely high standard for responsiveness and interactivity. That directness of interaction in that every app can respond to every touch instantaneously, as if you are touching the real thing underneath the screen, and I think it's hard sometimes for people to appreciate the technical constraints involved in achieving that.

Stage Manager takes advantage of the more powerful GPU, faster I.O. and virtual memory, faster storage and more RAM that the M1 ships brought to the table. That all had to come together to keep the experience fluid, and this year they did, said Federigi. It's only the M1 iPads that combine the high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND, and allows for our virtual memory swap to be super fast, Federigi says. Now that we're letting you have up to four apps on a panel plus another four,

up to eight apps to be simultaneously responsive and have plenty of memory, we just don't have that ability on the other systems, end quote. It was not purely the ability of memory that led Apple to limit Stage Manager to M1 iPads, though. We also view Stage Manager as a total experience that involves external display conductivity. And the I.O on the M1 supports connectivity that our previous iPads don't. It can drive 4K, 5K, 6K displays. It can drive them at scaled resolutions. We can't do that on other iPads, end quote.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. So,