Twitter tests News Tab to make scanning headlines easier

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Twitter is always experimenting with new features, A/B testing across the world to figure out the next experience on the platform. It seems that one of those experiments is a special News Tab, according to a report by BuzzFeed. The tab, which sits on the navigation bar of the Twitter app, has already rolled out to users in Japan. It provides a list of headlines from Twitter-approved publishers, designed to help people get the news of the day quickly and easily. The tab appears to be a more content-driven version of the app’s old “Discover” tab, which was discontinued on…

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YouTube’s Web video player just received a sleek transparent update

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If you’ve been watching cat videos on YouTube today, you may have noticed things are looking a bit different. Google appears to be rolling out a transparent video player on its Web interface today. The new video player is a lot sleeker, featuring controls floating on the video itself instead of planted underneath. Besides just looking nicer, the redesign also saves a few vertical pixels of screen real estate. I like these new controls, a lot. http://pic.twitter.com/u2FCqrcorH — Joe Caiati (@JoeCaiati) August 3, 2015 The controls disappear after a second or two of inactivity, and reappear once you point your…

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This Chrome plugin supercharges Airbnb for sightseeing

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Travel app yapQ has launched a Chrome plugin for Airbnb that lets you see a list of noteworthy places near the accommodation you’re checking out as you search. The plugin wasn’t exactly a planned feature; the yapQ team came up with the idea last week at an in-house hackathon and three days later it was submitted and approved by Google. It appears on the right-hand column of the Airbnb accommodation pages, showing up to 20 nearby spots of interest per listing, along with the exact distance (metric or imperial) and a short description. With a clean, non-intrusive design, the plugin…

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Peakon wants to help you keep your best employees by bringing ‘people analytics’ to the masses

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It’s a familiar tale; you join a company that proudly trumpets how much it values its people, only to later discover it’s not really listening to them at all. Regular surveys can help bosses know what their employees think about their working environment, but a new startup called Peakon wants to go further and give firms real, actionable insights that they can use to improve company culture and staff retention. The Copenhagen-based firm has just raised $1 million from a group of investors including Tommy Ahlers (Podio, Zyb); Zendesk co-founders Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour; Doug Monro (Gumtree, Zoopla, Adzuna), and Sunstone Capital.…

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Here are the best excuses to ‘work from home’ according to the internet crowd

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Last week, I wrote about Work From Home: Ninja (WFH: Ninja), a side-project by Christina Ng, that crowd sources ‘working from home’ excuses to tell your boss when you really can’t face the office. The experiment ended up being pretty popular, hitting the top of Hacker News, Product Hunt and /r/InternetIsBeautiful as well as earning pieces on Business Insider and Fortune after we featured it here. All that lovely traffic meant that Ng could make a lot of interesting observations about making a fun Web thing that goes viral, which you can read about in this Medium post, and built a run…

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Future BMWs will spot traffic lights before you do

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Anyone who drives knows the frustration of getting stuck at every red light on the one day that you’re running late. But if you drive a BMW, you might be able to avoid that horrible scenario, thanks to the company’s latest integration. The company has teamed up with the EnLighten app for iOS to help drivers time traffic signals through the BMW iDrive infotainment system. The app shows drivers the status of the nearest traffic lights alongside a real-time prediction of when the light will change. It works by linking up with the city’s traffic management system and combining its data with…

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DU Battery Saver gives you control over your smartphone’s battery life

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This post was brought to you by DU Apps Studio.

As our thirst for dazzling ultra HD screens and beautiful graphics grows, sadly the humble battery supplying these smartphone experiences hasn’t been able to keep up. C’est la vie. But, the clever people at Baidu have realised that it isn’t the size of the battery that counts, it’s how you use it. DU Battery Saver is a free Android app that can instantly find battery-hungry apps, giving you up to 50 percent more battery life. Within 30 seconds of loading the app, it has already identified how much battery life you can save – in my case, an hour. You…

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Frontback lives! The dual-camera selfie app won’t be closing but the founders are leaving

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Last week, Frontback, an app that lets you take a photo with your forward and rear-facing cameras simultaneously, announced that it would be closing on August 15. This, however, is no longer the case according to a recent post from the company: “We just signed an agreement with a partner who believes as much as we do that there’s something incredible with Frontback. This partner is fully committed to make Frontback an even better place to share your moments, we were impressed by how much they understand the platform and we will help the new team to make the transition…

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EVE helps you learn your Mac’s hotkeys as you work, for a price

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There’s a reason that there are so many productivity apps: people are time-poor and need to squeeze a million different tasks into each day, and given that so many people’s working lives are spent at a computer, learning all the hotkeys to navigate it can really save you some time. That’s where Hotkey EVE comes in, a Mac app to help you find all the shortcuts you never knew about. It’s not new, but it is really useful, so worth calling out. There’s no memorizing of lists here, just work away as normal and EVE will help you out by showing…

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