Linked List: December 18, 2019

Wednesday, 18 December 2019

The Next Generation of Xbox Is Just Called Xbox ★

Ryan Gilliam, writing for Polygon:

During The Game Awards 2019, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of Xbox: the Xbox Series X. Or that’s what we and everyone else thought it was called. However, Business Insider recently spoke to a Microsoft representative who confirmed the next generation’s name is simple. Xbox — Series X is the name of the model coming next year.

“The name we’re carrying forward to the next generation is simply Xbox,” said the Microsoft representative. “And at The Game Awards you saw that name come to life through the Xbox Series X.” In a separate quote, the representative told Business Insider: “Similar to what fans have seen with previous generations, the name ‘Xbox Series X’ allows room for additional consoles in the future.”

I would have gone with “Xbox X Xbox” — that way they’d go straight to five X’s in the name.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to Develop Connectivity Standard ★

Apple Newsroom:

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers.

Connected Home over IP = CHIP. A good acronym is a good place to start. I’d love to see this succeed — it’d be so great if connected home devices worked across platforms as well as USB devices do. And let’s face it, right now Siri is on the short end of the stick on that front.

(Conspicuously absent: Microsoft?)

Mac Pro With Afterburner in Action ★

Jonathan Morrison:

To test out the Mac Pro Afterburner acceleration, I initially created a 4K Multi-Cam project with 9 and even 15 streams of 4.5K Pro Res 4444 XQ video which didn’t even break a sweat on the Mac Pro. I figured let’s make an 8K timeline, nah. Let’s make a 16K timeline and the results blew me away.

Impressive results, and a good case that the base model Mac Pro with the Afterburner card could be a hell of a machine for video pros.

The New ML Super Resolution Feature in Pixelmator Pro ★

The Pixelmator blog:

It’s no secret that we’re pretty big fans of machine learning and we love thinking of new and exciting ways to use it in Pixelmator Pro. Our latest ML-powered feature is called ML Super Resolution, released in today’s update, and it makes it possible to increase the resolution of images while keeping them stunningly sharp and detailed. Yes, zooming and enhancing images like they do in all those cheesy police dramas is now a reality!

First, these results are incredibly impressive. I’ve tried it on a few small images and their samples accurately reflect how good this is. There’s a film-like quality to the results that I find visually pleasing beyond the interpolated increase in resolution. Really hard to believe how good these results are.

Second, there is nothing cheesy about Blade Runner.