#106 It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye… For Now

Deemable Tech | WJCT

This week Ray, Tom and Sean talk about quantum computers, Google’s new messaging apps, and the possibility of an all-glass iPhone. Plus the guys share some sad news.

A special message from Ray, Tom and Sean

If you’re an avid listener to Deemable Tech, it will probably come as no surprise that we’ve been having some difficulty putting out shows for the past few months. The three of us have gone through some major changes in our careers and lives over the past year, and those have taken away a lot of the time we’ve had to devote to bringing you this show every week.

So, after months of not recording an episode, we’ve made the tough decision to end the Deemable Tech podcast. For now, at least.

We’ve come to the realization that it is just not sustainable. We can’t keep producing the show to the level that we did before, and it was unfair of us to leave you in the dark about it.

We may relaunch the show down the road, if we are able to. If you are interested in finding out when we or if we do, sign up for our newsletter on the right side of this page. You’ll be the first to know.

We won’t be gone completely, though. You can still catch us answering your tech questions every week on Ask Deemable Tech, so be sure to subscribe to that podcast or listen live Thursdays on 89.9 FM WJCT.

If you have any farewell messages for us, leave us a voicemail at 1-888-972-9868 or send an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

We’ve truly appreciated you listening to (and sometimes even enjoying) our shenanigans for the past four years. It’s been a blast.

Now let’s take this baby for one last ride!

http://cpa.ds.npr.org/wjct/audio/2016/05/DeemableTech_2016-05-23.mp3

THE RUN DOWN

Google releases Science Journal app

For those of you who loved doing science projects as a kid, Google recently released a new app that you’ll love.

The app, Science Journal, uses the sensors in your phone to measure and record data in real time, including movement, light and sound.

As Google says on the Science Journal site, “See something you want to measure? How much light is in my room compared to outside? How loud is the dog’s bark compared to my cough? Record your observations in real-time at the press of a button. Explore your environment or measure things you’ve built yourself.”

Among other features, Science Journal lets you record measurements as charts and graphs, and record a voice memo as you’re doing your experiment so you can give extra details about it.

Google has also partnered with the Exploratorium in San Francisco to sell special little kits with materials like sensors your phone doesn’t have to let you measure other stuff.

Science Journal is currently only available for Android.

It’s all about the qubits, baby

Verge is reporting that IBM has made a working quantum computer that anyone in the world can play with.

What does that mean? Glad you asked! Basically, as anyone who has watched any movie from the 90s that involved computers can tell you, computers work by translating ones and zeros into machine understandable language and then translating that into human language and user interfaces. Quantum computers use ones, zeros and both at the same time.

Now the question is, what to do with that. We’ve built an entire industry out of a binary system, and now that we have the capability to expand it to a trinary or “ternary” system, the question is how to use it. So, IBM has opened it to the public for research and experimentation because basically the only people who understand what we just said are scientists.

Google says hello to Allo and Duo

One area where Google has long lagged behind competitors like Apple and Facebook has been in messaging. Rather than having a single, unified messaging app, Google has introduced numerous messaging systems like Gchat, Google Hangouts, and the default Android text-messaging app.

This week at Google’s I/O event, the company announced two new messaging apps, Allo and Duo. Allo is for text messaging, and includes Google bot technology which offers up auto-responses to messages based on things you usually type.

Duo, meanwhile, is a 1-on-1 video chat app. It is optimized to work even in low-bandwidth situations.

Both apps support end-to-end encryption, however, controversially, it will not be enabled be default. Some think this might be because it would impede their ability to offer features like the auto response bot.

All-glass iPhone?

We couldn’t do a final episode of the podcast without Ray talking about iPhones, could we?

Forbes is reporting that the iPhone 8 could lose the unibody aluminium case for an all glass one. No, you didn’t read that incorrectly, the next iPhone is the presumptively going to be coined the “7”, but this rumor is about the iPhone 8.

The glass case is expected to wrap around the entire device and have no bezel as a result.

And apparently the entire front of the phone will be screen. The front facing camera, touch ID sensor, speaker and proximity sensor will somehow all be behind the screen.

Android apps coming to Chromebooks

The Google Play Store is coming to Chromebooks. Along with every single Android app!

As Ars Technica puts it, everything “from Microsoft Word to Hearthstone to Firefox will be able to run on Chrome OS without noticeable performance penalties.”

That’s the pretty great stuff. Here’s the asterisk: Google has released a compatibility list for this amazing new feature and it basically excludes any Chromebook older than two years old. This even includes Google’s souped-up and overpriced Pixel Chromebook.

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