YouTube adds ‘continue watching’ feature
YouTube might be feeling a little left out lately with the news usually dominated with stories about other social media apps adding features (or trying to), like Spotify and Facebook. Maybe YouTube enjoyed having the piece of the action it got when it tested a download feature and so is looking to replicate that. Enter the ‘continue watching’ feature.
Towards the end of 2018, YouTube added a picture-in-picture player that let users watch a video while browsing the site in a mini video player. Now it’s expanding on that. If you’re using the YouTube for Android or iOS app to watch your content and leaving during a video, going back to the app or website will provide you with the mini-player and your unfinished content already queued up from a second before you stopped watching. Hitting play will start playback and tapping anywhere else will make it full screen.
This is the kind of straightforward implementation we like to see from companies when they add features. No one wants to sit through another crash course on how to use a feature they might not even end up using anyway. Thanks, Google.
Source: 9to5Google
Halo is setting the standard for accessibility
343 Industries, developers of the Halo franchise, have added even more accessibility options to the much anticipated Halo Infinite. Accessibility options in video games aren’t a new thing but, depending on the game, can feel tacked on as an afterthought just so the developer can say “look we did it too,” while leaving a lot of potential gamers out due to things beyond their control.
“343 Industries’ goal is to make the newest journey into the Halo universe more accessible to as many gamers as possible,” Xbox shared on its blog. The post goes on to say it includes new players and those that have struggled to play “due to barriers that hadn’t previously been accounted for.”
New features include accessibility standards for enhanced colourblind settings and support for rebinding various control methods as well as options to change the font size and colour of the text in menus and subtitles, different ways to navigate through UI elements and text-to-speech and speech-to-text options for those that want to participate in voice comms.
The increased focus on accessibility and inclusion in Halo Infinite is part of a wider push across the gaming industry to be more accessible to players of all capabilities.
Source: Xbox
Trump suffers acute case of FOMO, sues to get back on Twitter
If you cast your mind back to January of this year, former US President Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube following the deadly riots at the Capital building. Twitter first placed his account under a 12-hour ban citing “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy”. Two days later it made the ban permanent.
Well, Trump didn’t like that very much and has filed a complaint that seeks a preliminary injunction of the platform’s ban while he seeks to be permanently reinstated. In the filing, he argues that his Twitter account was an important source of government news and information.
The kicker here is that Trump has filed this complaint in Florida which is home to, apart from the notorious Florida Man, a new social media law that seeks to prohibit social media companies from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians. The law was signed in May by Gov. Ron DeSantis but, unfortunately for Trump, was blocked by a federal judge before it could take effect.
Source: The Verge
DC Comics is giving away free NFTs
The publisher is giving away non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of some of its superhero comic book covers to people who register for the FanDome event on 16 October. If you aren’t in the loop yet or still don’t understand what an NFT is or how it works, here’s an explainer. But, in a nutshell, a non-fungible token is “a kind of ownership token that can’t be swapped for something else”. So essentially, DC is giving away the ownership rights to the comic book covers of some of their most iconic superheroes, including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
The NFTs that DC is giving away will be randomly selected from three rarity levels, common, rare and legendary. Participants will receive their first free, randomly selected NFT from tomorrow and will be eligible for a second if they tweet about the first.
Last years FanDome event, the first one for DC and Warner Bros., gave fans their first look at trailers for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Wonder Woman 1984 and Robert Pattison in The Batman. This year, fans are expecting a new trailer for The Batman which is slated for a March release next year, and previews of upcoming movies like Black Adam, The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
Source: The Verge
