Software

Ashlar-Vellum releases new Lithium downloads for Mac and Windows

It starts with a sketch. Ashlar-Vellum, one of the pioneers in industrial design software tools, has introduced Lithium, their new sketch app, which comes at an opportune time for Mac designers. (Source: stock image)   Austin-based Ashlar-Vellum is the inheritor of a long tradition of industrial design tools and the company has continued to provide tools for drafting, CAD, and … Read more

Adobe Express for everybody else

Adobe has introduced a new collection of cloud-based tools to enable anyone to create a quick multimedia something. Adobe suggests banners, flyers, logos, etc. In other words, prepare to see more plain old posts gussied up with baked content in your feeds. Anyone can do it: Adobe Creative Cloud makes the job of content creation easier. (Source: JPR) Adobe packaged … Read more

The pantone color of the year is Very Peri

This year, Pantone announced a brand new color to the color pantheon, Veri Peri. The association’s Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Institute, said the group’s members felt they had to come up with something special and something that expressed all the feelings and moods associated with 2022, a year that people hope will signal a new beginning. So, … Read more

Corel charts a new path to yet another rebirth

In 2019, the venture firm KKR acquired Corel Corporation. According to a story by Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch, KKR could have paid billion dollars or so to Corel’s previous owner, Vector Capital, also a venture capital company. Vector Capital had an interest in Corel since 2003. The price tag is a bit surprising, but not totally. Corel has been a … Read more

Qualcomm handheld game machine—Snapdragon G

Qualcomm’s handheld, game console, reference design. (Source: Jon Peddie)   In December 2021, Qualcomm announced a handheld game console reference design. Qualcomm has had a long and effective history of developing reference designs to illustrate how their SoCs could be successfully employed. Often, some OEMs would use the entire design either because they had limited design resources, time, or because … Read more

Amazon’s New World has a hard time getting it right

Not for everyone, Amazon’s New World MMO is demanding and has a few glitches, but it has fierce defenders as well. (Source: Amazon)   Dinner out with a young friend who asks, is Amazon still bricking GPUs? Er, what? The gamers among you probably know all about this. Amazon’s new MMO New World, a Windows game introduced last summer, had … Read more

Autodesk upends software development and licensing

Usually, Autodesk University is a crowded, messy affair, full of front-line workers set loose in Las Vegas for a few days of hanging out, learning, sharing tips and tricks, gossiping, and so on. That hasn’t happened in two years. Instead, these digital conferences are all business and blessedly a lot less talk. Over this period, what has also happened is … Read more

Imagination Technologies fires photon ray

Image courtesy Movieclips.com   Imagination Technologies has introduced its latest ray tracing IP, the IMG CXT for its flagship B-series GPU IP. The announcement marks the debut of Imagination’s PowerVR Photon ray tracing architecture.  Photon, says Imagination, is the industry’s most advanced ray tracing architecture, bringing desktop-quality visuals to mobile and embedded applications. The biggest news is that it has already … Read more

3D data visualization gets communitive

Earth day 2021. (Source: Nasa Earth)   How do you know if an airplane will fly, a nuclear boom will explode, or what Jupiter is made of? You take a bazillion tons of data (that’s how we measure data in today’s zettascale of data creation) and create a simulation that generates a visualization of it. Weather and climate change forecasting, … Read more

UPDATE – HP’s Reverb G2

I heard back from HP and they told me this: Changes are rolling out in the US first and will be rolled out subsequently in other countries. The tracking improvement is a result of hardware changes to the physical camera module on the new Reverb G2 units. These changes are not backward compatible and are only available with the purchase … Read more

HP adds a few tweaks to the Reverb G2

HP announced that it has launched an updated version of its Reverb G2 headset in the US that brings improvements to controller tracking, eye-relief, and AMD compatibility. Alongside the headset’s improvements, there are changes to the Mixed Reality Portal software in Windows 11 with the aim to streamline the experience for SteamVR users and improve performance. When HP launched Reverb … Read more

Nvidia adds it adaptive sync to its GeForce Now cloud service

Nvidia announced the beta version of its GeForce Now service seven years ago in October 2015. Over the years it has been collecting data, building out its server sites, and working deals with publishers—the latter, the weirdest and most difficult part of all. Nvidia has been making one helluva big investment in hardware, and personnel to launch this service, and … Read more