Month: February 2018

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As part of its Mobile World Congress release slate, Google's Flutter SDK is hitting beta 1. Flutter is an open source mobile UI framework that allows developers to make super-fast, cross-platform mobile apps.

"But wait!" you're saying, "Google already has a mobile SDK! It's called 'Android.'" That's correct, but as usual, Google isn't attacking mobile app development with a single solution. It now has two competing mobile app platforms: Android and Flutter.

As a cross-platform SDK, Flutter apps work on iOS and Android. It does a neat trick of kind of sidestepping both OS' UI frameworks. Flutter apps don't directly compile to native Android and iOS apps; they run on the Flutter rendering engine (written in C++) and Flutter Framework (written in Dart, just like Flutter apps), both of which get bundled up with every app, and then the SDK spits out a package that's ready to go on each platform. You get your app, a whole new platform to run the app on, and enough native code to get the Flutter platform running on Android and iOS.

Enlarge / An Uber self-driving car drives down 5th Street on March 28, 2017 in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

On Monday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved new rules that would allow self-driving cars to hit the road without a human behind the wheel, ready to take over at any time.

The new regulations, which take effect as of April 2, will pave the way for companies like Waymo, Uber, GM, and others to continue autonomous vehicle (AV) testing on the roads of the Golden State and likely will lead to the technology becoming mainstream.

In 2014, California was the first state to adopt rules for testing autonomous vehicles on public streets. But many now feel that those regulations were too prescriptive and were not flexible enough to adapt to a technology that is maturing rapidly. As a result, testing programs have flourished in other states, like Arizona.

Enlarge / Sorry to disrupt this dystopian landscape from the game Into the Breach with our praise. But we didn't want you to miss how much we love this game. (credit: Subset Games / Aurich Lawson)

My favorite games—video, board, outdoor, whatever—stand out because of the stories they inadvertently rope me into. And I don't mean pre-written ones. At their best, these games combine otherworldly, world-saving stakes with wild challenges, reasonable ways to overcome them, and a sprinkling of come-from-behind momentum shifts on either side.

I have had the unbelievable pleasure of playing Into the Breach, the newest game from the makers of 2012's indie hit FTL, for a few months. That span of time has been littered with holy-cow story moments in which I was nearly a guardian of the ga... er, universe. I have failed, again and again, to save humanity from an alien-bug scourge. I have clumsily sacrificed dozens of my own robo-suit soldiers by issuing a range of idiotic orders. And I have torn the fabric of time to rewind and try again, always feeling one step closer to mastering this galactic-scale war.

But it's not just the "I can't believe I pulled that off" factor that drives me to recommend this just-one-more-game approach to tactical combat. Into the Breach is just as charming for boiling down similar thrills found in FTL and making them work for pretty much any experience level of computer gamer.

Call it a Starship Troopers version of chess—to describe the delectable future-soldier combat and the way its approachable pieces and systems evolve into something much greater.

Ron Amadeo

NEW YORK—Samsung announced the Galaxy S9 to the world this week, and recently we were able to get our hot little hands on Samsung's latest. The phone is very much a Galaxy S8 with some upgrades; you can get the basic info here.

The thing I was most interested in trying out was the fingerprint reader placement, which is new this year. When Samsung switch to a slim bezel design with the Galaxy S8, the fingerprint reader needed to move to the back. Rather than place it in an easily reachable position, Samsung opted to stick it on the side of the camera module. As a result, the fingerprint reader was difficult to reach from a normal hand position, making the fingerprint reader feel like an afterthought.