TechNews

Google says it will phase out its use of Material Design interface elements within its iOS apps in favor of Apple’s own UIKit. Jeff Verkoeyen, the company’s iOS design chief, announced the change in a Twitter thread spotted by The Verge.

Introduced in 2014, Material Design is Google’s in-house design language. The company has used it to unify the look and feel of its apps and services across various platforms. According to Verkoeyen, Google shifted its open source iOS Material component libraries into maintenance mode earlier this year after it conducted a “deep evaluation” of what it means to build a “hallmark” Google experience on iOS. What it found was that many of the custom elements it started building nearly a decade ago to fill gaps in UIKit’s design language are no longer necessary.

“With the introduction of SwiftUI and significant UIKit improvements in iOS 14+, it’s never been easier to build a great branded experience with a tiny amount of code,” Verkoeyen said. 

With the shift to UIKit, Verkoeyen expects his team will spend less time building custom code, which should hopefully lead to faster and more frequent releases. Additionally, the use of UIKit should allow the company to more tightly integrate its software into iOS. However, those benefits may pale in comparison to the fact the company’s apps may end up looking more at home on Apple devices.

Samsung has created a new 980 Pro SSD model designed for Sony’s PlayStation 5. The SSD includes a heatsink specifically designed to fit inside the M.2 SSD storage expansion slot inside the PS5. Samsung is releasing this new 980 Pro SSD model on October 29th, priced at $249.99 for the 1TB version or $449.99 for the 2TB model.

The built-in heatsink is designed to keep temperatures low enough to deliver sustained speeds, with sequential read speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 5,100MB/s. Not many games take advantage of such speeds on the PS5 just yet — Samsung’s 980 Pro specs are way above the 5,500MB/s read speeds that Sony recommends.

Sony also recommends a heatsink on compatible SSDs. PS5 owners have been able to use the existing 980 Pro with a third-party heatsink, but this new model makes it a lot easier for people to simply slot this fast M.2 SSD into the PS5 without any modifications.

If you’re planning to use this SSD elsewhere, Samsung lists the dimensions as 24mm (W), 80mm (L), and 8.6mm (H). Most modern motherboards come equipped with built-in heatsinks that should keep the 980 Pro cool enough for sustained speeds, so this new heatsink option is really targeting PS5 owners looking for one of the best SSD options available right now.

If you’re interested in other alternatives and cheaper options, we have a PS5 SSD buying guide with a number of M.2 SSD models that will fit inside the PS5 with heatsinks attached.

Google is phasing out its use of Material Design user interface components for its iOS apps in favor of leaning more on Apple’s own UIKit. The company says the result of the switch should be less work for its iOS development team, but, more importantly, it’s likely the change will mean that Google’s iOS apps will feel less like interlopers on Apple devices. Instead of obeying Android’s UI conventions, they should look and feel more like they belong on iOS.

The change was announced on Twitter by Jeff Verkoeyen, engineer lead for Google Design on Apple’s platforms. I recommend reading the full thread if you’re interested, but Verkoeyen says his team “shifted the open source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode” earlier this year. Material Design is Google’s in-house set of design conventions, which it introduced in 2014 in order to unify the look and feel of its apps and services across mobile devices, Chrome OS, and the web.

Verkoeyen said Google developed its own Material Design components for iOS, but, over time, found that these have been “slowly drifting further and further from Apple platform fundamentals because those fundaments were also evolving year over year.” Instead of creating work for itself by filling those gaps, Verkoeyen says Google has now decided to use Apple’s own UIKit for it iOS apps. He notes that doing so will “result in much tighter integrations with the OS than what we can reasonably achieve via custom solutions.”

Verkoeyen’s phrasing is somewhat oblique here, but many are interpreting the thread — including that mention of “tighter integrations” — as meaning that Google’s iOS apps will, in the future, follow more of the design conventions of Apple’s mobile OS. That might mean using fewer custom buttons that look like they belong on Android, for example.

As long-time Apple journalist Jason Snell commented: “This is good news. It’s good for Google’s developers, who no longer have to build that custom code. And more importantly, it’s good for people who use Google’s apps on iOS, because with any luck they’ll be updated faster, work better, and feel more like proper iOS apps, not invaders from some other platform.”

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, though, and until Google actually starts updating it iOS apps over the coming years, we won’t really know how it plans to marry the two design approaches. Let’s hope it does the right thing, and just makes things easiest for users. We will see.

At the southernmost tip of Texas, alongside the Gulf of Mexico, a gleaming stainless steel rocket has been rising from the salt marshes.

At nearly 400ft, the new SpaceX rocket will eventually be taller than the Saturn V that carried Nasa’s Apollo missions to the moon, and its 33 engines will deliver twice the thrust. For Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, it is meant to play a key role in one day establishing a human colony on Mars.

But the rocket, dubbed the Starship, could have a far more immediate impact on a space industry that has already been shaken by Musk’s ambitions. With the power to carry as much as 100 tons into low orbit around the Earth, his admirers claim Musk is about to transform the economics of the launch business.

“It’s game over for the existing launch companies,” says Peter Diamandis, a US space entrepreneur. “There’s no vehicle out there on the drawing board that could compete.”

Musk’s space company still has some way to go to live up to the promise, including winning regulatory clearance to launch Starship from its Texas site and showing that it can reliably reach space while returning both the rocket’s stages for reuse — an essential step in reducing launch costs.

Also, many experts question whether a large rocket designed to colonise another planet can double up as an all-purpose transport for more varied and mundane tasks closer to Earth. But SpaceX’s success in turning its current rocket, the Falcon 9, into the main workhorse for reaching space has made others in the commercial space industry nervous.

“If you’re not careful, SpaceX will be the only game in town,” says Fatih Ozmen, co-founder of Sierra Nevada Corp, a private US company that has been contracted by Nasa to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ private space company, makes a blunter claim: SpaceX could end up with “monopolistic control” of US deep space exploration.

Musk’s venture has put itself in a commanding position in the new commercial space industry with surprising speed. It is only 13 years since it became the first private company to launch its own rocket into orbit, breaking into an industry previously dominated by nation states. It has also leapt ahead of contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, whose joint venture, United Launch Alliance, had carried the flag for US space launch — though using Russian engines.

SpaceX’s ascendancy has been underlined over the past six months by a striking series of wins.

They include a $2.9bn contract awarded by Nasa to use the Starship to land its astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. It was the space agency’s decision to pick only one supplier for this programme, after earlier indicating it would select two, that brought the warning from Blue Origin. Nasa officials point out that they have only awarded SpaceX a single mission, leaving them open to choose other suppliers for future landings. But Blue Origin claims that adapting its systems to work with the Starship will force design changes that will lock the agency into a dependence on SpaceX in the long term.

Musk went on to upstage Bezos a second time late last month. Just weeks before, the Amazon founder and Sir Richard Branson had each made personal trips to the edge of space on their company’s respective rockets. The brief moments they enjoyed in microgravity were eclipsed when SpaceX carried four passengers more than five times higher for a three-day joyride around the Earth, making them the first all-civilian crew to reach space.

SpaceX also announced the first 500,000 orders for its Starlink broadband network, making it the first in a new generation of broadband communications companies operating from a constellation of satellites in low orbit, around 500km above the earth.

And last week, Nasa said two astronauts who had been scheduled to fly on a Boeing spacecraft would be switched to SpaceX’s spaceship instead. The company that defined an earlier era of aerospace has hit too many technical obstacles to carry astronauts on its first commercially developed spaceship, putting it well behind what until recently was just a scrappy start-up.

Rocket science

At the heart of SpaceX’s spate of successes is the Falcon 9, which has brought down the cost of reaching space and become a springboard both for the company’s wider business and Musk’s ultimate goal of reaching Mars.

“In terms of performance, cost and reliability, it really is the most successful rocket ever built,” says Diamandis.

SpaceX’s share of the global launch market, excluding China, climbed above 50 per cent for the first time in the first half of 2021, according to BryceTech, a space research and consultancy firm. And while China launched nearly as many rockets as SpaceX in that period, the US company lifted nearly three times as much weight into space.

The tactics that turned the Falcon 9 into the era’s most widely used rocket are now being applied to the Starship. They echo many of the things that also account for the breakout success of Musk’s electric car company, Tesla.

Foremost has been the success of Musk and SpaceX’s CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, at pushing disruptive technologies into mainstream production. In the case of the Falcon 9, that meant using 3D-printing for its engines, the most complex part of the rocket, and reusing the main booster, for future launches.

To master new techniques like these, SpaceX worked on almost every detail of designing and creating its own rockets rather than relying on suppliers, with Musk himself acting as a chief engineer in the early days to goad his team on. SpaceX also took on the full development risk itself, rather than being able to fall back on guaranteed payments from Nasa, forcing much greater financial discipline. As a result, the space agency estimates that the $400m SpaceX spent to develop the Falcon 9 rocket was 10 times lower than the likely cost of a rocket built under traditional government contracting.

Another advantage that SpaceX has shared with Tesla has been its ready access to cheap capital, thanks to the high valuation investors have been prepared to put on its business. Musk has raised more than $6.5bn for the company in the private market, lifting its valuation to $74bn earlier this year. Share sales by some of its investors have since valued it at more than $100bn, according to CNBC.

Most rivals have to generate cash from their existing businesses to fund new ventures, says Steve Collar, chief executive of satellite company SES. The ease with which SpaceX has been able to tap investors has opened the way for it to take much bigger risks, he adds.

One result of the ample cash, along with the company’s access to its own launch service, has been Starlink, which has beaten would-be rivals like OneWeb and Amazon’s Kuiper to launch its broadband service.

Racing to be first has involved technical gambles with its satellite designs, and Starlink is already on its third generation of technology. But even if it ends up writing off billions of dollars’ worth of satellites on the way to perfecting its constellation, the setback would not hurt the company the way it would a rival without access to such cheap capital, says Collar.

Rivals complain that as a result, SpaceX risks squeezing out other companies that haven’t yet achieved its scale and don’t enjoy its funding advantages. Blue Origin, which has lodged a formal complaint over Nasa’s moon landing award, said losing the contract would rob it of one important market for its New Glenn rocket, which has already cost $2.5bn to develop and has yet to leave the launch pad.

SpaceX’s vertically integrated manufacturing approach will also deprive other US suppliers of business, weakening the wider industrial base the country had built up to support its long-term ambitions in space, Amazon and others warn.

However, SpaceX’s customers — including those in government — do not seem to share the misgivings.

“Before SpaceX we only really had the ULA, so we’re in a better position than we were,” says Phil McAlister, director of NASA’s commercial space flight division.

Diamandis goes further: “The US government is lucky to have a company like SpaceX based here,” he says, since its efficiencies feed through directly into the US space programme. And companies that compete with SpaceX in some markets seem more than happy to use its launch services, despite supporting a rival.

“When they came into the [satellite] industry, that freaked people out a bit — but I don’t think it needs to,” says Collar of SES, which is still happy to rely heavily on SpaceX rockets.

Soaring demand

The warnings that a vertically-integrated rocket company could weaken an important supply chain also gets short shrift in many parts of the emerging commercial space industry. Most new rocket companies have adopted a similar model. Jory Bell, a partner at Playground Global, a venture capital firm that has invested in the space industry, also points out that the traditional supply chain has served more of a political purpose than a commercial one. Having suppliers spread across the country has enabled a larger number of politicians to claim success by winning a share of government space contracts.

The most telling argument against the risk of monopoly, though, is that the plunging price of reaching space has brought a boom in demand that is far more than any one company can manage. Much of it is coming from new communications networks aiming to launch constellations comprised of thousands of satellites, as well as more governments eager to reach space for national defence or to take part in deeper space exploration.

“This is a market that will be supply-constrained for many years,” says Edison Yu, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. The space launch market will be worth $37.5bn a year by the end of the decade, he predicted — five times as much in 2021.

That should leave more than enough room for at least one big rival to SpaceX to emerge, according to many in the industry. And even if some existing launch companies struggle, held back by older technologies, uncompetitive manufacturing approaches or cultures built on government contracting, a new generation of disruptive rocket companies is rapidly emerging.

Along with Bezos’ own Blue Origin, they include Relativity Space, a company led by former SpaceX executives, which has raised $1.3bn and plans to make entire rockets using 3D printing, not just the engines.

“We don’t have to beat SpaceX — we just have to beat everyone else,” says Bell at Playground Global, one of Relativity’s financial backers. A generation of engineers and space entrepreneurs trained by SpaceX is helping to build an entire industry based on its ideas, he added.

Satellites and beyond

Starship’s first orbital flight, when it comes, will still reverberate through the space industry. Its sheer scale will change the economics of getting to orbit, setting a new pricing benchmark against which others are likely to be judged.

The Falcon 9 has already brought the price for customers willing to share a launch with others down to $5,000 per kilogramme, around a third of what it was before, says Yu. That price could fall to $1,000, and perhaps even as low as $500, once Starship becomes fully operational, he predicts.

How well adapted it will be for the satellite launches that make up the bread and butter of today’s space industry is another matter. Since Starship will not be able to deposit its large payloads into multiple orbits, the satellites it carries will need their own propulsion to manoeuvre into place, making them considerably more expensive, says Yu.

“You need to get a lot of mass to orbit for some things — and you need speed and agility and precision for other things,” says Dan Hart, chief executive officer of Virgin Orbit, which reached orbit for the first time this year after launching a rocket from under the wing of a Boeing 747.

That is likely to make the Starship “a capability that’s more suited to Mars than commercial satellites”, says Collar at SES.

Some also question how committed SpaceX will be in the coming years to battle for market share in the routine satellite launch business. Falcon 9 was always intended as a stepping stone, to develop the cash flow and the technology needed to carry the company much deeper into space.

Musk should be taken seriously when he muses about turning away from the Falcon 9 and redirecting all of SpaceX’s effort to the Starship and the goal of reaching Mars, according to supporters like Diamandis. “He kills his old products and burns the ship,” he says — one reason he has often succeeded at ambitious new undertakings.

With a lock on today’s launch market, it is probably still far too soon to write the epitaph for the Falcon 9. But when the Starship finally takes to the heavens, it is likely to draw a clear dividing line between one era of space and the next.

Magic Leap has raised $500 million in funding and is preparing to release a new AR headset, the Magic Leap 2, next year, the company announced Monday. The headset will be generally available next year, the company said, and “select customers” are using it as part of an early access program.

CEO Peggy Johnson said in a statement that with the new funding “Magic Leap will have greater financial flexibility and the resources needed to continue our growth trajectory as we expand on our industry-leading AR technology.” She revealed the new device in an Monday appearance on CNBC.

Magic Leap, of course, is the company that began its existence as a mysterious AR startup, received almost $3 billion to fund its consumer-friendly AR headset, before changing its headset’s name from Magic Leap 1 to The Magic Leap One Creator Edition in an attempt to attract professional customers. The company laid off 1,000 employees — roughly half its workforce — in 2020, and was reportedly abandoning its consumer business. Cofounder and CEO Rony Abovitz left the company in July 2020, and was replaced by Johnson.

In April, Johnson said limited quantities of Magic Leap’s second-gen headset, 20 percent lighter and with a doubled field of view, would ship later this year. According to its statement Monday, the Magic Leap 2 will be the industry’s smallest and lightest device built for enterprise, “designed to increase business adoption of AR.”

In a separate post Monday, Johnson reflected on her first year as Magic Leap’s CEO. She cited a “growing demand for AR” across industries, and cited research from International Data Corp. (IDC) that showed the AR/VR market is expected to grow to $140 billion by the end of 2024.

She listed the company’s enterprise customers, including Ericsson, and Farmers Insurance, the latter of which used the company’s tech to train new employees remotely during the pandemic. Johnson said Magic Leap has added strategic partnerships with Google Cloud, PTC, NVDIA, and VMWare

Johnson said Magic Leap’s core business is focused on enterprise solutions, but added “there continues to be intense interest in the application of Magic Leap’s technology in the consumer space. In fact, we have received several requests to license our technology and will actively pursue these opportunities if they enhance our position and ability to innovate in the enterprise market.”

Last month, the reveal of Nintendo 64 games headed to Nintendo Switch Online was mostly met with adoration from fans, although one problem did prevent the announcement from being truly special. As you may recall, footage shown off during the Nintendo Direct suggested that European fans might have to put up with games running at a slower 50Hz – an issue we explored and explained in full detail just weeks ago.

In a slightly surprising move, however, the company has today addressed those concerns with a statement, confirming that Europe’s N64 games will all be available in 60Hz.

“All Nintendo 64 games included with Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack can be played in 60Hz English language versions,” Nintendo says. “Select games will also have the option to play the original European PAL version with language options.”

So there we are. All games will run at 60Hz, with some also being available in their original 50Hz PAL states. Perfect.

Of course, if you’re reading this from North America and wondering what all the fuss is about, don’t worry. It’s safe to assume that all N64 games headed to Switch Online will also run at the preferred 60Hz in your region, just as the originals did back in the day.

Are you happy with the news? As ever, feel free to share your thoughts with us below.

Publisher Aniplex and developer CyberConnect2 have released the first screenshots of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Hinokami Chronicles playable characters Akaza and Rui, who will be added to the game via its first free post-launch update.

Akaza and Rui are two of six planned free post-launch characters. The second update will add another two characters, and the third update will add the final two.

Details regarding the release timing for the first free post-launch update will be announced at a later date.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Hinokami Chronicles is due out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam on October 14 in Japan, and October 15 worldwide. Read more about the game here.

View the screenshots at the gallery.

If you’re trying to play Diablo 2 Resurrected but can’t connect, don’t fret, it’s not you, but rather, the game is experiencing issues once again. Diablo 2 Resurrected down reports are surfacing once again, which makes this the third day in a row that the action-RPG has experienced server issues!

Diablo 2 Resurrected Down Reports – October 11:

Multiple reports on the game’s subreddit have surfaced with players from all platforms confirming the server outage:

i just want to play. from Diablo

Is this an out of season april fools joke? from Diablo

Servers Offline Again v2 from Diablo

For now, Blizzard’s official customer service account has not acknowledged the downtime, which isn’t surprising given the time. That said, the studio acknowledged yesterday’s downtime an hour or two after the servers were out.

Same as always, we’ll be updating the post with Blizzard’s updates up top, so make sure to refresh the post from time to time. Chime in down in the comments on whether the game’s servers are working for you! Share which platform you’re on, as well as region, so other players will know whether there are countries where the game’s online component can be played.

Google applications on iOS have long been criticized for not feeling native to the platform. Earlier this year, the company’s designers reviewed their approach for developing iOS apps and opted for a change. 

Google apps on iOS have long looked and functioned near identically to their Android counterparts. That in itself is fine and the company’s prerogative, but Apple enthusiasts have complained about Google applications not respecting common iOS conventions and “feel,” thus resulting in an inconsistent user experience between first and third-party clients. 

Behind the scenes, this was due to the company’s belief in “shar[ing] UI components across Google.” In building their own libraries, another focus was “filling gaps in UIKit,” Apple’s framework for building apps.

This is according to the staff engineering lead for Google Design on Apple platforms Jeff Verkoeyen in a Twitter thread earlier this week. All that work was eventually open-sourced as Material Components for iOS (MDC) to allow any third-party developer to adopt the same UI elements used by Google’s iPhone and iPads apps, like floating action buttons (FABs), chips, and snackbars. 

But as we continued on the pursuit of cross-platform pixel parity, our iOS components were slowly drifting further and further from Apple platform fundamentals because those fundaments were also evolving year over year.

In response, Google at the start of 2021 “began a deep evaluation of what it means to build a hallmark Google experience on Apple platforms,” and asked:

Does a switch really need to be built custom in alignment with a generic design system? Or might it be sufficient to simply use the system solution and move on?

Google concluded that it was time for the latter route, and that Apple’s UIKit had matured enough for internal needs. The company no longer had to maintain most of the custom components that it built out over the years, including app (top) bars, lists, and menus. 

Instead, it will adopt standard controls and apply “light branded touches” to maintain the Google look on iOS. Some custom components are still needed, and they will now benefit from “more attention and focus.” It remains to be seen how much (or even if) Google’s iPhone apps will diverge from the Android versions.

As part of this shift, Google in July put Material’s iOS libraries in “maintenance mode.” New releases and bug fixes will be limited, with documentation no longer updated. The company’s official guidance to past developer users is to “follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and consider using modern UIKit components or SwiftUI instead.” That said, it also plugged Flutter as the way to “get a Material look and feel across all platforms.”

Besides the feel of apps, Google has been quick to adopt recent iOS capabilities. This includes widgets for most major services and support for becoming the default browser or mail client. In fact, the Google Photos widget first debuted on iOS last year before coming to Android this August.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Material You will impact Google apps on iOS. On Android, Gmail, Calendar, Docs/Sheets/Slides, Drive, Keep, and Meet have all been updated to Google’s personalized design language. Navigation is unchanged, but there are tweaks to various navigation elements, like the circular FAB turning into a rounded square. However, the bigger change is Dynamic Color where the entire app adopts a color palette based on your wallpaper. It’s unlikely that DC will come to iOS, and updated apps will just end up using a blue tint, like on older versions of Android.

The time we’re saving not building custom code is now invested in the long tail of UX details that really make products feel great on Apple platforms. To paraphrase Lucas Pope, we’re “swimming in a sea of minor things”, and I couldn’t be more excited about this new direction.

— Jeff Verkoeyen (@featherless) October 7, 2021

---

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: