Month: January 2016

Independence sits atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON—It was the bitterest of pills for Houston, the home of human spaceflight. This is the city Neil Armstrong hailed, by name, after the lunar module reached the surface of the Moon. And more than that, however, thousands of technicians, engineers, and flight directors had managed the space shuttle program from Houston for three decades. They designed the shuttle, tested it, and operated it. They loved those vehicles and mourned when 14 neighbors lost their lives during two accidents.

And then, in April 2011, the city of astronauts learned the bitter truth. The retiring space shuttles would go to museums in Washington, DC, New York, and Los Angeles plus a visitor’s center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Houston’s prize? A pair of flown space shuttle seats.

For the city and more specifically Space Center Houston, the official visitor’s center for Johnson Space Center that had made a bid for a shuttle, it was a humbling moment. “We are really disheartened,” the visitor center’s president, Richard Allen, said at the time.

Banish your car's stock infotainment system to the background with CarPlay. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

If you buy a car today, it will probably come with some kind of touchscreen computer onboard. These are basically embedded tablet computers that run some kind of operating system, but rather than coming from Apple, Google, or Microsoft, the software comes from car manufacturers and their suppliers. Car companies don't have a ton of experience when it comes to software, so the integrated computers generally aren't designed very well. They also never have the app ecosystem we've come to expect from smartphones and tablets, so it's no surprise that many people still prefer using their smartphones over the in-car option.

Traditional software companies are getting a foothold in cars, though. We already reviewed Android Auto, and recently we got to spend some time with Apple's CarPlay. CarPlay seeks to combine the benefits of the in-car system—namely the big, bright touchscreen—with the design, apps, and functionality of iOS. Plug an iPhone into a supported vehicle and the stock infotainment system will go away while the iPhone beams an iOS-style interface to the car screen. From our time with CarPlay, this system appears built from the ground up for computing on the go, with an easy-to-use, safety-focused UI, a heavy emphasis on voice commands, and a sliver of the huge iOS app ecosystem.

To run CarPlay in your vehicle, you'll need a compatible car (Apple has a list here) or an aftermarket radio. Phone-wise, you'll need an iPhone 5/5c or newer. CarPlay updates come up fairly frequently, but this is CarPlay as it exists in iOS 9.2.