With HTML5 all the rage, Quark has announced that the next generation of its App Studio will enable cloud-based, HTML5-based app development for Apple and Android mobile devices, or for Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
The latest App Studio combines technology from Quark’s acquisition of PressRun and its parent company, Mobile IQ earlier this year, with Quark’s existing digital publishing technology, QuarkXPress and InDesign. PressRun is being retired as a brand. The previous App Studio, included with QuarkXPress 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3, will be renamed Quark AVE Publishing, and will continue to support existing App Studio customers.
Smaller File Size
The company said that the hosted App Studio is the only digital publishing solution for creating customized apps with HTML5, QuarkXPress, InDesign and XML.
App Studio-created apps feature searchable and selectable text, can be bookmarked or shared, and the company said the apps are often a quarter of the file size of apps created with other solutions — potentially saving time for users during downloading. QuarkXPress and InDesign, the company’s flagship products, can be utilized for content creation in the apps.
Shaun Barriball, Vice President of Mobile Products for Quark, said in statement that the intent of App Studio is to “remove the complexity around creating and delivering the best app experiences,” while allowing content creators to employ their favorite design tools and to work within a cloud environment.
Native apps are designed and developed for a specific mobile device platform, so as to optimize performance and access such on-board device capabilities as a camera. Web-based apps are server-based, accessed through a browser, and offer device independence but have a limited ability to utilize the specific capabilities of a device and often provide slower performance.
Hybrid apps, however, use web technologies such as HTML5 and run inside a native container, with a web-to-native layer that provides access to a device’s resources.
A recent report by Forrester noted that native apps offer the highest performance for mobile devices, but that hybrid apps “offer an inexpensive alternative to native apps,” especially for apps where content is frequently modified.
The U.S. Army and DARPA have concluded field tests on next-generation binocular replacements that read human brain signals and have a 91% threat detection success rate. They might just help you control your car with your thoughts too (seriously).
Binoculars on the battlefield are fine, as long as soldiers know what they're looking at. But when a target's not so clear or, say, a shop keeper with a broom could easily be mistaken for an insurgent with an RPG, the eyes--even the conscious, rational mind--might not be the best tool for threat spotting and quick reaction.
So a new system from military think tank DARPA is instead going straight to soldiers' brainwaves to spot real threats--from far away, or amid a crowded landscape.
The concept might sound familiar to science fiction readers: Augmenting human soldiers with brainwave-reading computers. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) is a threat detection system for troops in the field that simultaneously scans warfighters' brainwaves while a camera surveys the area. The binocular replacement system detects a specific kind of brainwave (the P300, which is involved in stimulus evaluation and categorization), combines that info with a camera feed, and processes it all through an algorithm in near-real time to feed back an almost-instant threat assessment. (Think: every cyborg POV shot in every Terminator movie ever made.) Sounds pretty out there, but testing indicates 91% of enemy targets were identified in the field, compared with the 47% spotted by U.S. warfighters in action today who aren't using the new system.
The CT2WS project started in 2008, with the goal of developing next-generation portable visual threat detection devices for use in warzones. The University of California San Diego's bioengineering department and several California biotech and hardware firms partnered with DARPA to develop the brain-scanning enemy detection device.
As currently developed, CT2WS consists of three parts. There is a electroencephalogram (EEG) headset (below) worn by the user which records electrical activity in the brain and sends a ping to an outside computer system when the subconscious evaluates a visual threat.
Additionally, there is a separate 120 megapixel electro-optical video camera with a 120 degree field of view (below).
Lastly, both the camera and EEG unit are connected to a computer system that uses proprietary algorithms to identify potential targets and cue images for review. The software behind CT2WS can be run on a laptop as well, according to DARPA.
HRL Laboratories is a Malibu-based R&D house jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors which worked on CT2WS. One of HRL's specialties is developing cognitive-neural algorithms that allow computers to interpret human thoughts. According to HRL, the end result is far superior to conventional enemy-spotting technologies like binoculars. “CT2WS automatically scans a field of view more than ten times as wide as that is available using standard army binoculars. This is coupled with digital techniques that provide far higher resolution and greater effective visual distance than today's binoculars,” HRL's Deepak Khosla tells Fast Company.
In testing for desert, tropical, and open terrain, CT2WS was able to identify 91% of targets successfully. DARPA is also considering combining the system with a commercial radar--during field tests, the combination of CT2WS and a commercial system, the Cerberus Scout surveillance system, was able to identify 100% of the targets encountered.
The EEG sensor component of CT2WS was developed by San Diego's Quasar. Quasar used special wireless EEG sensors for the project that don't require the use of conductive gels and which don't cause skin abrasion. The lightweight EEG sensors and accompanying headset are small enough to wear under a bike helmet according to Quasar's Walid Soussou. The CT2WS headset is also designed for easy cleaning, and meets the blunt and ballistic impact safety requirements for a military helmet.
DARPA, for their part, is playing up the fact that human and machine can complement each other on the battlefield. Project literature claims that “humans are inherently adapt at detecting the unusual,” while algorithms are successful at detecting commonplace phenomena that are potential indicators of threats or targets--such as birds in flight or tree branches swaying. When the camera and sensor were tested, sensor and cognitive algorithms returned 810 false alarms per hour. However, once a testee began wearing an EEG cap and feeding in results, false alarms dropped to only five per hour.
Development of CT2WS is currently being transitioned from DARPA to the U.S. Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate. According to HRL, the military is interested in CT2WS for situational awareness in reconnaissance, force protection surveillance, and standard infantry tactical fighting. The transfer of CT2WS technology to the U.S. Army indicates that the brain-wave reading binoculars have progressed past testing and into the sweet spot of Pentagon bureaucracy.
Of course, CT2WS also has civilian applications: According to Khosla, HRL (which, again, is partly owned by General Motors) believes that the EEG decoding and cognitive algorithms used by CT2WS can also be used for controlling buttons inside cars or breaking in sudden emergencies--all using, well, human thought.
For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Find Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, on Twitter and Google+.
Alfresco announced its next generation Records Management 2.0 platform, and the updated system now fully integrates with Alfresco Enterprise 4 including more granular controls, mobile access and email features.
As more and more enterprise and even government level IT move to the cloud, tracking documents and records is going along for the ride. Records Management 2.0 is just such a vehicle.
Secure, Mobile Content Management
Alfresco 4 debuted early in 2012 and in June, the company released a cloud based version of its open source CMS. With Records Management 2.0, the cloud based transition is complete. Not every document needs to be available for mobile downloading, of course, but things are moving in that direction with this release.
Records management may not be the sexiest aspect of an IT department's mission, but it's become painfully obvious there's a growing need to keep secure documents protected. One way to do that is to make documents easier to identify and sort.
A new multi-level file plan in Records Management 2.0 allows for creating deeper record structures beyond the main levels as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Additionally, because the system has been redesigned to support Alfresco Enterprise 4, mobile, social and cloud capabilities in the Enterprise CMS can be leveraged as well.
New Features
Records are now simpler to search with easier to define queries, and favorite searches can be saved for records more frequently called upon. With a single file repository, less content needs to be migrated so there's less of a chance of losing information.
Furthermore, there's a Web-based interface and native IMAP support so it's easy to file emails without installing a plugin. RM 2.0 shows up as a mail folder so filing records can easily be done with drag and drop.
For those needing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requirements, Alfresco has included workflow and hold tools like better transparency.
