Bits: Amazon Updates Kindle Fire Line

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Q&A: Installing Windows Updates, Automatic or Manually

Q. I have Windows 8 set to update itself automatically, but it doesn’t always work and I end up having to click around and install some updates myself. Why?

A. Like earlier versions of the operating system, Windows 8 can check to see if software updates for your computer are available from Microsoft — and then install them for you so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself. Security updates and other software patches deemed important or critical are typically installed automatically when Microsoft pushes them out. (The company often releases the updates on the second Tuesday of each month, but it can happen as needed).

But even if you have the automatic updates option turned on, not all the software Microsoft sends you will install itself. Certain types of updates, including fresh versions of programs that have new user agreements or terms of service statements, require your attention because you are asked to read the legal fine print — or at least click the Agree button — before you can install the software.

Some updates, like feature enhancements or updated device drivers, are considered optional and not critical to a program’s ability to function. When an optional update is ready, you usually get an alert that it is available if you want it, and Windows leaves it to you to do the installation yourself.

Restoring Scroll Bars on a Mac

Q. I just got my first Mac laptop and am confused by the lack of scroll bars on the sides of the Safari browser and other windows. The scroll bars seem to appear sporadically, so how do you get around the Web on this system?

A. Recent versions of OS X keep the scroll bars on the Safari browser and other windows hidden unless you need them — like when you are already scrolling. While the lack of scroll bars makes for a cleaner look, many people find it disorienting because of the inconsistent behavior and inability to see just where they are within a Web page.

If you would prefer to have scroll bars visible at all times, you can change the setting. To do so, go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences, or click on the System Preferences icon in the Mac’s Dock. In the Personal area, click the General icon. In the box, next to “Show scroll bars,” click the button next to “Always.” Close the System Preference box when you are finished.

If you are reading long articles on the Web, you can scroll down one screen at a time within the page by tapping the Space bar on the keyboard. To go back up to previous screens, hold down the Shift key while pressing the Space bar.

Bits Blog: Photos Take the Spotlight in Updates to Google’s Social Network

Users of Google’s photo service will get a one-click option to enhance photos.

Google may dominate Web search, but when it comes to social networks, the company’s Google Plus service is an underdog against Facebook and Twitter. As of December, Google Plus users were spending about 12 minutes a month on the service, according to the company, a smidgen of time compared with the hours that Facebook users spend on that site every month.

But Google has one unique weapon in its quest to build traffic for Google Plus: it is increasingly tying all of its services, from search and maps to video chats and photo sharing, to the social network. Google doesn’t consider Plus a social network in the Facebook sense, but views it more as a connective layer personalizing and connecting Google’s myriad of services together for each user.

The company said on Wednesday at its developer conference in San Francisco that about 390 million people a month used the network of services, with slightly less than half using the core service, called the stream, which features updates and posts from a user’s social network.

To increase the time spent on the service and make it more useful, the company unveiled a redesign of the stream and related apps at the conference.

The most striking improvements are to Google’s photo sharing service. When users upload a batch of photos to Google’s online photo album via Picasa or mobile devices, Google’s algorithms will sort through them and attempt to choose the best of the bunch — eliminating blurry shots, duplicates and bad exposures and favoring photos of smiling people, landmarks and those that are aesthetically pleasing

“Photography is very labor-intensive,” with all the editing and uploading that comes along with shooting photos, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering. “At Google, we think we can give you some of your time back.”

Users will also get a one-click option to automatically enhance photos to fix red eye, adjust exposure, soften the look of human skin and correct other flaws.

The quirkiest new photo feature, which Google calls “auto awesome,” can stitch together a series of snapshots — a child blowing out birthday candles and cutting a cake, for example — into a short animation, or merge multiple photos shot at different exposures into a single image with high dynamic range.

To encourage users to make Google their principal place for photo storage, the company will allow users to set up their mobile devices to automatically upload all photos to Google, with unlimited free storage at standard resolution and 15 GB of storage at full resolution for high-quality prints.

All of the new photo features are scheduled to be rolled out later on Wednesday and will be available on existing Google Photo albums as well as new ones.

The Google Plus stream of updates has been given a new multi-column format.

The more familiar part of Google Plus, the page showing the stream of updates from your social networks, has been given a new multicolumn format. It creates a busier look, but also offers a view of more updates, including photos, at one glance.

Google’s Hangouts service is getting easier access from mobile devices.

Leveraging Google’s strength in search, the stream will also feature automatic hash-tagging of topics mentioned in a post and use those to provide links to more information from a user’s social network or the broader Web. For example, a friend’s comment about an event like the Boston Marathon bombing could pull up other comments and related news articles.

Hangouts, Google’s text and video chatroom service, will also receive some new features, including easier access from mobile devices and other Google services like Gmail and archiving features that can keep a permanent history of a conversation within a group, whether it’s a business discussion about the merits of various strategic plans, the evolution of a romance or family debates about where to go on vacation.

Coverage of the annual Google I/O conference for developers, May 15-16, 2013.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Picking an Audience for Your Facebook Updates

When I post on Facebook, only people on my Close Friends list can see the pictures, but not all my friends. This just started happening. Why?

Facebook lets you group your friends into smaller lists and share photos and updates with these subsets of people. It is possible that you inadvertently changed the “audience” setting for your posts so that your photos are only visible to those on the Close Friends list.

Changing the audience setting by accident is not that difficult to do on Facebook’s Web site. When you compose a new update, look at the label next to the Post button. If it says “Close Friends,” your updates are only appearing in the news feeds of people on that particular list. Click the triangle to the right of the Close Friends label and choose Friends to make your updates visible to everyone on your friends list.

Facebook remembers the audience setting you last used and keeps posting items that way until you change it. If you want to adjust the audience setting after you have already shared a photo, link or update to your timeline, go to the post and click the small gray audience icon under your name. The audience drop-down menu appears so you can change who can see that specific update.

Bits: Updates From Apple's Product Event

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, introduced the new iPad Mini.

Apple unveiled a smaller iPad, a new iMac and other revamped products on Tuesday at an event at the California Theater in San Jose, Calif. I filed updates from the event, and my colleagues Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton in San Jose, and Nick Wingfield in New York, pitched in with commentary.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The big question around the iPad Mini is, will people pay an extra $130 for a device that is roughly the same size as its competitors? Apple is hoping its iOS 6, hundreds of thousands of apps, and of course, the lovely little Apple logo will be enough to entice them. But $130 might be enough to push customers in another, less expensive direction. People will decide with their dollars.

(Update: Dropping reference to retina display in the Mini, as there is none.)

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

And we’re done here. While everyone expected to meet the new iPad Mini, today’s biggest surprises were a new iPad and the skinny new iMac. Watch for our full story on the announcements, coming soon.

At a starting price of $329, the iPad Mini is only $30 more than the much smaller, redesigned iPod Touch. That could make the iPod Touch a tougher sell.

— Nick Wingfield

Apple’s new iPad Mini ad features someone playing “Heart and Soul” on their iPad Mini piano. Everyone is cooing thinking about that scene from “Big” with Tom Hanks at FAO Schwarz and how far we’ve come.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iPad Mini will sell for $329, quite a markup from Google’s $200 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet, and Amazon’s latest 7-inch tablet which sells for $160.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The iPad Mini has a better camera than the iPad 2 for high-definition videochat, “ultrafast wireless” and the new, smaller Lightning connector that is in the iPhone 5. The battery life, sigh, is still 10 hours. A video featuring Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer, features Mr. Ive saying: “There is inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. We went back to the very beginning to design a concentration, not a reduction, of the original.” Cue the applause.

A reader, Nick in Los Angeles, notes that the welded-togetherness of the new iMac means it is not likely to be possible to upgrade its hard drive on your own, which was still possible with the last-generation iMac. It looks like the locked-up hardware of the iPhone and iPad is now seeping into the Mac line too.

— Nick Bilton

Apple is showing its typical video featuring its executives discussing the iPad Mini. Jony Ive is wearing a grey T-shirt, rather than his usual black V-neck. My mind is blown.

— Nick Bilton

Mr. Schiller is taking a few digs at Google with a side-by-side comparison of the iPad Mini versus the Android-powered Nexus. The iPad Mini’s screen is 7.9 inches diagonally, compared to 7 inches for the Nexus, but the display surface is 35 percent larger. The biggest differentiator, Mr. Schiller says, are the apps. “They have phone applications stretched out, not tablet applications,” Mr. Schiller says of Android apps. He is talking up the fact that Apple now has 275,000 apps customized for the iPad.

Phil Schiller is showing the iPad Mini next to the Google Nexus tablet. Reminds me of when he was in court for the Samsung patent trial, showing the iPad next to Samsung tablets.

— Nick Bilton

The new iPad Mini is “light as a pad of paper,” says Mr. Schiller. It features a 7.9-inch screen, compared to its 9.7-inch big brother.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new iPad Mini, which fits in one hand. Steve Jobs once said that smaller tablets made by its competitors would never sell. He called them “tweeners.” Times change.

Mr. Schiller returned to debut the fourth-generation iPad. Inside is a new chip that offers faster performance. Of the iPad’s competition, Mr. Schiller says, “I can’t even see them in the rear-view mirror.” The new iPad has twice the graphics- and image-processing power of the previous generation, and still has 10 hours battery life. It’s getting the Lightning connector that is in the new iPhone. It sells for the same price, $499, as the previous iPad.

This is a surprise — a fourth-generation iPad is being introduced. Nobody saw this coming. Everybody was expecting the smaller iPad to be the only new iPad introduced today. The third-generation iPad has only been on the market for seven months, so this is unusual.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says 94 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 are now developing applications for the iPad.

Tim Cook is talking a lot about the importance of the iPad in education. The education market is a priority for e-reader makers because schools are now buying the devices for students.

— Nick Bilton

Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says Apple did not expect the iPad to be a game-changer in education. The company announced iBooks Author earlier this year to encourage the development of textbooks for the iPad. Today, Mr. Cook says iBooks textbooks are now available for 80 percent of American high school core curricula and are available in 2,500 schools in the United States.

The new iMac, which is 5 millimeters thick, looks awfully similar to those things we call televisions. It looks like it’s just a matter of time before Apple takes this flat screen and sticks it on a wall.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says the iPad hit the 100 million mark two weeks ago. “This is unprecedented for a new product in a new category,” he says. Apple sold more iPads in the June quarter than any other PC maker sold PCs, Mr. Cook says.

Mr. Cook is back and says Apple has sold 100 million iPads in 2.5 years. (Compare that to the 15 million 7-inch tablets that Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google have sold combined.)

— Brian X. Chen

The 21.5-inch iMac will sell for $1,299. The 27 inch version will sell for $1,799. People are clapping. Mr. Schiller keeps talking up how “environmentally friendly” these new versions are. Both use 50 percent less power than previous versions.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller is boasting about the “Fusion” drive in the new iMac. Basically the operating system is installed on a flash drive for faster performance, and files are on the hard drive. Last I checked this was called a hybrid drive, which has been around for a while.

— Brian X. Chen

The new iMac is 80 percent thinner and eight pounds lighter that the previous generation. It features something called “friction stir welding” that sounds like voodoo, but really just means the entire hardware has been welded into one piece. The display comes in two sizes: 27 inches and 21.5 inches. Apple added an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare by 75 percent, Mr. Schiller says.

The iMac, which is now in its eighth generation, was the comeback computer for Apple when it was introduced 12 years ago. Back then, it was a blue bubble with a handle on the back that was added to help customers feel less intimated by computers.

— Nick Bilton

This is a pretty significant upgrade for the iMac, but it has been about 540 days since Apple last upgraded its all-in-one desktop.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iMac is much thinner than the last one. A lot of people in the audience are clapping — I suspect many of them are Apple employees.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

— Brian X. Chen

Apple just debuted the new iMac, a sleeker, smaller, slighter version of the previous generation. It’s eliciting roaring applause from the audience. The computer is “the most beautiful iMac we have ever made,” says Mr. Schiller. The screen looks about as thick as a file folder.

Phil Schiller is talking a lot about gigahertz, terabytes, megapixels, SSDs and a number of other things that most consumers no long think about thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new Mac Mini. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, costs $599 and will start shipping today.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Apple’s live webcast of the event keeps cutting away to a shot that shows Bertrand Serlet, the former head of Mac development at Apple, in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Mr. Schiller is showing Apple’s new MacBook Pro ad, which talks up the retina display. The ad features cute pictures of kids, and people are getting emotional.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A starting price of $1,700 for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display. That’s a bit more expensive than the 13-inch MacBook Pro was previously. But Apple is still selling a non-retina version of the MacBook Pro for $1,200.

— Brian X. Chen

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is now almost as light as the 13-inch MacBook AIr, which weighs three pounds. Maybe they should have called it the Airy MacBook Pro.

— Nick Bilton

The new MacBook Pro features a high-definition camera for FaceTime videoconferencing camera and dual microphones. The most exciting thing, Mr. Schiller says, is what’s inside: “Everything has been reengineered from scratch.” He says the new MacBook Pro has an Intel dual-core processor and 7-hour battery life. It also “power naps” — while it’s sleeping it automatically runs software updates and backs up contacts. It will cost $1,699.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a retina display, following the iPhone, iPad and 15-inch MacBook Pro. Will we see a retina display on the smaller iPad today?

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, just took the stage to introduce the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s 0.75 inches thick, 20 percent thinner than the previous version, and is a pound lighter, making it “the lightest MacBook Pro ever,” Mr. Schiller says. The computer features Apple’s “retina” display and has four times as many pixels as the previous version.

The Mac has been outgrowing the PC market for the last six years, Mr. Cook says: “The Mac is the No. 1 desktop in the U.S. and the No. 1 notebook in the U.S.”

With the introduction of continuous scrolling in iBooks, the book reading software will now feel similar to reading on the Web and in most of the offline reading apps available for the iPad.

— Nick Bilton

There are now 1.5 billion books in Apple’s bookstore, Mr. Cook says. The company is announcing a new reading option that has continuous scrolling — no more flipping page by page. This elicits “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience.

Mr. Cook says people have downloaded 35 billion apps for iOS devices, and Apple has paid $6.5 billion to developers. There are now 275,000 apps that have been custom-designed for the iPad.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

There are 200 million devices running iOS 6 — by comparison the latest version of Google’s Android is only running on 1.8 percent of all Android devices. Despite Apple’s new Maps app, people are upgrading to iOS 6 extremely fast.

— Brian X. Chen

Mr. Cook says there are now 200 million devices powered by iOS 6. In the last year people have sent 300 billion messages through Apple’s messaging system, or 28,000 a second.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Tim Cook just took the stage and is talking about the iPhone 5, showing a video of people standing in line for the phone all over the world.

We’re seated and getting ready to go. It’s a packed auditorium. Looks like an old cinema.

— Brian X. Chen