Category: 4. Technology

Apple’s WWDC made a ton of announcements with the liquid glass redesign and iOS 26 being the stars. As an avid iPhone user, there are a couple of things I’m stoked about, but there’s a few new iOS 18 settings that I definitely can do without.

As someone who thoroughly reads phone manuals, I consider myself an expert in how to make phones work the way you want them to. The latest iOS 18 updates have many things I can appreciate but there are three features I really wish Apple fixed. 

However, until they do, here’s what I did and you can too. Especially if these three iOS 18 features bother you as much as they do me. For more, check out the nine hidden iOS 18 features you should definitely know about.

Get rid of all the clutter from the Photos app on iOS 18

OK, I’ll straight out say it, I really don’t like the overhaul that Apple has given the Photos app on iOS 18. I understand what it’s going for but it feels awfully cluttered by default. I don’t want my main camera roll constantly reminding me of vacations or suggestions for wallpapers with photos and videos I’m not looking for.

Fortunately, Apple does give you the option to customize the Photos app to your heart’s desire.

When you open the Photos app for the first time, you’ll see a grid of all your photos and videos, which is the library view you’re used to, but at the bottom, you’ll notice the navigation bar is gone, and instead replaced with collections for photos and videos you’ve taken recently and have of friends, family and pets.

If you swipe down, you’ll continue to see random collections and albums, like pinned collections, shared albums, memories, trips, featured photos and wallpaper suggestions, all of which used to live in the Albums and For You tabs. Now they’re all in one place on iOS 18, which is the main view. While that may be useful to some, I don’t need to see all of it at once. I just want to see my camera roll and some albums.

To customize the Photos app, swipe all the way down to the bottom and tap Customize and Reorder. Here you can uncheck any collections you wish to hide from the main view. You can also organize the order in which they appear. I don’t want wallpaper suggestions and most of the other options so I unchecked everything but Media Types (organizes your media into videos, live photos, etc.) and Utilities (albums for hidden, recently deleted, receipts, documents and so on).

Of course, you’ll no longer be able to see the collections that Apple has created for you and several other albums as well. But if you don’t use them, you’re better off this way because you can still find any photo or video you want by going through your camera roll or using the search button at the top.

Remove all the new Control Center pages on iOS 18

I use the Control Center all the time — to quickly connect to Wi-FI, enable Do Not Disturb, turn on dark mode or low battery mode and discover new songs with the music recognition control. However, with iOS 18, Apple expanded how the Control Center is designed and it now has multiple pages of controls, some premade and others you can create yourself. 

The things is, I don’t need multiple Control Center pages — I just need the one. I don’t want the clutter of multiple pages because I can fit all the controls I need on a single page. But that’s not the only issue. I also find that when I now try to swipe out of the Control Center, I end up accidentally scrolling through the Control Center pages, and so I get stuck … and annoyed.

As luck has it, there’s an easy way to get the Control Center to look like it used to, with only a single page.

In the Control Center, which you can access by swiping down from the top-right of your screen, swipe up to access the additional pages and press your finger down on any blank part of the page. This will highlight the control — hit the remove control button (-) at the top-left to get rid of the control and the page. 

Do this for any other extra Control Center pages you have, until you only have the main Control Center.

Now when you try to swipe out from the Control Center, you’ll no longer get stuck in the other pages. Instead, you’ll be able to easily exit like before.

Stop accidentally triggering Siri on iOS

The big AI upgrade to Siri came with the release of iOS 18.2.

Instead of the Siri orb that you’re used to, the edges of your iPhone screen will now glow with various colors when the assistant is listening to you. It’s a welcome design change but one aspect of the new ChatGPT-powered Siri keeps annoying me.

If you double tap at the bottom center of your iPhone, the Type to Siri feature appears. This allows you to type, instead of speak, to Siri, bringing up a keyboard at the bottom of your screen. It’s a useful feature if you’re in a situation where you need to be discreet but I always seem to enable the feature by accident, especially when I’m tapping or swiping around my phone.

There is a way to disable Type to Siri though, without completely disabling the assistant. In Settings, go to Apple Intelligence & Siri > Talk & Type to Siri and toggle off Type to Siri.

For more, check out how to cut through muddy movie dialogue with this new iOS 18 audio feature.

Amazon Prime Day discounts for PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC gamers have been abound since the four-day sale’s start yesterday, but Seagate’s plug-in expansion SSDs for the Xbox Series X|S consoles have gotten some big bargains of their own, now up to 42% off.

Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice, solved a mystery that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were clearly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site.

Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had become one of his company’s greatest hype men — but it was also lying to people about what his app could do.

Holovaty is best known as one of the creators of the open source Django project, a popular Python web development framework (though he retired from managing the project in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which remains “proudly bootstrapped,” he tells TechCrunch. Currently, he’s focused on his music career both as an artist and as a founder.

Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It’s known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played. 

It also offers a feature called “sheet music scanner” that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations.

Holovaty carefully watches this feature’s error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said.

That’s where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.

They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That’s a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There’s no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.)

The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so onerous that it was costing his company money to store them and crushing his app’s bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post about the situation.

“Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed around with ChatGPT myself.”

That’s how he saw ChatGPT telling people they could hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and uploading the image of the chat session. Only, they couldn’t. Uploading those images wouldn’t translate the ASCII tab into audio notes.

He was struck with a new problem. “The main cost was reputational: New Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They’d been confidently told we would do something that we don’t actually do,” he described to TechCrunch.

He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it — “No, we can’t turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music” — or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system.

He opted to build the feature.

“My feelings on this are conflicted. I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?” he wrote.

He also wondered if this was the first documented case of a company having to develop a feature because ChatGPT kept repeating, to many people, its hallucination about it.

The fellow programmers on Hacker News had an interesting take about it: Several of them said that it’s no different than an overeager human salesperson promising the world to prospects and then forcing developers to deliver new features.

“I think that’s a very apt and amusing comparison!” Holovaty agreed.

Apple Inc. is planning to introduce its first upgrade to the $3,499 Vision Pro headset as early as this year, aiming to improve the performance and comfort of a device that has been slow to catch on with consumers.

The updated Vision Pro will include a faster processor and components that can better run artificial intelligence, according to people with knowledge of the matter. There also will be a new strap to make it easier to wear the headset for long periods of time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been announced.

Microsoft just announced that all digital games and experiences are now accompanied by . These Accessible Games Initiative tags are designed to “provide players with clear and consistent information about the accessibility features in video games.”

They are found on top of the store page. As you can see below, the game South of Midnight . Clicking “More” leads to a description of each. In this case, the game boasts adjustable input sensitivity, multiple volume controls, color alternatives, large subtitles and the ability to play without button holds, among other accessibility-minded features.

Each of these tags can now be used as a filter in the Xbox Store, to make it easier to search for the perfect game. They are also available in the Xbox PC app, Xbox Mobile app and, of course, on the website. Xbox began implementing , but this move marks a transition to the .

These standardized tags are being managed by the Entertainment Software Association, with input from companies like Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, Sony and Microsoft. Other big firms like Amazon Games, Riot Games, Square Enix and Warner Bros. Games have since joined the project. All told, , advertising features like text-to-speech and menu narration.

Despite being involved since inception, Nintendo and Sony have yet to update their store pages with these tags. It looks like Microsoft is the first of the big three to do so.

While the gaming industry is standardizing this feature, the mobile app industry is playing catch up. Apple recently announced it’s developing its own accessibility tag system, . This feature will be introduced to the App Store later in the year.

If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.

Letters to the editor

When you’re establishing a fitness routine, making it to the gym is just one piece of the puzzle. Another big one? Figuring out when to eat. Will eating before exercise give you fuel or slow you down? And when should you time your pre-workout and post-workout snacks to get the best results?

According to dietitians, when you eat matters. If you head into a workout feeling hungry and weak, you may not have the energy to push yourself. But if you eat too close to a workout, you might feel nauseous—and that’s not ideal either.

To settle this debate once and for all, we asked dietitians whether you should eat before or after a workout—and what you should eat when you do. Here’s what they had to say.

Should You Eat Before or After a Workout?

The dietitians we spoke to agree: It’s generally a good idea to eat before a workout—about 30 minutes to 2 hours before exercise. But it’s more important to listen to your body.

“Some of the people I counsel can’t eat before a workout,” says Bonnie Taub-Dix, R.D.N., creator of BetterThanDieting.com and author of Read It Before You Eat It. “They feel nauseous and don’t feel great. But there are other people who need something to eat because they feel weak.”

The key? Ask yourself whether you’ll feel better if you eat before or after a workout, and pay attention to what happens when you do.

When you should time your pre-workout meals is up for debate. “I recommend eating 30 minutes to 2 hours ahead,” Taub-Dix says. But Frances Largeman-Roth, R.D.N., nutrition and wellness expert, runner, and author of Eating in Color recommends an even tighter window. “Ideally, you should be eating about 1 hour before a workout,” she says. “But if you’re time-crunched and need to head out the door, I recommend having a banana or a small energy bar, like [a] chia bar, for quick fuel.”

Both dietitians agree that fueling up wisely can help you get the most out of your workout and boost your sports performance. Eating a healthy snack that has a good combination of protein and carbs can give you the boost you need to run, jump, and lift the best you can.

What to Eat Before a Workout

Both dietitians say the best pre-workout snacks contain readily digestible ingredients—nothing heavy that your body will have to work hard to break down. Think: bananas, smoothies, Greek yogurt with nuts, and whole-grain toast with cheese or almond butter.

“I like to eat 1 cup of yogurt plus 2 teaspoons of muesli and a drizzle of honey,” Largeman-Roth says. “Or 1 cup of cottage cheese with 1/2 cup cubed cantaloupe or watermelon, plus 2 tablespoons of granola.”

Taub-Dix suggests making smoothies using greens, protein powder, Greek yogurt, and banana almond milk. (She likes Almond Breeze’s version, because it’s made with real bananas.) “Bananas are rich in potassium, which we lose from sweating,” she says. “[Potassium is] also important for muscle contraction.”

Aim for a snack that’s around 200 to 250 calories, Largeman-Roth says. You want to feel energized but not completely stuffed. Remember to drink plenty of water, too.

And no, the kind of workout you’re doing shouldn’t really change what you eat, Taub-Dix says. Enjoying a bowl of Greek yogurt before HIIT probably won’t benefit you more than eating it before Pilates. “But like I said, what you should eat largely depends on how your body feels,” she adds. A little trial and error can help you figure out the best pre-workout snacks for you.

What to Eat After a Workout

Protein is essential for repairing muscles after a tough workout, and carbs help replenish the energy you’ve used up. So the perfect post-workout snack has a combination of both.

“Post workout is when you’re restoring your body and helping to repair any micro tears in the muscles,” Largeman-Roth says. “So I advise having a combo of carbs, protein, healthy fats, and antioxidants to combat the oxidative stress that exercise puts on your body.” She recommends refueling 15 to 20 minutes after exercise to replenish muscle glycogen and help your body recover.

One quick and easy post-workout snack idea? A bowl of yogurt with nuts, hydrating fresh fruits (like grapes), and a drizzle of nut butter. “This snack is my go-to after a sweaty bootcamp workout in the park,” Largeman-Roth says.

Other simple post-workout combos include a whole-wheat English muffin with avocado, or overnight oats with cottage cheese, nuts, and fruit. These snacks deliver protein, carbs, healthy fats, and some minerals you might have lost during your workout.

And keeping healthy convenience snacks on hand is a good option if you have a busy schedule. Not having time to prepare a nutritious nosh shouldn’t keep you from refueling. “If I’m in a hurry, I’ll sometimes grab protein-rich mug muffins,” Largeman-Roth says. Look for an option that’s packed with protein and tastes good, too.

The Galaxy Watch 8 series got Google Gemini before Google could add it to its own Pixel Watches.

At Wednesday’s Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Watch 8, Galaxy Watch 8 Classic, and Galaxy Watch Ultra, all of which have Google Gemini integrated into its One UI 8 Watch operating system. During the livestream, Samsung touted Gemini as a useful hands-free way to operate its health and fitness features.

Asking Gemini to “start a 300-calorie circuit training workout” activates Samsung Health behind the scenes, so you can track your workout without navigating to the app. Other examples include using Gemini as a voice assistant to send messages or schedule calendar events. Whether as a health and fitness coach or personal assistant, Gemini on the Watch 8 series introduces an exciting new use case for AI wearables.

Mashable Light Speed

Earlier in the event, Samsung shared the Google Gemini integration with its new foldable phones, the Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7. Ever since debuting Galaxy AI a few years ago, it has maintained heavy focus on bringing AI features to its devices, and this event was very much on brand with those efforts.

Preorders for the three new models in the Galaxy Watch 8 series start today, and going on sale July 25. Here’s the price breakdown:

• Galaxy Watch 8: $349 for WiFi, $399 for WiFi plus 4G LTE

• Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: $499 for WiFi, $549 for WiFi plus 4G LTE

• Galaxy Watch Ultra (2025): $649 for WiFi plus 4G LTE

Topics
Samsung
Google Gemini

DUBAI, UAE, July 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Huawei today announced that it will host the Fashion Next product launch event in Dubai on July 10. The showcase will debut the HUAWEI Pura 80 Series and HUAWEI MatePad 11.5, alongside major updates for the XMAGE Awards 2025, Huawei’s global photography competition celebrating artistic excellence.

Over the past two years, Huawei has strengthened its leadership in the Chinese market while making a powerful resurgence globally. The brand continues to drive innovation with next-generation foldable screen technology, superior imaging capabilities, and fashion-forward wearable designs. Initiatives like GoPaint, Huawei’s intuitive digital painting app, and the XMAGE Awards underscore its commitment to bridging cultures through art and technology. By engaging deeply with local communities and expanding its worldwide presence, Huawei fosters meaningful connections across borders.

Zhu Ping, President of Huawei Device Business Marketing and Sales Services, said, “Huawei is steadfastly progressing in international markets, from launching flagship devices to nurturing meaningful connections within local communities abroad. We remain dedicated to our founding vision, continually enhancing the scenario experiences and technology products for global consumers. Today in Dubai, we proudly unveiled the Pura 80series, featuring exceptional imaging capabilities through innovative technology, empowering mobile photography to more vividly capture the thoughts and emotions of creators.”

The flagship Pura 80 Series marks Huawei’s highly anticipated return to the global smartphone arena, offering three distinct models. Originally rebranded in 2024, the Pura series combines avant-garde design with high-performance mobile technology, redefining the intersection of fashion and functionality. The new lineup is expected to receive strong consumer demand.

Meanwhile, Huawei tablets continue gaining momentum in international markets, becoming a top choice for education and mobile productivity thanks to their versatile, scenario-driven applications. The MatePad 11.5 has already captivated users worldwide with its fluid multi-tasking performance and seamless cross-device connectivity, while the upcoming model is set to raise the bar in display innovation and productivity-centric features, addressing evolving user needs.

Beyond delivering innovative products, Huawei continues to pioneer the fusion of fashion with emotional connectivity, empowering users to become the authors of their digital lives. The XMAGE Awards 2025, which launched globally on June 11, has attracted participants from over 170 countries and regions since its inception in 2017, with nearly 5 million submissions to date. Recognized as one of the world’s most influential celebrations of mobile photography, the program has evolved into a cultural bridge linking Huawei with its global community—encouraging users to capture meaningful moments and share their personal vision through images. With the global debut of the HUAWEI Pura 80 Series, Huawei’s XMAGE imaging technology is set to redefine smartphone photography and transform the visual experience for users everywhere. 

Industry analysts highlight Huawei’s ongoing presence in Kantar’s “Global Most Valuable Tech Brands” ranking as evidence of its strong international brand equity. By expanding its global product portfolio and making sustained investments in channel development, retail, and community engagement, Huawei is not just meeting the diverse needs of consumers worldwide but also reshaping the connected device ecosystem through technological innovation and fostering more meaningful user interactions.

SOURCE HUAWEI