Software & Apps - Page 39

Windows 11 (and Windows 10) users who've been hit by a recent bug that told them they had an 'unsupported processor' - with the system then crashing - following an update for the OS should take note that Microsoft has now concluded its investigation into the problem.

And we're told that this isn't an issue with Microsoft's OS, even though the bug is clearly triggered by the most recent (optional) update (namely KB5029351).

Bleeping Computer noticed that Microsoft updated its release health dashboard entry on the error to say:

It's been confirmed that after far too long Mac users are finally getting a new and native WhatsApp app to call their own. The new, improved version of Whatsapp is launching on macOS today and will roll out to the App Store for download soon.

That's according to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of WhatsApp parent company Meta. He posted the news in a Facebook message, saying that WhatsApp for Mac will allow video group calls for up to eight people and 32 people when using audio alone. The new app will also be a native one, making it a more familiar experience for Mac owners who have long had to make do with a version of the app that was borrowed from the iPad.

The new app is already available for download via the WhatsApp website but it will ake a little while for it to become widely available via the Mac App Store. No matter how you download it this new app will be free, as you might expect. It'll also support all of the features that you'd expect from a modern native Mac app including the ability to drag a file and then drop it into a chat. There's also more support for seeing more of a user's chat history than was previously possible, too.

Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform formerly called Twitter, has said that the entire platform could fail under his command.

The owner of X has admitted what many users have suspected: the entire social media platform could fail under his command. This admission came after a glitch riddled the platform last weekend that resulted in images and links posted before December 2014 to magically disapear. The Verge reported that X was having trouble displaying any hyperlinks that were converted through Twitter's built-in URL shortener. The publication confirmed that this glitch didn't affect videos.

The problem was discussed by the X Support account, which wrote, "We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days. The glitch claimed one of the most famous tweets ever, the selfie snapped by Ellen DeGeneres that features a slew of stars such as Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, and more. Musk took to his personal X account for the rare admission, saying there are no great "social networks' right now, and that there is a real possibility that X may fail like many social media platforms before it.

Elon Musk has announced that all news links on X that redirect users to websites will be getting a facelift in the pursuit of making X a more aesthetically pleasing social media platform.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter will soon be changing the way it displays news links on its timeline in an effort to make the social media platform's timeline more visibly attractive. According to a post that X owner Elon Musk replied to last Monday, X will be getting rid of the headline and just leaving the header image and link. According to Musk, this will "greatly improve the esthetics."

Before these changes, Twitter displayed a preview card of the post along with the headline and summary text. However, if Musk's change is rolled out, users will only show the image and the link. Moreover, if the publication or source of the post doesn't include any text with the link, users will only see the link and image for that article. So, why go through with this change? In short, Musk wants to reduce the height of a post in order to fit more posts on the screen.

WhatsApp is already one of the most popular instant messenger apps around and is used in a big way across Europe. But it's always had one major limitation in the way it handles the sharing of photos and videos. Now, it seems that parent company Meta is finally starting to fix it.

Sending photos and videos over WhatsApp has historically seen them greatly reduced in quality with the service ensuring that they can be sent and received as quickly as possible. However, with cellular connection speeds continuing to increase WhatsApp recently started to roll out so-called HD photo and video sharing for the first time. That allows for better quality media to be sent in chats, but now it appears that WhatsApp is testing going a step further and finally allowing people to share their photos and videos in their original quality with no additional compression taking place. The result will be that photos of our food, family, and pets will look better than ever before.

This is all according to the WhatsApp beta watchers at WABetaInfo who note that the latest beta for the Android version of the app is already starting to roll out the testing for the new feature. It appears that the new option will appear within the document picker that allows people to choose photos and videos from the app gallery. The option to select original quality photos or videos is available in the latest beta available to testers, with WhatsApp now treating the media as general documents which means that files as large as 2GB in size can be sent.

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has killed off its offer of giving people as much space as they need without additional fees after various groups of people started to abuse it, the company has confirmed.

Writing in a blog post detailing why it is now going to use a metered model on the previously unlimited Advanced plan, Dropbox says that there were instances of people going as far as to pool storage and even reselling it to others for a fee.

Dropbox previously allowed people to sign up for its Advanced plan and use as much storage as they needed. That's now changing, with the plan now giving people three active licenses and 15TB of storage across all of them. The plan is obviously designed for used within businesses, with each license being given to a different member of the team.

Have you ever gone to Type-A web address into Google Chrome on your iPhone only to drop the damned thing because it's just too big? Reaching all the way to the top of an iPhone 14 Pro Max is no easy feat unless you're blessed with Hulk-like hands. But Google is working on fixing that.

According to a new report, Google is now testing a change that will make it much easier for people to reach the address bar no matter how big their iPhone might be. It's going to do that by borrowing a change that Apple made to the iPhone's Safari web browser all the way back in the iOS 15 days - it's going to give people the option of moving the browser's address bar to the bottom of the screen.

That's according to developer Steve Moser who happens to be on the TestFlight beta for Google Chrome and he shared a screenshot of what the new option currently looks like. It isn't yet clear how long it will be before Google rolls this new update out to everyone who gets their apps via the App Store, but we can only hope that it isn't that far away. Nobody should have to drop their iPhone because they wanted to visit a website, after all.

The co-founder of Adobe has sadly passed away on Saturday surrounded by his family and loved ones, according to a recent Adobe press release.

Dr. John Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. Charles Geschke, and their very first product as a team and company was Adobe PostScript, which sparked the desktop publishing revolution. The press release also states that Dr. Warnock stepped down from the head of Adobe in 2000, moving to chairman of the board - a position he shared with Dr. Geschke, until 2017. Since then, Dr. Warnock was a member of the company's Board of Directors.

Adobe Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote an email that was sent to all Adobe employees that Dr. Warnock passed away at the age of 82, and went on to recognize the achievements he made throughout his career. Narayen wrote that Dr. Warnock's ambitions led to incredible creations such as the Illustrator, the ubiquitous PDF file format and Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and many more frequently used technologies.

An internal document obtained by Bloomberg has revealed Spotify is looking into banning white noise podcasts, as the music-listening platform is missing out on tens of millions of dollars.

The document read by Bloomberg reveals that a not-so-seemingly popular lane of podcasters is much more popular than one might imagine - white noise podcasts, which are used by people predominately to go to sleep. According to Bloomberg, some creators behind these podcasts are earning up to $18,000 per month through Spotify advertisements, as Spotify's own algorithm was boosting these podcasts.

As of January 2023, white noise and ambient podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours, and while that is a significant number, it isn't necessarily profitable for Spotify, or at least not as profitable as the company wants it to be. Spotify makes most of its money through paid subscribers, and according to its internal document, if it directed white noise listeners away from what they like, the company could net an additional $38 million in profit.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Meta is preparing to launch the web version of the X competitor Threads.

Since the launch of Threads, users have been asking for a web version that will enable desktop users to enjoy the new text-based social media platform. The launch of Threads, while extremely popular in terms of adopted users, is now experiencing a bit of a slump with a declining user base, which can be attributed to, but not limited to, the lack of features.

For example, Threads currently doesn't even have a search feature, as, at the moment, users can only search for other users and not specific content or posts.

Elon Musk decided only a day ago that X will no longer have a block feature, meaning individuals won't be able to decide which accounts can view their profile.

Musk's newest update to the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, has seemingly been met with heavy criticism, as many users of the platform are worried that it will only perpetuate more toxicity. However, blocking won't be entirely removed from the platform, as Musk said in his announcement that users will still be able to block accounts in direct messaging.

There are also some policy problems with Musk's desire to do away with the blocking feature, as both the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store require social apps to have a block feature. If the app doesn't have a block feature, it would be a violation of the App Store and Google Play Store's terms of service, which could result in the entire social media platform being pulled from both platforms, according to Musk's post that gained a Community Note.

Elon Musk has announced that the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now called X, will have the "block" feature removed.

The owner of X responded to a post by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley that asked if there is a difference between blocking an account and muting an account. Musk responded by saying that the block feature was going to be deleted, except for direct-message blocking. Removing the block feature would mean that all accounts will be able to view every profile, which is different than muting an account. For example, muting an account means you can't see the muted account, and blocking means the blocked account can't see you.

However, Musk's ambition to do away with blocking on X may result in the entire app being pulled from the App Store and Google Play Store. Musk's announcement that the block feature was going to be deleted gained a Community Note, which explained that removing the block feature would be a violation of the terms of service for both the App Store and the Google Play Store.

Elon Musk has been accused of locking a New York University marketing professor out of his X account after he posted critiques of the X owner.

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University, has claimed Elon Musk has personally locked him out of his X account, which has more than 560,000 followers, after Galloway posted criticisms of Musk. At the moment, it's unclear what exactly triggered Musk to allegedly lock the marketing professors' account, but according to Galloway, who wrote on Threads, a mutual friend informed him Musk feels "unfairly attacked" and "wants to meet".

Galloway wrote on the Threads post that he declined Musk's offer to meet up, and then two days later, his account was locked. As previously mentioned, it's unclear what exactly Musk is allegedly upset about, but Galloway's last X post on July 28 was about a Reuters story that claimed Musk created a secret team at Tesla to cancel service appointments for Tesla owners reporting trouble with their vehicle's range.

Users of the WhatsApp instant messaging service can now send photos in a higher quality than ever thanks to a new feature that has been announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Taking time out from not fighting X CEO Elon Musk, Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that people can now use the new HD photos option when sending an image via the instant messaging app. WhatsApp has long supported sending photos and even videos to one or multiple people, but this is the first time there has been a wide rollout of HD support. WhatsApp had previously tested allowing people to send HD photos using the iPhone TestFlight beta version of the app before rolling it out to everyone.

Thanks to HD photos, those who share images will now be able to keep the higher resolution of the original image when sending it to their recipient, whereas previously WhatsApp would downscale it to save on things like data usage. It still will, by default, but a new HD button at the top of the photo-sharing screen will allow people to override that setting from here on out. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to change the default behavior, however.

The founder of what is now called X and what was called Twitter has announced he is no longer using Instagram.

The Twitter co-founder took to Nostr to announce that he has deleted his Instagram account, writing, "Don't know why it took me so long". With the deletion of Dorsey's Instagram account the @jack handle is now back up for grabs, which is undoubtedly causing waves among the community of people that hunt for sought after handles such as @jack. Notably, simple handles such as this typically sell for thousands of dollars, unless you are Elon Musk or X, which recently nabbed the @X handle from a user that possessed it for 16 years.

Dorsey wrote in his post that he thinks he was one of the first 10 people to create an account on Instagram, while also being one of the first angel investors in the company. Furthermore, Dorsey explains that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systorm was originally an intern at Odeo, an organization founded in 2005 by Noah Glass and Evan Williams, which later became the roots that grew into Twitter.

If you've been using your Mac over the last little while and wondering why some apps simply weren't behaving how they should, it could have been thanks to a bug relating to how location access permissions work. But don't worry - Apple just fixed it.

The issue was one that meant some apps that required the Mac's location data to work, like weather and mapping apps, were not able to display a permissions dialog as they would normally do. That essentially prevented them from working at all, in some cases, leaving people stuck. However, Apple has now released macOS 13.5.1 which fixes the issue for those who were affected.

The new update is now available as a free download via the System Settings app on affected Macs and is worth getting a hold of even if you don't think you've been afflicted with this particular issue - there is no telling whether you will in the future.

YouTube has announced a big effort to reduce cancer treatment misinformation that's present across its platform.

Medical misinformation on YouTube was thrown into the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the Google-owned video platform is continuing its efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation in what seems like it will be a never-ending battle. According to reports, YouTube is cracking down on false information about cancer treatments, in particular, videos that promote cancer treatments that are proven to be harmful or ineffective.

Additionally, YouTube has said that it will be removing videos that discourage people from seeking medical advice from a licensed practitioner. Furthermore, these changes will bring in new changes to YouTube's medical misinformation policies and will start on Tuesday next week - rolling out over the coming weeks. YouTube's revision of its medical misinformation policies will "streamline dozens of our existing medical misinformation guidelines to fall under three categories - Prevention, Treatment, and Denial."

TikTok junkies who are using their New York City-owned phones to watch cat memes are going to have to find something else to do with their time, it seems. The city has apparently decided that it is going to ban TikTok from all city-owned devices and has already told agencies that they have to get people to remove the app from phones and other hardware within the next 30 days.

The news comes as part of a directive that was issued on Wednesday and follows a review by the NYC Cyber Command. It was then decided that TikTok poses a security threat to the networks of New York City and that the ban will start immediately. That means that employees can no longer download or use the app even if it's already there, while the 30-day timeframe for uninstalling the app is also now underway.

In a statement to The Verge, a New York City Hall spokesperson said that NYC Cyber Command regularly takes proactive actions to "keep New Yorkers' data safe." The city also cited US Office of Management and Budget guidelines that discourage TikTok being used on government devices including federal legislation that already banned the app earlier this year, The Verge reports.

YouTube has rolled out a new feature to its YouTube Music app that's designed to let users discover brand new music through 30-second snippets.

YouTube Music has a new feature called "Samples" and judging by the above video posted to YouTube's official channel, the feature will be designed to let YouTube Music users discover brand new music through quick 30-second snippets of songs recommended to them. Notably, Samples won't just play the start of a song, they will play what YouTube Music considers to be the most "catchy" part of a song. An example of this would be a strong chorus, guitar riff, or head-bobbing beat.

Users will interact with Samples the same way they interact with Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok Videos - taking on the swipe up/down layout. Additionally, Sample's won't just feature snippets of the "best" parts of songs, it will also include exclusively made content by artists. The idea behind this new feature is to enable more discoverability for upcoming artists by combining the TikTokification of short video content with the millions of paying subscribers that are already on YouTube Music.

We've known that the Paint application is getting a dark mode for some time now, and you may have been losing patience waiting for it to arrive - if so, we've got some good news.

As flagged up by leaker PhantomOfEarth on X (formerly Twitter), the new Paint app complete with dark mode is now rolling out to stable versions of Windows 11, so everyone should have it before too long.

Unfortunately, you won't necessarily receive the updated app just yet, because the rollout is not coming to everyone initially, as Brandon LeBlanc, Senior Program Manager on the Windows Insider team, clarified.