Technology

We’re still seeing short or no supply of PlayStation 5 consoles at many retailers and going weeks between new nationwide restocks. Hopefully, this summer will prove more fruitful, and a good (though small) sign is that Walmart has a PS5 event coming up tomorrow. If you’re a Walmart Plus subscriber, you will have the chance to queue up for a standard $499 disc drive-equipped PlayStation 5 Thursday, June 2nd at 3PM ET. This is yet another restock that’s exclusive to paying Walmart Plus members, though, since we have advance notice, you have plenty of time to pay the minimum $12.95 for one month of membership ahead of the drop. Yes, you get other perks from Walmart, like free deliveries, but we’re ultimately just paying to play the restock game. Though, remember that you can always cancel the...

Just a few months after Twitter spent $40 million to acquire TweetDeck in 2011, it launched new HTML5 apps for the browser, Windows, and Mac. Now, with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter still looming, and an edit button incoming, the web browser version will be all that’s left. Twitter shut down TweetDeck’s Windows app in 2016, versions for iOS, Android, and Adobe Air went away in 2013, and now the Mac version is set to disappear after July 1st. In a tweet, the team said the change is happening “to focus on making TweetDeck even better and testing our new Preview.” Twitter power users who use the app to monitor different feeds of information got the message via a banner notification this morning. Twitter has been publicly testing an overhauled version of TweetDeck since last year and is appa...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Just a few months after Twitter spent $40 million to acquire TweetDeck in 2011, it launched new HTML5 apps for the browser, Windows, and Mac. Now, with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter still looming, and an edit button incoming, the web browser version will be all that’s left. Twitter shut down TweetDeck’s Windows app in 2016, versions for iOS, Android, and Adobe Air went away in 2013, and now the Mac version is set to disappear after July 1st. In a tweet, the team said the change is happening “to focus on making TweetDeck even better and testing our new Preview.” Twitter power users who use the app to monitor different feeds of information got the message via a banner notification this morning. Twitter has been publicly testing an… Continue rea...

On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images — or animated sequences of images — anywhere. The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes. Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too. “Imagine we’re in a parallel universe and every movie ever shot was shot in color, but every human being was watching in black and white,” says Looking Glass co-founder and CEO Shawn Frayne. “That’s the situation we’re in with 3D.” He says that if you add up all the CG movies, video game screenshots, 3D models, and portrait mode photos — and, yes, NFTs — there are hundreds of trillions of pieces of 3D content that we only ever experience in 2D. That’s why ...

At the risk of confusion: this is a GIF of a Block. | Image by Nikki Chan / GIF by The Verge On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images — or animated sequences of images — anywhere. The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes. Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too. “Imagine we’re in a parallel universe and every movie ever shot was shot in color, but every human being was watching in black and white,” says Looking Glass co-founder and CEO Shawn Frayne. “That’s the situation we’re in with 3D.” He says that if you add up all the CG movies, video game screenshots, 3D models, and portrait mode photos — and, yes, NFTs — there are ...

Discord is enabling a new dedicated text chat feature for voice channels. Users of the platform can take advantage of the new feature, aptly named Text Chat in Voice Channels, by clicking on a new chat bubble icon for the voice channel they are participating in. The feature is a welcome quality of life change, similar to the chat window in Zoom calls that many are used to in this day and age. All non-community servers have Text Chat in Voice Channels enabled by default, while servers that have community enabled (under Server Settings > Community) have a period of time to either opt in or disable it from ever going live. If no action is taken, the feature will enable automatically on all servers by June 15th. Demonstration of Text Chat in Voice Channels.Image: Discord Previously, Discord...

Discord is enabling a new dedicated text chat feature for voice channels. Users of the platform can take advantage of the new feature, aptly named Text Chat in Voice Channels, by clicking on a new chat bubble icon for the voice channel they are participating in. The feature is a welcome quality of life change, similar to the chat window in Zoom calls that many are used to in this day and age. All non-community servers have Text Chat in Voice Channels enabled by default, while servers that have community enabled (under Server Settings > Community) have a period of time to either opt in or disable it from ever going live. If no action is taken, the feature will enable automatically on all servers by June 15th. Demonstration of Text Chat in Voice Channels.Image: Discord Previously, Discord...

Focusrite, the British manufacturer of audio interfaces and recording tools, is introducing a new line of devices designed for home podcast recording. The Vocaster One and Vocaster Two take the key parts of Focusrite’s popular interfaces and tailor them to amateur podcasters and other home audio creators. Focusrite’s Scarlett line of audio interfaces has been a consumer standard over the past few years for podcasters who need to plug XLR microphones into their computer (to the point where I saw one in the trailer for a movie about a podcast just last week). But even as it’s become a hit in the podcast world, Focusrite has mostly marketed itself as a company for musicians (the tagline on its website is “We believe in enriching peoples’ lives through music”), and its interfaces have traditio...

Focusrite, the British manufacturer of audio interfaces and recording tools, is introducing a new line of devices designed for home podcast recording. The Vocaster One and Vocaster Two take the key parts of Focusrite’s popular interfaces and tailor them to amateur podcasters and other home audio creators. Focusrite’s Scarlett line of audio interfaces has been a consumer standard over the past few years for podcasters who need to plug XLR microphones into their computer (to the point where I saw one in the trailer for a movie about a podcast just last week). But even as it’s become a hit in the podcast world, Focusrite has mostly marketed itself as a company for musicians (the tagline on its website is “We believe in enriching peoples’ lives through music”), and its interfaces have traditio...

Volvo will be the latest automaker to tap into the graphical prowess of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. The Swedish automaker said it will partner with the Fortnite creator to bring “photorealistic visualization” into its next generation of electric vehicles. The crux of the Volvo / Epic partnership will be the “human-machine interface” (HMI), which, in the context of vehicle ownership, is another way to describe the way car owners interact with their vehicle’s software. Volvo says that Epic will help build a platform on which the automaker’s engineers can design software that will improve the HMI while also maintaining levels of safety that Volvo has staked much of its reputation on. “This technology gives us the capability to create responsive, really high quality visuals that we can play wit...