Apple shows iOS 9’s major upgrades, from multitasking to picture-in-picture

Major changes are coming to our iPads, from the way we select text, to the way we interact with our favorite apps and play videos.Speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi showcased an updated version of iOS 9 that included a few new features designed specifically with tablet users in mind.MORE FROM WWDC: Apple's El Capitan OS X 10.11 to bring natural language search, other enhancementsLet’s start with QuickType, an enhancement to the iPad’s onscreen keyboard that includes new shortcuts and turns into a trackpad when you place two fingers on it. The trackpad can be used to select text, move objects around, and generally combine the convenience of touch controls and the precision of a mouse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple shows iOS 9’s major upgrades, from multitasking to picture-in-picture

Major changes are coming to our iPads, from the way we select text, to the way we interact with our favorite apps and play videos.Speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi showcased an updated version of iOS 9 that included a few new features designed specifically with tablet users in mind.MORE FROM WWDC: Apple's El Capitan OS X 10.11 to bring natural language search, other enhancementsLet’s start with QuickType, an enhancement to the iPad’s onscreen keyboard that includes new shortcuts and turns into a trackpad when you place two fingers on it. The trackpad can be used to select text, move objects around, and generally combine the convenience of touch controls and the precision of a mouse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Most SDN OpEx benefits can be realized by automating existing use cases, Cisco says

As Senior Director of Technical Marketing and Solutions Engineering at Cisco, Frank D’Agostino leads the development and technical go-to-market strategy for Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the company’s portfolio of Software Defined Networking tools. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently spoke with D’Agostino about what the company is learning as customers adopt SDN. (D’Agostino was formerly VP of WW Technical Operations for Nicira Networks, the company VMware bought to drive its SDN strategy.) Is there a profile emerging of what a typical ACI customer looks like in terms of the types of challenges they’re trying to address?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple will let developers build native apps for its Watch with new update

Developers will be able to create applications that run natively on the Apple watch using a new version of the wearable device’s operating system announced Monday. CEO Tim Cook gave the announcement a brief mention during his introduction to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote at San Francisco’s Moscone West conference center. His proclamation drew cheers from the audience of developers, who will be able to do more with the Apple Watch than they could at the time of the device’s launch in April. It’s an improvement to the current state of Apple’s Watch OS, which currently requires users have their iPhones on and within range in order to work with third party apps. That limitation has been criticized by both developers and reviewers alike, since it reduces the Watch’s utility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Live 2015 – Day 1

  It has been an interesting start to Cisco Live 2015 this year.  It is nice to see everyone refreshing friendships between people that we have not seen since San Francisco, if not longer.  It is great to see many of the old (guess that what happens as years pass) faces that I have seen over […]

The post Cisco Live 2015 – Day 1 appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.

How to watch the WWDC livestream on Windows and Android

With WWDC slated to begin in less than an hour now, Apple will be providing live streams of what promises to be an exciting event. That said, live streaming will only be officially supported on either iOS devices or Macs. Which is to say, Windows or Android users who want to keep tabs on what Apple is announcing today are out of luck.Or so you might have thought.As it turns out, there is a clever way for Windows and Android users to tune in to Apple's live presentation today.Here's how it works.Download the popular VLC media player app to your computer or your smartphone. The desktop link is here while the Android link is here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DEVNET-1001 – Coding 101

How to Call REST APIs from a REST Client and Python

Presenter: Matt (didn’t catch last name, sorry)


I was late to this session because of wonderful San Diego traffic :-/

A walk-through of using the REST API on APIC-EM.

http://learninglabs.cisco.com – sample code, docs

Postman – plugin for Chrome browser to craft, send, receive API commands over HTTP using a nice graphical interface. Helpful for building and testing queries and also viewing the raw output from the controller that you’re querying. Is there an equivalent for Firefox?

APIC-EM docs fully cover the API. Methods, variables, etc.

“Requests” library in Python – simplifies the CRUD operations in Python.

When you’re in the lab, verifying the SSL cert of your controller (in your code) might be optional. Don’t bring that into prod code. Get a proper cert and have your code validate the cert.

Other references:

  • http://developer.cisco.com
  • http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book
  • http://api.jquery.com
  • http://codeacademy.com/tracks/python

Copyright Joel Knight. All Rights Reserved.
www.packetmischief.ca

Life gets tougher for alternative mobile OSes Tizen, Firefox and Ubuntu

The future doesn’t look very bright right now for alternative mobile operating systems Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu.It’s always been difficult to attract developers to these platforms, and now smartphones powered by the OSes are also falling behind affordable Android devices on hardware specs. So not only must their users put up with a smaller selection of apps, but also with less powerful devices.Struggling to compete with Apple in the high-end of the smartphone market, the Android camp has increasingly turned its attention to mid-range and low-end products. While this has been good for consumers looking for more affordable products, it has turned up the competitive heat on Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Researchers seek to harvest radio waves for extra smartphone battery power

All of the recent hoop-la about extending smartphone battery life with special metals, using graphite batteries to charge a device in seconds, and even power-reducing microprocessors, could well be moot.Researchers at Ohio State University think that the way to extend battery life is not by improving battery tech—something we've found hard to do in comparison with other tech innovations—but by using the existing energy that's already found in the device that goes to waste.The reason: the radio signals emitted by a smartphone are a form of power.So harvest the stray signals, convert it all to DC, and squirt it back into the phone in the form of electricity, the researchers say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways Apple should reinvent the iPad

After enormous early success, Apple's iPad and its myriad competitors and imitators are facing a bit of an identity crisis. As laptops get smaller and lighter and smartphones get bigger and more powerful, tablet sales are slowing. According to IDC, the global 2015 tablet market will be 221.8 million units in 2015, down 3.8% from 2014.That's still a lot of tablets, of course, but the devices are increasingly seen as "nice-to-have" complements to smartphones for everyday use and awkward substitutes for a PC when you have to do real work. If tablets are going to regain their place at the center of mobile computing, something has to change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: The Apple Watch after a month of use (video)

Every once in a while, there comes a bit of tech that lets you do what you're already doing, but in simpler and more effective ways. After using the Apple Watch for a month, I've decided that the watch is that kind of product. If you're already in the Apple ecosystem, chances are that you'll want one.The design of the watch is typical Apple minimalism: A simple square of stainless steel, aluminum, or gold measuring 1.65 x 1.41 x 0.41 in. for the 42mm versions and 1.52 x 1.31 x 0.41 in. for the 38mm version. Weight varies by model and materials, ranging from 2.43 oz. for the 42mm Edition to .88 oz for the 38mm Sport. All models feature a capacitive multitouch Retina display with Force Touch technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to use Google Now cards: 7 tips for managing what they show you, when and why

Google Now and its “cards”—those bite-sized alerts, reminders, and personalized recommendations—are so prescient, they’re positively spooky. One such card might tell you that today’s the birthday of a close friend, while another might point out a news article that it somehow knew you’d want to click.Google Now cards may also alert you to traffic jams on the way home, thunderstorms in tomorrow’s forecast, that dinner rezzie you made for Friday, a thrilling victory by your favorite baseball team, or a hot new bistro in your neck of the woods.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Google Graveyard: Here's what Google has killed So, what’s going on here? Is Google Now reading our minds or something? Can these Google Now cards be controlled—or stopped?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Memory scraping malware targets Oracle Micros point-of-sale customers

A new malware program designed to steal payment card details from point-of-sale (PoS) systems is targeting businesses using Oracle Micros products.Micros, which was acquired by Oracle last year, develops front and back office customer service systems that are popular in the hospitality, food and retail industries. Its technology is used at over 330,000 customer sites in 180 countries, according to the company.Security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro recently came across a highly configurable memory scraping malware program that they dubbed MalumPoS.This kind of program monitors the memory of other processes for payment card track data—the information that’s encoded on the magnetic stripe of payment cards and which can be used to clone them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco denies MPLS may leave

Cisco says reports that its star spin-in engineers – Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, aka “MPLS” – may leave the company this year are untrue. Speculation arose last week during Cisco’s top level management makeover that some or all of MPLS might leave after the departure of CEO John Chambers, and certain vesting and bonus milestones are reached in September.Cisco at first had no comment on the future of MPLS at Cisco while noting that incentives tied to their most recent spin-in, Insieme Networks, run through Cisco’s fiscal year 2017, which ends in July 2016. Once that response was published, Cisco followed up with a sterner denial in an e-mailed statement:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Architect or Designer?

Are you an architect or designer? What’s the difference? A reader asked this last week in email — my (probably) less than perfect response.

First, we have to dispense with this objection — network people aren’t “architects” in the first place. Nor are they “engineers.” Okay, so… A challenge: what else would you call someone who designs and builds things? When someone says, “You’re not a real architect, because you don’t build buildings, and you’re not held responsible for your work,” I tend to reply, “Why are you talking to me if I don’t exist?”

I’ve probably spent a lot more time than most people thinking about what the difference between design and architecture is, as it was a major issue when the CCDE and CCAr were split into two certifications (long ugly story — but then again, whenever marketing is involved, it normally is). With the help of some psychos (psychometricians, actually, but saying you worked with psychos for seven years to develop certification just sounds cooler somehow), we came up with some differentiators that I think are useful.

The difference is in focus, not task — the designer focuses on a solution to a narrower engineering problem, Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, June 8

South Korean team wins DARPA bot battleSouth Korea’s Team Kaist took the top honors in the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals on Saturday after a two-and-a-half-year battle. The group won a $2 million prize in the competition among 24 teams of roboticists from around the world, Computerworld reports. Their nearly six-foot-tall, 176-pound humanoid robot finished all eight tasks in the course in just 44 minutes and 28 seconds.Apple Pay for UK, streaming music to debut at WWDCApple is expanding the reach of its mobile payments system, with Apple Pay slated for launch in the U.K. in a couple of months, the Telegraph reports. The newspaper cited sources saying that the news will break at the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday, one of a number of announcements planned for the event. The CEO of Sony Music shocked no one this past weekend by confirming that Apple will unveil a streaming music service at WWDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here