What Is Object Oriented Programming? The Basics Explained in Layman’s Terms

If you’ve done some beginner programming, or even started to look at different languages, you’ve probably come across the phrase “object-oriented programming” (or “OOP”).

There are all sorts of technical explanations as to what it is, but today we’re going to take a look at defining object-oriented programming in a simple way.

Before We Start: Procedural Languages

To understand what an object-oriented programming language is, you need to understand what it replaced. Early programming languages were procedural—so-called because the programmer would define a very specific set of procedures that the computer would undertake.

In the earliest days, procedures were written on punch cards. Those steps took in data, performed a sequence of actions on that data, then output new data.

Procedural languages worked well for a time (and some are still in use). But when you want to program something beyond a basic sequence of steps, procedural languages can become difficult to manage. That’s where object-oriented programming comes in.

The Object of Object-Oriented Programming

So then, what is object-oriented programming?

The first object-oriented language (generally agreed to be Simula) introduced the idea of objects. Objects are collections of information that are treated as a singular entity.

We’ll dive deeper into what that actually means in a second with an example, but first we have to talk about classes. Classes are sort of like pre-objects. They contain a list of attributes that, when defined, become an object.

Let’s take the example of programming a chess game. We might have a class called Piece. Within Piece, we have a list of attributes:

• Color
• Height
• Shape
• Movement allowed

An object simply defines one particular instance of a thing belonging to that class.

So we could have an object called WhiteQueen. That object would have definitions for all four attributes (white, tall, cylindrical with crenellations, any number of spaces in any direction). It might also have methods or functions.

What makes this so much better than the procedural approach?

In short, object-oriented programming languages (like Java) makes it easier to organize data and code in a way that’s more versatile for larger project.

To discuss it in a bit more detail, we’ll talk about the four basics of object-oriented programming.

Object-Oriented Programming: Abstraction

Just because you want to use something doesn’t mean you need to know how it works. An espresso machine, for example, is complex. But you don’t need to know how it works. You just need to know that when you hit “On,” you’re going to get espresso.

The same is true of objects in object-oriented programming. In our chess example, we may have a move() method. That method could require a lot of data and other methods. It might need the initial position and final position variables. It could use another method for determining whether it’s captured a piece.

But you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that when you tell the piece to move, it moves. That’s abstraction.

Object-Oriented Programming: Encapsulation

Encapsulation is one of the ways that object-oriented programming creates abstraction. Each object is a collection of data that’s treated as a single entity. And within those objects are data—both variables and methods.

The variables within an object are generally kept private, which means other objects and methods can’t access them. Objects can only be affected by using their methods.

A Bishop object might contain several pieces of information. For example, it could have a variable called “position.” That variable is necessary to use the move() method. And, of course, it has a color.

By making the position variable private and the move() method public, a programmer protects the move variable from being affected by anything else. And if the color is a private variable, there’s no way for another object to change it unless there’s a method that allows the change. (Which you probably wouldn’t have, as the color of the piece should remain constant.)

These variables and methods are kept within the Bishop object. Because they’re encapsulated, a programmer could make a change to the structure or contents of the object without worrying about the public interface.

Object-Oriented Programming: Inheritance

In addition to classes, object-oriented programming languages also have sub-classes. These contain all of the attributes from the parent class, but they can also contain other attributes.

In our chess game, the pawn pieces need a method that can turn them into other pieces if they make it to the end of the board. We’ll call it the transformPiece() method.

Not every piece needs the transformPiece() method. So we wouldn’t want to put it in the Piece class. Instead, we can create a sub-class called Pawn. Because it’s a sub-class, it inherits all of the attributes from Piece. So an instance of the sub-class Pawn includes a color, height, shape, and movement allowed.

But it also includes the transformPiece() method. Now we never have to worry about accidentally using that function on a rook. Here’s a technical explanation:

Creating sub-classes also saves a lot of time. Instead of creating new classes for everything, programmers can create a base class and then extend it to new sub-classes when they need to. (However, it’s worth noting that over-reliance on inheritance is bad.)

Object-Oriented Programming: Polymorphism

Polymorphism is a result of inheritance. Fully understanding polymorphism takes some programming knowledge, so we’re just going to stick with the basics here. In short, polymorphism allows programmers to use methods of the same name, but with different objects.

For example, our Piece class might have a move() method that moves a piece one space in any direction. That works for the king piece, but not for anything else. To fix this problem, we can define new move() method in the Rook sub-class that defines movement as an unlimited number of spaces forward, backward, left, or right.

Now, when a programmer invokes the move() method and uses a piece as the argument, the program will know exactly how the piece should move. This saves a ton of time over trying to figure out which of many different methods you should use.

Object-Oriented Programming in a Nutshell

If your head is spinning a bit after those last four definitions, don’t worry too much. Here are the main things you need to remember:

• Object-oriented programming collects information into single entities called objects.
• Each object is a single instance of a class.
• Abstraction hides the inner workings of an object when it’s not necessary to see them.
• Encapsulation stores related variables and methods within objects and protects them.
• Inheritance allows sub-classes to use attributes from parent classes.
• Polymorphism allows objects and methods to deal with multiple different situations with a single interface.

If you can remember those points, you’ll have a good handle on what object-oriented programming is. The four basics of object-oriented programming, as I mentioned, can be a little difficult to get a handle on. But once you start programming, they’ll become more clear.

Remember that we’ve only discussed generalities in this article. Different object-oriented languages will have their own quirks and ways to make things happen. Once you choose the right language for you, you’ll start to learn how it puts OOP principles into practice.

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Learn to Fix Your Own Gadgets With Help From These 5 Sites

Over time, it’s easy to accumulate a lot of devices. But keeping all of them up-to-date and in working order can get expensive.

If you’re not fond of replacing your hardware, or you don’t want to pay the high cost of having an item repaired or replaced, then you may want to take matters into your own hands.

In general, hardware manufacturers don’t make this easy, but there are a handful of sites that can—and they’ll prove invaluable at some point as long as you keep them bookmarked.

1. iFixit

iFixit is the most well-known site of its type. The US-based company started in 2003 after co-founder Kyle Wiens couldn’t find a repair manual for his Apple iBook. iFixit has since grown into a global community.

The site offers video teardowns, so you can see what goes into a product and how to put it back together. Users from all over submit their own guides to fix consumer electronics of all types. You can also buy the parts you need to finish the job.

2. SOSav

SOSav is a similar site based out of the UK. The sheer number of guides isn’t comparable to what you find on iFixit, but what’s here is of a similar quality. The site provides an abundance of photos, and again, you can buy needed parts directly from the site.

Guides are currently available for Apple computers, mobile phones, tablets, digital music players, game consoles, cameras, smartwatches, and virtual reality headsets. If you’re looking to repair a Chromebook or a PC that came with Windows, head back to iFixit.

3. PowerbookMedic

As the name suggests, PowerbookMedic has been around since before Apple called its laptops MacBooks or even iBooks. But that doesn’t mean the site is filled with stagnant, outdated information. It remains a valuable tool for fixing current Apple hardware, including iPhones and iPads.

Don’t have an Apple product? PowerbookMedic isn’t entirely irrelevant to you. The site also has guides for Amazon Kindle devices. So if your Fire tablet or Kindle ereader has fallen on hard times, this resource could help you out.

PowerbookMedic doesn’t only sells parts—it offers to buy your current PC. The company will repair your machine and then sell it refurbished. If the folks at PowerbookMedic can’t make use of a part, they try to recycle what they can.

4. wikiHow

wikiHow provides step-by-step instructions on how to do seemingly anything. But one task it doesn’t do is tell you how to fix exactly the component that’s broken on your model of computer or mobile device. Still, that doesn’t mean its useless for addressing your electronic woes.

Here you can find general guides that may work regardless of your model, such as how to revive a cell phone battery or how to fix an iPod jack. This is general know-how that may serve you well not only with your current headache, but potential future ones as well.

5. YouTube

Many of us have an easier time following along with a video than with text or photos. Fortunately, YouTube is packed with tutorials and clips of people fixing their own PCs. Most of the sites above even upload videos to YouTube.

Lots of the tutorials come from channels that don’t specialize in computer repair. These are often from individuals who at some point need to fix their own devices and decide to share their experience with the internet. Their instructions may be the best you can find when working with less common hardware.

Anyone can upload content to YouTube, so keep that in mind when considering whether to take a video’s advice. You may come across instructions that aren’t reliable, increasing the chance you will break your machine.

Rather Have Someone Else Do the Work?

Fixing a device takes time. You also run the risk of damaging the hardware further, and if anything goes wrong, you’re out of luck. So it makes sense if you don’t want to take that task on yourself.

Many shops exist for precisely this kind of work. Some of the sites listed above will take your gadget and fix it for you, as long as you’re willing to mail it in. PowerbookMedic will repair your Apple device, and it claims an average turnaround time of four business days (though Amazon hardware is not supported). SOSav serves those in the UK via the name Captain Repair.

Other shops offer brick and mortar locations in the US. CPR (Cell Phone Repair) Stores, despite the name, will also fix computers and game consoles at its over 450 locations across the US. uBreakiFix is another larger chain, with nearly 400 locations. iFixandRepair appears in 17 states.

At the rate businesses are appearing, there’s bound to be a smaller, local option somewhere in your nearest metropolitan area. Just make sure you avoid repair and tech support scams!

What If You Hit a Roadblock?

Some companies make their products hard to repair. They may design hardware to require tools that only company employees have. They may also refuse to create or provide instruction manuals to consumers or repair shops.

In some cases, you can get around this issue by buying from a different company. But sometimes there’s no other option, or the competition engages in the same practices. This is why people have come together to demand the right to repair.

If you live in the US and view having the ability to fix hardware as a right, check out repair.org, the website of the Repair Association. You may also want to check out iFixit.org, the activist side of iFixit, which provides plenty of relevant links and other resources.

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The 12 Best Reference Apps to Look Up Anything While On the Go

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world class service.

Maps needs fixing.

Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so It’s re-building the maps part of Maps.

It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.

Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.

This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been 4 years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.

“Since we introduced this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investment in getting the map up to par,” says Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who now owns Maps in an interview last week.  “When we launched, a lot of it was all about directions and getting to a certain place. Finding the place and getting directions to that place. We’ve done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently. All of those things over the past six years.”

But, Cue says, Apple has room to improve on the quality of Maps, something that most users would agree on, even with recent advancements.

“We wanted to take this to the next level,” says Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.”

In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and over a dozen Apple Maps team members at its mapping headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in a way that aligned with Apple’s very public stance on user privacy.

If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of building its own maps from scratch before it launched Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of Maps at all. Given that the future of mobile devices was becoming very clear, it knew that mapping would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its devices from photos to directions to location services provided to apps. Decision made, Apple plowed ahead, building a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data brokers. The result was underwhelming.

Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it signed on a bunch of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data.

It wasn’t enough.

“We decided to do this just over four years ago. We said, “Where do we want to take Maps? What are the things that we want to do in Maps? We realized that, given what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves,” says Cue.

Because Maps are so core to so many functions, success wasn’t tied to just one function. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and walking — but also as a utility used by apps for location services and other functions.

Cue says that Apple needed to own all of the data that goes into making a map, and to control it from a quality as well as a privacy perspective.

There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data.

Cue points to the proliferation of devices running iOS, now numbering in the millions, as a deciding factor to shift its process.

“We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the way that it was being done — we could improve things significantly, and improve them in different ways,” he says. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the map faster based on the data and the things that we’re seeing, as opposed to driving again or getting the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things?”

I query him on the rapidity of Maps updates, and whether this new map philosophy means faster changes for users.

“The truth is that Maps needs to be [updated more], and even are today,” says Cue. “We’ll be doing this even more with our new maps, [with] the ability to change the map real-time and often. We do that every day today. This is expanding us to allow us to do it across everything in the map. Today, there’s certain things that take longer to change.

“For example, a road network is something that takes a much longer time to change currently. In the new map infrastructure, we can change that relatively quickly. If a new road opens up, immediately we can see that and make that change very, very quickly around it. It’s much, much more rapid to do changes in the new map environment.”

So a new effort was created to begin generating its own base maps, the very lowest building block of any really good mapping system. After that, Apple would begin layering on living location data, high resolution satellite imagery and brand new intensely high resolution image data gathered from its ground cars until it had what it felt was a ‘best in class’ mapping product.

There is only really one big company on earth who owns an entire map stack from the ground up: Google.

Apple knew it needed to be the other one. Enter the vans.

Apple vans spotted

Though the overall project started earlier, the first glimpse most folks had of Apple’s renewed efforts to build the best Maps product was the vans that started appearing on the roads in 2015 with ‘Apple Maps’ signs on the side. Capped with sensors and cameras, these vans popped up in various cities and sparked rampant discussion and speculation.

The new Apple Maps will be the first time the data collected by these vans is actually used to construct and inform its maps. This is their coming out party.

Some people have commented that Apple’s rigs look more robust than the simple GPS + Camera arrangements on other mapping vehicles — going so far as to say they look more along the lines of something that could be used in autonomous vehicle training.

Apple isn’t commenting on autonomous vehicles, but there’s a reason the arrays look more advanced: they are.

Earlier this week I took a ride in one of the vans as it ran a sample route to gather the kind of data that would go into building the new maps. Here’s what’s inside.

In addition to a beefed up GPS rig on the roof, four LiDAR arrays mounted at the corners and 8 cameras shooting overlapping high-resolution images – there’s also the standard physical measuring tool attached to a rear wheel that allows for precise tracking of distance and image capture. In the rear there is a surprising lack of bulky equipment. Instead, it’s a straightforward Mac Pro bolted to the floor, attached to an array of solid state drives for storage. A single USB cable routes up to the dashboard where the actual mapping capture software runs on an iPad.

While mapping, a driver…drives, while an operator takes care of the route, ensuring that a coverage area that has been assigned is fully driven and monitoring image capture. Each drive captures thousands of images as well as a full point cloud (a 3D map of space defined by dots that represent surfaces) and GPS data. I later got to view the raw data presented in 3D and it absolutely looks like the quality of data you would need to begin training autonomous vehicles.

More on why Apple needs this level of data detail later.

When the images and data are captured, they are then encrypted on the fly immediately and recorded on to the SSDs. Once full, the SSDs are pulled out, replaced and packed into a case which is delivered to Apple’s data center where a suite of software eliminates private information like faces, license plates and other info from the images. From the moment of capture to the moment they’re sanitized, they are encrypted with one key in the van and the other key in the data center. Technicians and software that are part of its mapping efforts down the pipeline from there never see unsanitized data.

This is just one element of Apple’s focus on the privacy of the data it is utilizing in New Maps.

Probe data and Privacy

Throughout every conversation I have with any member of the team throughout the day, privacy is brought up, emphasized. This is obviously by design as it wants to impress upon me as a journalist that it’s taking this very seriously indeed, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s evidently built in from the ground up and I could not find a false note in any of the technical claims or the conversations I had.

Indeed, from the data security folks to the people whose job it is to actually make the maps work well, the constant refrain is that Apple does not feel that it is being held back in any way by not hoovering every piece of customer-rich data it can, storing and parsing it.

The consistent message is that the team feels it can deliver a high quality navigation, location and mapping product without the directly personal data used by other platforms.

“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it —in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the ‘ground truth’ data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this ‘probe data’ sent back from iPhones.

Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows who that ID refers to. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level.

Because Apple’s business model does not rely on it serving, say, an ad for a Chevron on your route to you, it doesn’t need to even tie advertising identifiers to users.

Any personalization or Siri requests are all handled on-board by the iOS device’s processor. So if you get a drive notification that tells you it’s time to leave for your commute, that’s learned, remembered and delivered locally, not from Apple’s servers.

That’s not new, but it’s important to note given the new thing to take away here: Apple is flipping on the power of having millions of iPhones passively and actively improving their mapping data in real time.

In short: traffic, real-time road conditions, road systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a lot better in Apple Maps.

The secret sauce here is what Apple calls probe data. Essentially little slices of vector data that represent direction and speed transmitted back to Apple completely anonymized with no way to tie it to a specific user or even any given trip. It’s reaching in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, giving it a holistic, real-time picture without compromising user privacy.

If you’re driving, walking or cycling, your iPhone can already tell this. Now if it knows you’re driving it can also send relevant traffic and routing data in these anonymous slivers to improve the entire service. This only happens if your maps app has been active, say you check the map, look for directions etc. If you’re actively using your GPS for walking or driving, then the updates are more precise and can help with walking improvements like charting new pedestrian paths through parks — building out the map’s overall quality.

All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into location services and can be toggled off using the maps location toggle in the Privacy section of settings.

Apple says that this will have a near zero effect on battery life or data usage, because you’re already using the ‘maps’ features when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities.

From the point cloud on up

But maps cannot live on ground truth and mobile data alone. Apple is also gathering new high resolution satellite data to combine with its ground truth data for a solid base map. It’s then layering satellite imagery on top of that to better determine foliage, pathways, sports facilities, building shapes and pathways.

After the downstream data has been cleaned up of license plates and faces, it gets run through a bunch of computer vision programming to pull out addresses, street signs and other points of interest. These are cross referenced to publicly available data like addresses held by the city and new construction of neighborhoods or roadways that comes from city planning departments.

But one of the special sauce bits that Apple is adding to the mix of mapping tools is a full on point cloud that maps the world around the mapping van in 3D. This allows them all kinds of opportunities to better understand what items are street signs (retro-reflective rectangular object about 15 feet off the ground? Probably a street sign) or stop signs or speed limit signs.

It seems like it could also enable positioning of navigation arrows in 3D space for AR navigation, but Apple declined to comment on ‘any future plans’ for such things.

Apple also uses semantic segmentation and Deep Lambertian Networks to analyze the point cloud coupled with the image data captured by the car and from high-resolution satellites in sync. This allows 3D identification of objects, signs, lanes of traffic and buildings and separation into categories that can be highlighted for easy discovery.

The coupling of high resolution image data from car and satellite, plus a 3D point cloud results in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal reconstructions of city streets with textures in place. This is massively higher resolution and easier to see, visually. And it’s synchronized with the ‘panoramic’ images from the car, the satellite view and the raw data. These techniques are used in self driving applications because they provide a really holistic view of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho view can do even more for human viewers of the data by allowing them to ‘see’ through brush or tree cover that would normally obscure roads, buildings and addresses.

This is hugely important when it comes to the next step in Apple’s battle for supremely accurate and useful Maps: human editors.

Apple has had a team of tool builders working specifically on a toolkit that can be used by human editors to vet and parse data, street by street. The editor’s suite includes tools that allow human editors to assign specific geometries to flyover buildings (think Salesforce tower’s unique ridged dome) that allow them to be instantly recognizable. It lets editors look at real images of street signs shot by the car right next to 3D reconstructions of the scene and computer vision detection of the same signs, instantly recognizing them as accurate or not.

Another tool corrects addresses, letting an editor quickly move an address to the center of a building, determine whether they’re misplaced and shift them around. It also allows for access points to be set, making Apple Maps smarter about the ‘last 50 feet’ of your journey. You’ve made it to the building, but what street is the entrance actually on? And how do you get into the driveway? With a couple of clicks, an editor can make that permanently visible.

“When we take you to a business and that business exists, we think the precision of where we’re taking you to, from being in the right building,” says Cue. “When you look at places like San Francisco or big cities from that standpoint, you have addresses where the address name is a certain street, but really, the entrance in the building is on another street. They’ve done that because they want the better street name. Those are the kinds of things that our new Maps really is going to shine on. We’re going to make sure that we’re taking you to exactly the right place, not a place that might be really close by.”

Water, swimming pools (new to Maps entirely), sporting areas and vegetation are now more prominent and fleshed out thanks to new computer vision and satellite imagery applications. So Apple had to build editing tools for those as well.

Many hundreds of editors will be using these tools, in addition to the thousands of employees Apple already has working on maps, but the tools had to be built first, now that Apple is no longer relying on third parties to vet and correct issues.

And the team also had to build computer vision and machine learning tools that allow it to determine whether there are issues to be found at all.

Anonymous probe data from iPhones, visualized, looks like thousands of dots, ebbing and flowing across a web of streets and walkways, like a luminescent web of color. At first, chaos. Then, patterns emerge. A street opens for business, and nearby vessels pump orange blood into the new artery. A flag is triggered and an editor looks to see if a new road needs a name assigned.

A new intersection is added to the web and an editor is flagged to make sure that the left turn lanes connect correctly across the overlapping layers of directional traffic. This has the added benefit of massively improved lane guidance in the new Apple Maps.

Apple is counting on this combination of human and AI flagging to allow editors to first craft base maps and then also maintain them as the ever changing biomass wreaks havoc on roadways, addresses and the occasional park.

Here there be Helvetica

Apple’s new Maps, like many other digital maps, display vastly differently depending on scale. If you’re zoomed out, you get less detail. If you zoom in, you get more. But Apple has a team of cartographers on staff that work on more cultural, regional and artistic levels to ensure that its Maps are readable, recognizable and useful.

These teams have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there — in the best traditions of Apple pursuits that intersect the technical with the artistic.

The maps need to be usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive goals on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the US, it is very common to have maps that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, however, the maps are absolutely packed with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users.

This is the department of details. They’ve reconstructed replicas of hundreds of actual road signs to make sure that the shield on your navigation screen matches the one you’re seeing on the highway road sign. When it comes to public transport, Apple licensed all of the type faces that you see on your favorite subway systems, like Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order that you’re going to see them on the platform signs.

It’s all about reducing the cognitive load that it takes to translate the physical world you have to navigate through into the digital world represented by Maps.

Bottom line

The new version of Apple Maps will be in preview next week with just the Bay Area of California going live. It will be stitched seamlessly into the ‘current’ version of Maps, but the difference in quality level should be immediately visible based on what I’ve seen so far.

Better road networks, more pedestrian information, sports areas like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more land cover including grass and trees represented on the map as well as buildings, building shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through.

Search is also being revamped to make sure that you get more relevant results (on the correct continents) than ever before. Navigation, especially pedestrian guidance, also gets a big boost. Parking areas and building details to get you the last few feet to your destination are included as well.

What you won’t see, for now, is a full visual redesign.

“You’re not going to see huge design changes on the maps,” says Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would cause a lot of confusion.”

Apple Maps is getting the long awaited attention it really deserves. By taking ownership of the project fully, Apple is committing itself to actually creating the map that users expected of it from the beginning. It’s been a lingering shadow on iPhones, especially, where alternatives like Google Maps have offered more robust feature sets that are so easy to compare against the native app but impossible to access at the deep system level.

The argument has been made ad nauseam, but it’s worth saying again that if Apple thinks that mapping is important enough to own, it should own it. And that’s what it’s trying to do now.

“We don’t think there’s anybody doing this level of work that we’re doing,” adds Cue. “We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those things that we’ve been able to keep pretty much a secret. Nobody really knows about it. We’re excited to get it out there. Over the next year, we’ll be rolling it out, section by section in the US.”

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Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world class service.

Maps needs fixing.

Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so It’s re-building the maps part of Maps.

It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.

Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.

This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been 4 years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.

“Since we introduced this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investment in getting the map up to par,” says Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who now owns Maps in an interview last week.  “When we launched, a lot of it was all about directions and getting to a certain place. Finding the place and getting directions to that place. We’ve done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently. All of those things over the past six years.”

But, Cue says, Apple has room to improve on the quality of Maps, something that most users would agree on, even with recent advancements.

“We wanted to take this to the next level,” says Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.”

In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and over a dozen Apple Maps team members at its mapping headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in a way that aligned with Apple’s very public stance on user privacy.

If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of building its own maps from scratch before it launched Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of Maps at all. Given that the future of mobile devices was becoming very clear, it knew that mapping would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its devices from photos to directions to location services provided to apps. Decision made, Apple plowed ahead, building a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data brokers. The result was underwhelming.

Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it signed on a bunch of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data.

It wasn’t enough.

“We decided to do this just over four years ago. We said, “Where do we want to take Maps? What are the things that we want to do in Maps? We realized that, given what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves,” says Cue.

Because Maps are so core to so many functions, success wasn’t tied to just one function. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and walking — but also as a utility used by apps for location services and other functions.

Cue says that Apple needed to own all of the data that goes into making a map, and to control it from a quality as well as a privacy perspective.

There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data.

Cue points to the proliferation of devices running iOS, now numbering in the millions, as a deciding factor to shift its process.

“We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the way that it was being done — we could improve things significantly, and improve them in different ways,” he says. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the map faster based on the data and the things that we’re seeing, as opposed to driving again or getting the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things?”

I query him on the rapidity of Maps updates, and whether this new map philosophy means faster changes for users.

“The truth is that Maps needs to be [updated more], and even are today,” says Cue. “We’ll be doing this even more with our new maps, [with] the ability to change the map real-time and often. We do that every day today. This is expanding us to allow us to do it across everything in the map. Today, there’s certain things that take longer to change.

“For example, a road network is something that takes a much longer time to change currently. In the new map infrastructure, we can change that relatively quickly. If a new road opens up, immediately we can see that and make that change very, very quickly around it. It’s much, much more rapid to do changes in the new map environment.”

So a new effort was created to begin generating its own base maps, the very lowest building block of any really good mapping system. After that, Apple would begin layering on living location data, high resolution satellite imagery and brand new intensely high resolution image data gathered from its ground cars until it had what it felt was a ‘best in class’ mapping product.

There is only really one big company on earth who owns an entire map stack from the ground up: Google.

Apple knew it needed to be the other one. Enter the vans.

Apple vans spotted

Though the overall project started earlier, the first glimpse most folks had of Apple’s renewed efforts to build the best Maps product was the vans that started appearing on the roads in 2015 with ‘Apple Maps’ signs on the side. Capped with sensors and cameras, these vans popped up in various cities and sparked rampant discussion and speculation.

The new Apple Maps will be the first time the data collected by these vans is actually used to construct and inform its maps. This is their coming out party.

Some people have commented that Apple’s rigs look more robust than the simple GPS + Camera arrangements on other mapping vehicles — going so far as to say they look more along the lines of something that could be used in autonomous vehicle training.

Apple isn’t commenting on autonomous vehicles, but there’s a reason the arrays look more advanced: they are.

Earlier this week I took a ride in one of the vans as it ran a sample route to gather the kind of data that would go into building the new maps. Here’s what’s inside.

In addition to a beefed up GPS rig on the roof, four LiDAR arrays mounted at the corners and 8 cameras shooting overlapping high-resolution images – there’s also the standard physical measuring tool attached to a rear wheel that allows for precise tracking of distance and image capture. In the rear there is a surprising lack of bulky equipment. Instead, it’s a straightforward Mac Pro bolted to the floor, attached to an array of solid state drives for storage. A single USB cable routes up to the dashboard where the actual mapping capture software runs on an iPad.

While mapping, a driver…drives, while an operator takes care of the route, ensuring that a coverage area that has been assigned is fully driven and monitoring image capture. Each drive captures thousands of images as well as a full point cloud (a 3D map of space defined by dots that represent surfaces) and GPS data. I later got to view the raw data presented in 3D and it absolutely looks like the quality of data you would need to begin training autonomous vehicles.

More on why Apple needs this level of data detail later.

When the images and data are captured, they are then encrypted on the fly immediately and recorded on to the SSDs. Once full, the SSDs are pulled out, replaced and packed into a case which is delivered to Apple’s data center where a suite of software eliminates private information like faces, license plates and other info from the images. From the moment of capture to the moment they’re sanitized, they are encrypted with one key in the van and the other key in the data center. Technicians and software that are part of its mapping efforts down the pipeline from there never see unsanitized data.

This is just one element of Apple’s focus on the privacy of the data it is utilizing in New Maps.

Probe data and Privacy

Throughout every conversation I have with any member of the team throughout the day, privacy is brought up, emphasized. This is obviously by design as it wants to impress upon me as a journalist that it’s taking this very seriously indeed, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s evidently built in from the ground up and I could not find a false note in any of the technical claims or the conversations I had.

Indeed, from the data security folks to the people whose job it is to actually make the maps work well, the constant refrain is that Apple does not feel that it is being held back in any way by not hoovering every piece of customer-rich data it can, storing and parsing it.

The consistent message is that the team feels it can deliver a high quality navigation, location and mapping product without the directly personal data used by other platforms.

“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it —in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the ‘ground truth’ data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this ‘probe data’ sent back from iPhones.

Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows who that ID refers to. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level.

Because Apple’s business model does not rely on it serving, say, an ad for a Chevron on your route to you, it doesn’t need to even tie advertising identifiers to users.

Any personalization or Siri requests are all handled on-board by the iOS device’s processor. So if you get a drive notification that tells you it’s time to leave for your commute, that’s learned, remembered and delivered locally, not from Apple’s servers.

That’s not new, but it’s important to note given the new thing to take away here: Apple is flipping on the power of having millions of iPhones passively and actively improving their mapping data in real time.

In short: traffic, real-time road conditions, road systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a lot better in Apple Maps.

The secret sauce here is what Apple calls probe data. Essentially little slices of vector data that represent direction and speed transmitted back to Apple completely anonymized with no way to tie it to a specific user or even any given trip. It’s reaching in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, giving it a holistic, real-time picture without compromising user privacy.

If you’re driving, walking or cycling, your iPhone can already tell this. Now if it knows you’re driving it can also send relevant traffic and routing data in these anonymous slivers to improve the entire service. This only happens if your maps app has been active, say you check the map, look for directions etc. If you’re actively using your GPS for walking or driving, then the updates are more precise and can help with walking improvements like charting new pedestrian paths through parks — building out the map’s overall quality.

All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into location services and can be toggled off using the maps location toggle in the Privacy section of settings.

Apple says that this will have a near zero effect on battery life or data usage, because you’re already using the ‘maps’ features when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities.

From the point cloud on up

But maps cannot live on ground truth and mobile data alone. Apple is also gathering new high resolution satellite data to combine with its ground truth data for a solid base map. It’s then layering satellite imagery on top of that to better determine foliage, pathways, sports facilities, building shapes and pathways.

After the downstream data has been cleaned up of license plates and faces, it gets run through a bunch of computer vision programming to pull out addresses, street signs and other points of interest. These are cross referenced to publicly available data like addresses held by the city and new construction of neighborhoods or roadways that comes from city planning departments.

But one of the special sauce bits that Apple is adding to the mix of mapping tools is a full on point cloud that maps the world around the mapping van in 3D. This allows them all kinds of opportunities to better understand what items are street signs (retro-reflective rectangular object about 15 feet off the ground? Probably a street sign) or stop signs or speed limit signs.

It seems like it could also enable positioning of navigation arrows in 3D space for AR navigation, but Apple declined to comment on ‘any future plans’ for such things.

Apple also uses semantic segmentation and Deep Lambertian Networks to analyze the point cloud coupled with the image data captured by the car and from high-resolution satellites in sync. This allows 3D identification of objects, signs, lanes of traffic and buildings and separation into categories that can be highlighted for easy discovery.

The coupling of high resolution image data from car and satellite, plus a 3D point cloud results in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal reconstructions of city streets with textures in place. This is massively higher resolution and easier to see, visually. And it’s synchronized with the ‘panoramic’ images from the car, the satellite view and the raw data. These techniques are used in self driving applications because they provide a really holistic view of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho view can do even more for human viewers of the data by allowing them to ‘see’ through brush or tree cover that would normally obscure roads, buildings and addresses.

This is hugely important when it comes to the next step in Apple’s battle for supremely accurate and useful Maps: human editors.

Apple has had a team of tool builders working specifically on a toolkit that can be used by human editors to vet and parse data, street by street. The editor’s suite includes tools that allow human editors to assign specific geometries to flyover buildings (think Salesforce tower’s unique ridged dome) that allow them to be instantly recognizable. It lets editors look at real images of street signs shot by the car right next to 3D reconstructions of the scene and computer vision detection of the same signs, instantly recognizing them as accurate or not.

Another tool corrects addresses, letting an editor quickly move an address to the center of a building, determine whether they’re misplaced and shift them around. It also allows for access points to be set, making Apple Maps smarter about the ‘last 50 feet’ of your journey. You’ve made it to the building, but what street is the entrance actually on? And how do you get into the driveway? With a couple of clicks, an editor can make that permanently visible.

“When we take you to a business and that business exists, we think the precision of where we’re taking you to, from being in the right building,” says Cue. “When you look at places like San Francisco or big cities from that standpoint, you have addresses where the address name is a certain street, but really, the entrance in the building is on another street. They’ve done that because they want the better street name. Those are the kinds of things that our new Maps really is going to shine on. We’re going to make sure that we’re taking you to exactly the right place, not a place that might be really close by.”

Water, swimming pools (new to Maps entirely), sporting areas and vegetation are now more prominent and fleshed out thanks to new computer vision and satellite imagery applications. So Apple had to build editing tools for those as well.

Many hundreds of editors will be using these tools, in addition to the thousands of employees Apple already has working on maps, but the tools had to be built first, now that Apple is no longer relying on third parties to vet and correct issues.

And the team also had to build computer vision and machine learning tools that allow it to determine whether there are issues to be found at all.

Anonymous probe data from iPhones, visualized, looks like thousands of dots, ebbing and flowing across a web of streets and walkways, like a luminescent web of color. At first, chaos. Then, patterns emerge. A street opens for business, and nearby vessels pump orange blood into the new artery. A flag is triggered and an editor looks to see if a new road needs a name assigned.

A new intersection is added to the web and an editor is flagged to make sure that the left turn lanes connect correctly across the overlapping layers of directional traffic. This has the added benefit of massively improved lane guidance in the new Apple Maps.

Apple is counting on this combination of human and AI flagging to allow editors to first craft base maps and then also maintain them as the ever changing biomass wreaks havoc on roadways, addresses and the occasional park.

Here there be Helvetica

Apple’s new Maps, like many other digital maps, display vastly differently depending on scale. If you’re zoomed out, you get less detail. If you zoom in, you get more. But Apple has a team of cartographers on staff that work on more cultural, regional and artistic levels to ensure that its Maps are readable, recognizable and useful.

These teams have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there — in the best traditions of Apple pursuits that intersect the technical with the artistic.

The maps need to be usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive goals on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the US, it is very common to have maps that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, however, the maps are absolutely packed with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users.

This is the department of details. They’ve reconstructed replicas of hundreds of actual road signs to make sure that the shield on your navigation screen matches the one you’re seeing on the highway road sign. When it comes to public transport, Apple licensed all of the type faces that you see on your favorite subway systems, like Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order that you’re going to see them on the platform signs.

It’s all about reducing the cognitive load that it takes to translate the physical world you have to navigate through into the digital world represented by Maps.

Bottom line

The new version of Apple Maps will be in preview next week with just the Bay Area of California going live. It will be stitched seamlessly into the ‘current’ version of Maps, but the difference in quality level should be immediately visible based on what I’ve seen so far.

Better road networks, more pedestrian information, sports areas like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more land cover including grass and trees represented on the map as well as buildings, building shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through.

Search is also being revamped to make sure that you get more relevant results (on the correct continents) than ever before. Navigation, especially pedestrian guidance, also gets a big boost. Parking areas and building details to get you the last few feet to your destination are included as well.

What you won’t see, for now, is a full visual redesign.

“You’re not going to see huge design changes on the maps,” says Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would cause a lot of confusion.”

Apple Maps is getting the long awaited attention it really deserves. By taking ownership of the project fully, Apple is committing itself to actually creating the map that users expected of it from the beginning. It’s been a lingering shadow on iPhones, especially, where alternatives like Google Maps have offered more robust feature sets that are so easy to compare against the native app but impossible to access at the deep system level.

The argument has been made ad nauseam, but it’s worth saying again that if Apple thinks that mapping is important enough to own, it should own it. And that’s what it’s trying to do now.

“We don’t think there’s anybody doing this level of work that we’re doing,” adds Cue. “We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those things that we’ve been able to keep pretty much a secret. Nobody really knows about it. We’re excited to get it out there. Over the next year, we’ll be rolling it out, section by section in the US.”

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AT&T’s low-cost TV streaming service Watch TV goes live

AT&T’s newly announced Watch TV, a low-cast live TV streaming service announced in the wake of the AT&T / Time Warner merger, is now up and running. The company already has one over-the-top streaming service with DirecTV Now, but this one is cheaper, has some restrictions, and doesn’t include local channels or sports to keep costs down.

At $15 per month, the service undercuts the existing low-cost leader Philo by a dollar, but offers a different lineup (Fomopop has a nice channel-by-channel comparison between the two, if you’re in the market.)

Both have 25 of the same channels in their packages, including A&E, AMC, Comedy Central, Food Network, Discovery, HGTV, History and others, but AT&T Watch is missing MTV, Nickelodeon, and Travl Channel.

In total, Watch TV has over 30 live TV channels, plus 15,000+ TV  shows and movies on demand, and allows you to subscribe by way of updated AT&T Wireless plans. Non-AT&T customers can subscribe for $15 per month directly.

AT&T has been monkeying around with its wireless plans to best take advantage of its Time Warner acquisition. With the new unlimited plans, it removed the previously free HBO perk and raised the entry-level plan by $5 per month, Ars Technica reported, detailing the changes that coincided with the launch of Watch TV. (Existing customers were grandfathered in to free HBO.)

Instead, wireless customers on the top-tier AT&T Unlimited & More Premium plan can choose to add on another option – like HBO – for free. Other services they can opt for instead include Showtime, Starz, Amazon Music Unlimited, Pandora Premium and VRV.

The company also quietly raised its “administrative fee” for postpaid wireless customers from $0.76 to $1.99 per month, Ars noted as well, citing BTIG Research. This will bring in $800 million of incremental service revenue per year, the analyst firm said.

Despite the price hikes and valid concerns over AT&T’s behavior, there’s likely going to be a market for this low-cost live TV service. The company’s DirecTV Now streaming service, launched in December 2016, reached 1.46 million subscribers in April. It’s catching up to longtime leader, Dish’s Sling TV, which debuted at CES back in January 2015 and now has 2.3 million subscribers. Other newer arrivals, like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV, have subscribers in the hundreds of thousands.

AT&T’s Watch TV service will be available across platforms, including iOS, Android, Apple TV, Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV/Fire TV Stick, according to the service’s website. However, it only streams in high-def on the Premium wireless plan. It also doesn’t offer perks common to other live TV services, like a cloud DVR or support for multiple simultaneous streams.

The Watch TV apps are rolling out now. Early reviews note there’s some similarity in the layout to DirecTV Now. There are no reports of crashing as of yet, which are common to new launches like this.

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How to Securely Delete Cookies, Internet Cache, and More With PrivaZer

Staying secure online is important, as is maintaining your privacy. One way to do this is to manually delete your cookies and cache after every session, but this can prove hit-or-miss, not to mention time-consuming.

For some, a dedicated solution for PC deep cleaning is a better and more convenient option. Here’s how PrivaZer can help with that.

What Is PrivaZer?

Developed to help keep your Windows PC clean, PrivaZer is an alternative to tools like CCleaner with a much more focused approach to cleaning and protection.

Whereas tools like CCleaner have a bunch of extra tools like a duplicate files finder and a disk space cleaner—which some users might consider bloatware—PrivaZer concentrates only on enhancing your privacy.

Different degrees of cleaning can be done with PrivaZer, but it is especially good at dealing with internet cache files, downloads, and cookies.

How Cookies Betray Your Online Privacy

Essentially text files storing user-specific data, cookies are useful for browsing the web, but they’re not exactly on your side.

Some sites use cookies to recognize you and perhaps issue a personalized greeting or content, others may keep you signed into a website and memorize some of your site settings. These settings are retained on your computer via cookies. These uses for cookies are benign and reasonable.

Then there’s the type of cookie that tracks your activity online, sharing your browser history with advertisers. Done with the aim of providing targeted advertising, you’ll have noticed this happening without realizing. This is why, when you browse a product on Amazon, all you see for the next week is adverts for the same item.

So, while slightly useful, you really need to kill cookies regularly. This, your internet cache, and more, can be wiped using a tool like PrivaZer.

The Two Versions of PrivaZer

Available from privazer.com, PrivaZer comes in two versions: Free version and Donor’s version (which offers extra functionality, such as automatically cleaning internet activity after each session).

Each of these can be downloaded as a standard installation or as a portable version. Further, the standard version, when run, gives the option to install, or run without installation. And in case you made a mistake, there’s also the option to create a portable version from the installation wizard.

You may have spotted benefits for each option. A portable version of PrivaZer can sit on a USB flash drive, waiting to be run. It requires no installation, and as such can be used on any Windows system at any time. Need to investigate some slow performance? Installing something new could be time consuming, which is why running a portable version of PrivaZer is a good option. The same is true of the option to run without installation.

However, if you do choose to install PrivaZer rather than simply “run” it, you can guarantee extra features and improved results.

How to Run a Deep Clean With PrivaZer

Get started by heading to the website and downloading the PrivaZer free version. Launch the installer, and when prompted “What kind of computer user are you?”, select Advanced. (This can be changed later, if necessary.)

In the next screen, use the check boxes to select what sort of data you want cleaning. You’re looking for things like invalid shortcuts, office software history, photo software history, thumbnails cache, browser autofills for forms, cookies and web cache, Windows Start menu items, and more. (If you selected Basic user, meanwhile, you’ll be presented with a wizard-based approach to each, with recommended options to help.)

With your preferred items checked, select Ready to perform my first scan, and click OK. Select Start cleaning, then Scan to proceed, and wait while the deep clean completes. A progress box on the right will display how much data has been cleaned; you can speed things up by raising the priority using the link at the bottom of the window.

Once done, PrivaZer will have cleaned up much of the unwanted data on your PC. Even if it fell into the wrong hands, an intruder would have difficulty finding out what files you had used recently. Meanwhile, with deleted tracking cookies, your ad-focused shadow profile will need to be built from scratch. Note that regular deletion of these cookies will prevent the annoyance of targeted ads in perpetuity.

Device-Specific Scanning and Total Deletion

PrivaZer can also scan a particular device, and clean all “internet traces”. This option, and many others, can be found in the drop down menu on the main PrivaZer screen. With each function, the process is largely the same: select the type of clean, choose the data types/location to analyze, then click Scan to commence.

The results are invariably good, and you can even clean traces from your system registry, and USB devices. There’s even the option to run a scheduled cleanup (although this requires the installed version of PrivaZer).

Meanwhile, the Advanced options screen gives you the opportunity to specify the depth of the clean. Flash memory/SSD (learn about how solid-state drives work), hard disk drives (labelled here as “magnetic disks”), and RAM can all be given multiple passes (up to 6 passes on flash and RAM, as many as 35 passes on HDD) to ensure total destruction of the data stored there.

This has multiple benefits, not least when wiping a data storage drive in order to sell it (or when selling the computer itself). Any previous data previously stored therein can be safely considered deleted if one of these options is used.

To do this, open Advanced options > Cleanup, and make the selection, then OK. Select Delete from the dropdown menu, then select between Sensitive files and Sensitive folders. Click OK to browse for the files/directories/drive, then click Clean.

PrivaZer Protects Your Online Privacy

You don’t have to pay so much attention to tracking cookies and your internet cache. But whether you’re trying to maintain some online privacy, or simply want to avoid a loved one or housemate uncovering your online interests, cleaning up when you’re done is a good idea.

PrivaZer is just one way of doing this. There are many other tools for maintaining online privacy. The takeaway is this: if you don’t want to be tracked, cleaning your PC regularly is the best way of dealing with it.

Read the full article: How to Securely Delete Cookies, Internet Cache, and More With PrivaZer

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3 Worst Programming Languages to Avoid Like the Plague

There are lots of awesome programming tutorials out there to get you started with coding. But before you dive into them, you’ll have to answer a very difficult question: Which programming language should I learn?

Some languages are easier for beginners to learn. Others are most useful for the future. And others are most likely to help you land a programming job.

In this article, we’ll approach it from the opposite end: Which programming languages should you avoid?

1. Esoteric as %^&*!

Let’s start with an easy one. Esoteric programming languages (or esolang for short) are designed to push programming to its limits of simplicity. In doing so they succeed in making it incredibly complicated.

While this seems like a contradiction in terms, a quick look at the unfortunately named Brainf&*k language:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.

This monstrosity is functional, Turing-complete code. The function of this program? It prints Hello World! to the screen. Simple, isn’t it?

The language consists of eight characters, which move the data pointer within the program array, and modify or output the data held in each position. This all adds up to a simple language which is an absolute mind destroyer to use. Hence the unfortunate name. By the way, Brainf£$k is not the only esoteric language with a “colorful” name, so be curious at your own risk!

Brainf^&k is one of the better known esoteric programming languages, though many more can be found. Perhaps you want to build a program using the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger? Chef is particularly notable as the code you write ends up reading like a recipe.

Esoteric languages are designed more like a fun challenge to programmers than for everyday use. As a general rule, these languages are Turing Tarpits and will cause more frustration than anything else if used for actual programming tasks. In the same way that going over Niagara Falls in a barrel isn’t necessary, I’m sure some of you will program in esoteric languages regardless!

2. PHP

This is where things may get contentious. PHP is a server-side language designed for web development. Originally released in 1997, PHP quickly took over the web. You’d be hard pushed to find any large web entity that doesn’t use PHP. PHP introduced the concept of Dynamic Websites, allowing users to query databases in real time rather than loading static pages on each interaction.

A recent Stack Overflow survey shows PHP as the ninth most popular language, and there is still a considerable demand for PHP developers. So far so good. Widely used, in demand, long-standing, what isn’t there to like?

Well, depending on who you ask, quite a lot!

Inconsistency

PHP wasn’t meant to be a language and grew piece by piece rather than with a general structure. This makes learning PHP a frustrating experience.

An example of this provided by aptly named phpsadness is PHP’s get function:

gettype()
get_class()

These little inconsistencies in the naming of in-built functions are part of a much larger problem. Small differences in syntax and semantics make PHP difficult to learn when coming from another language.

In an age of programming language polyglots, these issues might not be a big deal to you, but it is enough to make some developers run for the hills.

One more thing before we move away from these types of inconsistencies. In PHP, function and class names are not case sensitive, but variables are.

Wait, what?

The Ternary Operator

Whether it is a product of PHP’s ad-hoc structure or the mad whim of one of its creators, the ternary operator in PHP is baffling. Consider this:

$a = 11; 
echo ( 
    $a == 10 ? 'ten' : 
    $a == 11 ? 'eleven' : 
    $a == 12 ? 'twelve' : 
    $a == 13 ? 'thirteen' : 'something else'); 

echo "\n";
//this code prints 'thirteen' to the console

As you can see in the above example, PHP does strange things with ternary operators. In almost all other languages you would expect this code to output eleven. PHP disagrees.

This strange behavior comes from PHP using a left associative ternary operator. This somewhat mind-bending behavior is utterly unintuitive to many programmers, and even after reading a detailed explanation of how it works, it’s still baffling.

PHP is still used widely, and many people claim it has improved hugely over its 20-year tenure.

If you want to create your own WordPress plugins, then it’s certainly worth learning. There are great resources out there to get you started learning PHP, and its popularity means you will likely land a development job once you have.

The real question is: with so many other languages out there, and the rise of other frameworks like node.js and Ruby on Rails, do you really want to?

3. JavaScript

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of a thousand developers cracking their knuckles, ready to defend JavaScript’s honor in the comment section!

JavaScript is the language of the internet. There is no disguising its dominance. If you are using a browser, the page you are looking it will almost certainly be using JavaScript. When you watch Netflix or use PayPal, you are using servers running node.js, JavaScript’s server-side runtime. A quick skim of any job board for programmers shows demand for JavaScript developers.

Why does it belong on this list? Well, the darling of front-end has a few quirks.

Automatic Semicolon Insertion

If you are familiar with Java or any of the C family programming languages, you’ll know that semicolons are used to denote the termination of a statement. The interpreter sees the semicolon and knows to move on.

In JavaScript things are a little different. Semicolons are optional. While that might seem impossible, many people want to drop semicolons from JavaScript altogether.

While this is a nice idea, it is not without its problems. Self-confessed semicolon denier and YouTuber Kyle Robinson Young makes a good case for why they should be used by beginners.

The issues raised in this video point to a wider problem. JavaScript works fine without semicolons most of the time. This is because the semicolons aren’t gone at all, they are just automatically inserted where the interpreter thinks they should go.

While the cases when the interpreter gets it wrong are seen as “edge cases” by more experienced coders, they are all things beginners are likely to run into, thereby making the experience of using JavaScript unwelcoming.

A short search on the subject of semicolons in JavaScript will lead you down a rabbit hole of opinion and speculation with almost no end. When a language requires a full page of reading just to understand where you should use a semicolon, only to conclude that you should make up your own mind, it’s forgivable to think that something is wrong!

An Array of Weirdness

Anyone who has taken a beginner coding class will be familiar with arrays. They are a simple way to collect lots of data of the same type and order them to easily get it back later.

This is a fundamental of programming, so they should be pretty simple to understand right? Actually no, not right. The first example in James Mickins’ hilarious talk on JavaScript sums it up nicely:

“JavaScript arrays are array-list-dictionary combined multi-type objects.”

Right then. Clear as day.

These are just a few small examples of why JavaScript could be seen as a terrible language to learn and to use. For every case here, and the thousands of others all over the web, there is an army of people ready to defend these behaviors. One thing is for sure, JavaScript isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the endless online arguments about it.

For a final bit of fun, which harks back to esoteric languages discussed earlier: open up a JavaScript console in your web browser and paste in this monster:

alert((![]+[])[+[]]+(![]+[])[+!+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]);

A World of Programming Languages

Can you hear the sabers rattling? The angry devs ready to strike down every point made in this article? In truth, they would not be wrong. There are thousands of other cases in almost every language out there I could have used.

With the exception of the esoteric languages, each programming language has its good and bad points. As with all tools, a feature which makes one user’s blood boil is a cherished functionality to another. Semicolons may be one person’s kryptonite, whereas whitespace might keep others up at night.

For a beginner, any programming language is hard, and you should spend time learning the fundamentals of programming before worrying too much about what language to choose.

Image Credit: fizkes/Depositphotos

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How to Download More Voices for Windows Narrator

Windows Narrator is one of several accessibility functions in Windows 10. It serves as a simple screen reader for users with visual impairments.

But even if you don’t need it for that reason, you may still find Windows Narrator useful—and you may want to download and install voices other than the default. These are the basic text-to-speech (TTS) voices you can download for Windows Narrator.

How to Download More Voices for Windows Narrator

Windows 10 does include a few extra voices besides the default. To change them, go to Settings > Ease of Access > Narrator and under Personalize Narrator’s voice, choose a new voice from the dropdown box.

But what if you want entirely new voices? Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it once was.

In prior versions of Windows, you could utilize a few voice-related downloads from Microsoft. Using them, you were able to dive into the Registry and make a few modifications to tell Windows to use the new voices.

We tested the once-popular methods for this, but none of them work properly anymore. Windows 10 keeps the Narrator voice information in a different location than earlier versions, rendering earlier methods unsuccessful.

While you may be able to dig around in the Registry to make this work, there’s no guarantee that future updates to Windows 10 won’t break it. And we don’t like recommending methods that require extensive Registry editing, as they’re more likely to introduce issues.

Thus, if you need more Windows Narrator voices, you’ll want to follow Microsoft’s recommendation to look at third-party tools. It points to a few other speech synthesizer software tools that support SAPI 5, including:

• Harpo
• CereProc
• NextUp
• Eloquence
• Vocalizer for Windows

None of these tools are free, but if you need a high-quality screen reader or voice, they’re well worth paying for.

If you want to type with your voice instead, check out the best free speech-to-text tools for Windows.

Read the full article: How to Download More Voices for Windows Narrator

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How to Create and Use a Custom Color Scheme on Firefox

A few years ago, themes were a big part of the Firefox experience. You could find something to suit your mood or personality, the time of year, or even your favorite movie.

As Firefox has grown up, those themes have been largely left in the past. At best, you can add artwork as a browser skin. But that’s it.

And that’s a shame. There’s something oddly satisfying about using your own color scheme. Just ask anyone who rocked “Hotdog Stand” in Windows 3.1. Thankfully, it looks like Firefox is going to reintroduce some color customization features! Keep reading to find out how you can use a custom color scheme on Firefox again.

How to Enable Custom Color Schemes on Firefox

To use your own color scheme on Firefox, you first need to enable an experimental feature:

1. Go to the Firefox Test Pilot page while using the Firefox browser.
2. Click on Color to load the experiment’s listing
3. On the next window, click on Install Test Pilot and Enable Color.
4. Wait for the process to complete.

Now you’re ready to start customizing. The color add-on lets you tweak the color of almost any part of the browser’s user interface, including the search text, background tabs, toolbar color, and a whole lot more.

The Color add-on should take you to the customization page automatically, but you can also use the associated browser link.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the Color page, you can choose from some pre-made themes. And if you want to share your creation with family and friends, go to the Firefox add-on page and share the provided URL.

Lastly, to remove your colors and revert to the default color scheme, just delete the color add-on from your browser.

If you’d like to learn more about Firefox add-ons, we have covered some of the best in our extensive Firefox add-on guide.

Read the full article: How to Create and Use a Custom Color Scheme on Firefox

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