Bytes: What’s new in tech
A gaming war in the App Store
Facebook and Microsoft are furious at
Apple App Store policies that threaten their computer-gaming ambitions, said Lucas Matney in TechCrunch.com. Facebook issued a scathing statement last week when its Gaming app was finally approved following months of deliberation, but only “after the company stripped one of its two central features, a library of playable mobile games.” Microsoft’s new xCloud app, a software platform due to be launched next month that allows “gamers to livestream titles from the cloud,” was also denied entrance into the
App Store. Apple said it didn’t have the capacity to ensure all the Xbox titles are “safe.” Microsoft accused Apple of treating “gaming apps differently” from other media services to preserve its own profits from games, the most lucrative part of the App Store.
Instagram’s TikTok clone
Instagram’s new short-form video feature, Reels, “looks and feels just like TikTok,” said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. Like the explosively popular ByteDance product, Reels lets users “create, distribute, and consume” super-short video clips and add to them popular music and various filters and effects. “The similarities between TikTok and Reels run deeper than function.” While Reels isn’t a stand-alone app—it’s found within Instagram’s Explore feed—users swipe up or down to move between videos, just like TikTok, and “many Reels I watched were actually imported TikTok videos.” It’s not the first time another product has been “the focus of Facebook’s flattery.” Snapchat has been so often imitated by Instagram that it “tracked its archcompetitor’s aggressive tactics in a file called ‘Project Voldemort.’”
How autocorrect defeated biology
“Some 27 human genes have had to be renamed because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates,” said James Vincent in TheVerge.com. The alphanumeric symbol MARCH1—short for “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1” was regularly autoformatted by the spreadsheet as a date, 1-Mar. It’s not only “really, really annoying,” as one scientist put it, but can also corrupt data, which then have to be sorted by hand. “Excel errors” have become so pervasive, the scientific body that standardizes the names of genes recently published new guidelines, so that “the symbol MARCH1 has now become MARCHF1.”