Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Unity CEO John Riccitiello (credit: Unity)

The recently promised "changes" to Unity's controversial new per-install fee plan for developers could include hard limits based on a company's total revenue and developer self-reporting of installation numbers, according to a new report.

Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier cites a recording of a (threat-delayed) Unity all-hands meeting in reporting that the company is tentatively considering limiting total fees to 4 percent of a game's revenue. That change would potentially ameliorate concerns that some developers could literally bankrupt themselves with games that generate lots of installs but relatively little revenue per player under the currently proposed fee structure.

Bloomberg's report suggests this limit would apply to "customers making over $1 million," and it's not clear how smaller games and developers would be impacted by the potential change. For comparison, Epic's Unreal Engine currently charges a flat 5 percent royalty on all developer revenue after the first $1 million from studios using the engine.

Enlarge (credit: Benjamin Netanyahu on X)

Today, Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu livestreamed a discussion largely focused on the future of AI on Musk's platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

According to The New York Times, the talk was arranged at Musk's suggestion, and some perceived it as an attempt by Musk to seek "political cover at a time of rising antisemitism on X." In return, for Netanyahu, the talk seemingly provided an opportunity to deflect from mass protests against Netanyahu's attempts to weaken Israel's Supreme Court. Instead he could be seen promoting his dedication to turning Israel into a tech leader—and possibly even signal that Musk may consider investing in the country's tech, The Times reported.

The livestreamed event kicked off with a one-on-one between Musk and Netanyahu that attracted more than 735,000 views. While much of the one-on-one did focus on AI—which Musk claimed was "potentially the biggest civilizational threat" and Netanyahu called "a blessing and a curse"—the men also made time to discuss their views on antisemitism and how Musk deals with hate speech on X.

Enlarge / Layers in MS Paint! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria! (credit: Microsoft)

The venerable, equally derided and beloved MS Paint app has been on a roll lately, picking up a major redesign, dark-mode support, better zoom controls, and other fit-and-finish updates all within the last couple of years. But today Microsoft announced that it is finally adding two features that could make the app a bit more useful for power users: support for Photoshop-esque image layers and the ability to open and save transparent PNGs.

If you've never worked in an image editor other than Paint, layers give you the opportunity to decide which elements in an image appear above and below other elements. Say you're working on an image with a blue sky background, an airplane on top of it, and a cloud on top of the sky and the airplane. In an image program without support for layers, adding new elements to an image like this is always destructive—you lose the ability to see and edit the part of the sky that is covered by the plane and the cloud, and the part of the plane that is covered by the cloud. Layers also make it easier to reposition elements in an image, since all the elements you used to make the image are still fully intact.

Support for creating, editing, and saving transparent PNG images goes hand in hand with support for layers, since it's useful to be able to pull a single object out of an existing image so you can put it in a new one. Transparent PNG support goes well with the automated background removal button that Microsoft added to Paint builds earlier this month.

Enlarge / Microscopic view of photonic crystals on the surface of ancient Roman glass. (credit: Giulia Guidetti)

Nature is the ultimate nanofabricator. The latest evidence of that is an unusual shard of ancient Roman glass (dubbed the "wow glass") that boasts a thin, golden-hued patina. Roman glass shards are noteworthy for their iridescent hues of blue, green, and orange—the result of the corrosion process slowly restructuring the glass to form photonic crystals—and this particular shard's shimmering mirror-like gold sheen is a rare example with unusual optical properties, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's yet another example of naturally occurring structural coloration. As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings, soap bubbles, opals, or beetle shells don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured—naturally occurring photonic crystals. In nature, scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects), for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce specific colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

Also known as photonic band-gap materials, photonic crystals are "tunable," which means they are precisely ordered to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. They are used in optical communications as waveguides and switches, as well as in filters, lasers, mirrors, and various anti-reflection stealth devices.

Enlarge / Ars Technica Prime Day coverage for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale. (credit: Simon Nguyen)

We are now in the final day of Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days sale. There's still plenty of deals left on favorites from brands like Apple, Lenovo, Kindle, Dyson, DeWalt, HP, Logitech, Vitamix, and more. If you've been eyeing a new laptop, smartphone, router, or other gear, this likely will be your last chance to snag one on discount for the year as Amazon wraps up its Prime Day event. If you're a PC builder, there are plenty of PC components on sale for Day 2 of Prime Day.

Whether you want to splurge on yourself with a new pair of noise-canceling headphones or a therapeutic massage gun, or you're getting an early start on the holiday shopping season, there's something for everyone. In addition to the curated deals below, we also have an expanded selection of products on sale in our shopping guides to help you find some inspiration during Amazon's massive Prime Day extravanganza:

• Three fantastic TVs you should consider buying during Prime Big Deal Days
• Big Deal Days tech deals that don’t require a Prime membership
• Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale on DeWalt power tools, EDC gear, and more
• The best laptop deals aren’t on Amazon. Here’s where to shop during Prime Big Deal Days
• Upgrade your home office with an ergonomic chair from Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sales
• The best headphones on sale for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days
• The best Amazon Prime Big Deal Days savings on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox games
• The best Apple deals on Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, all in one place
• Top deals on home and kitchen gear for Amazon Prime Day
• Dealmaster: Top Amazon Prime Big Deal Days savings on Legos, Star Wars, and games
• Build your dream desktop with these Prime Day PC components deals
• 25 of the most popular Amazon Prime Day deals with Ars Technica readers

Be sure to check back frequently, as we'll be updating this Dealmaster with new sales throughout the shopping event.

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  The new tvOS home screen in tvOS 17 puts six icons in a row instead of five. It was the most I had noticed about a tvOS update in years. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Consider this a mini-review: Apple is releasing tvOS 17 today, and the update is probably the most useful one that Apple has released since the very early days of tvOS in 2015.

Why? Not because of some stunningly innovative new feature or a great app that tames the tangle of competing streaming services. It's because Apple added an extra column of app icons. There are now six icons in a row instead of five. Revolutionary.

That probably comes across as more sarcastic or cutting than poor tvOS deserves. It is genuinely nice to have that extra column of icons, particularly in the top row where apps can use the carousel that consumes the top half of the Apple TV's home screen.

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Google Domains has registered its last domain. Google announced in July that the service was getting shut down and that it had struck a deal with Squarespace to sell off the existing customer base. Part of that transition process means winding down the existing Google Domains functionality. 9to5Google was the first site to notice that you can no longer buy a domain through the service while it waits for the Google Grim Reaper to arrive.

Google Domain's homepage has a notice explaining that this all apparently went down a few days ago, saying, "On September 7, 2023 Squarespace acquired all domain registrations and related customer accounts from Google Domains. Customers and domains will be transitioned over the next few months." You can still manage existing domains on Google Domains, but that's it.

The Google Domains registration shutdown notice. (credit: Google)

Google Domains has been around since 2015 and spent seven of those years in "beta." The product exited beta status in 2022, only to be killed about a year later. For a while, it was a great service, with a clean, easy-to-use interface that stood in contrast to many domain registrars, especially in the early days.

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 Pro. (credit: Apple)

Improving a device's modularity and repairability isn't just a hobby horse for right-to-repair activists—it can also significantly lower costs when something breaks. Case in point: the iPhone 15 Pro, which is said to pick up some of the same internal changes that Apple made to last year's non-Pro iPhone 14 to make repairs easier.

Replacing the back glass in older iPhone X-style designs previously involved going in through the front of the phone, a tricky and involved process that made it expensive to pay for and extremely difficult to do by yourself. The iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 Pro change this, making it as easy to remove the back of the phone as it is to remove the screen and giving easier access to the battery and other components to boot.

To find the upshot, compare repair estimates on Apple's iPhone Repair & Service page (via MacRumors). Fixing damaged rear glass on an iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max costs you $499 or $549, respectively, if you didn't buy AppleCare+ protection for your phone. That's half of what those models cost to buy brand new. For an iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, that charge falls dramatically, down to $169 or $199.