Epic’s New MetaHuman Tool Lets You Craft Realistic Faces Inside a Browser

Epic Games has announced a new, browser-based software tool powered by its Unreal Engine called the MetaHuman Creator that can craft highly realistic human faces and help power more realistic body movements and facial animations. The Verge reports: Epic says the MetaHuman Creator can be used in conjunction with modern motion capture and animation techniques for creating lifelike movements and human…

Flash Is About To Die, But Classic Flash Games Will Live On

Fast Company’s technology editor harrymcc writes:
After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there’s a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over…

Flash Animations Live Forever At the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. Jason Scott writes in a blog post: Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed. While Ruffle’s compatibility…

China Bans Scratch, MIT’s Programming Language for Kids

China’s enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. From a report: China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch’s website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was…

Google: Jetpack Compose Lets Android Developers Write Apps With ‘Dramatically Less Code’

Google today released the alpha version of Jetpack Compose, its UI toolkit for helping developers “build beautiful UI across all Android platforms, with native access to the platform APIs.” From a report: While an alpha release means it is definitely not production ready, Jetpack Compose promises to let Android developers build apps using “dramatically less code, interactive tools, and intuitive Kotlin…

Chrome 84 Arrives With SameSite Cookie Changes, Web OTP API and Web Animations API

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and Web Animations API, and removes older Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions. First deprecated with Chrome 81 in April, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have now been completely removed with…

Chrome 84 Arrives With SameSite Cookie Changes, Web OTP API and Web Animations

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and Web Animations API, and removes older Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions. […] First deprecated with Chrome 81 in April, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have now been completely removed with Chrome 84. This…

How Should High Schools Teach Computer Science?

A high school computer science teacher claims there’s an “unacknowledged failure” of America’s computer science (CS) classes at the high school and junior high school level. “Visit classrooms and you’ll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor… “Look underneath the celebratory and self-congratulatory…

‘Adobe Flash Is Actually Going to Die’ In 194 Days

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: Three years ago, long after the rise (and fall) of Flash, Adobe announced that its once-ubiquitous multimedia platform was finally going away. But Adobe never provided a specific date for when Flash would reach its end-of-life. Now we know: Adobe Flash is going to officially die on December 31, 2020. While younger folks should be forgiven…