Month: April 2019

Enlarge / OK, so Visual Studio's always gonna look like Visual Studio. But the eagle-eyed will spot a few differences. There's the menus-in-title bar at the top. There's the message "No issues found" in the status bar, showing that background code analysis has found no problems with my code. Bottom left, to the left of the "Ready" text, is the new background task status indicator that provides more information about things like scanning code to build IntelliSense information. There's a (not visible) GitHub tab in the Solution Explorer panel that's used for the new Pull Request integration. And, of course, there's the Live Share button top right.

A new version of Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) goes live today with the release of Visual Studio 2019 and its cousin Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

Visual Studio is in a bit of a strange position, and it would be fair for developers to ask why this branded release even exists. Visual Studio 2017 has received nine point releases and countless patch releases since its release two years ago. Each of these releases has brought a mix of new features and bug fixes, and for Visual Studio users, the experience feels comparable to that of, say, Google Chrome, where each new version brings a steady flow of incrementally improved features and fixes.

Live Share C++ coding, with Visual Studio 2019 on the left, Visual Studio Code on the right. (credit: Microsoft)

Indeed, this iterative, incremental model is the one that Microsoft is pushing (and using) for services such as Azure DevOps and is comparable to the continuous development we see for Office 365, which is updated monthly, and the free and open source Visual Studio Code, which also has monthly iterations. With this development process in place, one wonders why we'd bother with "Visual Studio 2019" at all; let's just have "Visual Studio" and keep on updating it forever.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a sizable discount on Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon notebook, which is down to $1,063 on the PC maker's store when you use the code "THINKXAPR30" at checkout.

We previously highlighted a similar deal Lenovo ran around President's Day that dropped the X1 Carbon to the same price. As was the case then, Lenovo is advertising a separate coupon code on its site, but the code above actually brings the notebook down by another $80 or so. In any event, while this isn't the absolute cheapest the X1 Carbon has ever been, it's close, and it's still a good price for what we consider a top-tier ultrabook that looks good and is well-suited for getting work done. Normally, the laptop goes for around $1,400.

This price applies to the device's base configuration, which includes a Core i5-8250U chip, 8GB of RAM, and a 1080p panel, but the code can still be applied to higher-spec configs if needed. It also applies to separate ThinkPad X notebooks like the higher-end ThinkPad X1 Extreme, which adds a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, among other upgrades. It's worth remembering that a 7th-gen X1 Carbon is slated to arrive in a few months, but since it'll start around $1,700, the current model should still be a good value at this price.

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  Inbox's new account introduction. I did this April 1—perhaps I was the last person on Earth to see it? [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

We are gathered here today to lay to rest Google Inbox. Google's alternative email client was a radical rethink of how email should work, but as has been the case with many edge-case Google products, the company is opting to pull the plug on Inbox. The scheduled shutdown date is today, and Inbox users will be forced to switch back to Gmail.

But we're not here to mourn Inbox's death; we're here to celebrate its life. Many of the ideas and features of Google Inbox have been spun off across the Google ecosystem, and while there is sadly still no viable replacement for an Inbox-style email client, the spirit of Inbox can live on in the features it inspired in other products. Preserved here for future generations, this is what Google Inbox was like.

Inbox’s innovations

When the Gmail team set out to create Inbox, it totally rethought how an Inbox should work. The team came up with a lot of new ideas, but radically reworking the Gmail UI would open a can of worms apparently nobody on the Gmail team really wanted to touch. (I mean, have you seen the reaction to the comparatively minor Gmail redesign?) The result was Google Inbox: an alternative interface for your Gmail account. It was all your mail, contacts, drafts, and other information from Gmail, just with a UI full of new features and a new design paradigm. Gmail users that loved Gmail could keep using Gmail, but for users that wanted to try a new way of triaging email, Inbox was just a URL away.

There's just three short weeks before Avengers: End Game makes its hotly anticipated premiere, and Marvel is stoking the fires of anticipation with one last teaser, featuring our first glimpse of arch-villain Thanos, who seems more than ready for a rematch.

The first trailer for End Game dropped in December, giving us a glimpse of the Avengers who survived the Snappening, in which Thanos wiped out half of all living beings in the universe with a snap of his fingers, including many of our beloved superheroes. That's about all they could show us without giving too much away, although we did get a scene with Paul Rudd's Scott Lang/Ant-Man showing up, having escaped the quantum realm where he was presumably trapped at the end of Ant-Man and The Wasp.

A second trailer aired during the Super Bowl, using footage from just the first 20 minutes of End Game. We saw the fallen/dusted in rapid succession, in striking black-and-white hues with red highlights. But we also see them finally starting to regroup. Last month, Marvel dropped yet another trailer, taking us back to the origins of the remaining Avengers and introducing Brie Larsen's Carole Danvers (aka, Captain Marvel) into the mix for the first time.