The default desktop of Fedora Workstation — GNOME Shell — is known and loved by many users for its minimal, clutter-free user interface. It is also known for the ability to add to the stock interface using extensions. In this article, we cover 3 simple, and useful extensions for GNOME Shell. These three extensions provide a simple extra behaviour to your desktop; simple tasks that you might do every day.

Installing Extensions

The quickest and easiest way to install GNOME Shell extensions is with the Software Application. Check out the previous post here on the Magazine for more details:

How to install extensions via the Software application

Removable Drive Menu

First up is the Removable Drive Menu extension. It is a simple tool that adds a small widget in the system tray if you have a removable drive inserted into your computer. This allows you easy access to open Files for your removable drive, or quickly and easily eject the drive for safe removal of the device.

Extensions Extension.

The Extensions extension is super useful if you are always installing and trying out new extensions. It provides a list of all the installed extensions, allowing you to enable or disable them. Additionally, if an extension has settings, it allows quick access to the settings dialog for each one.

Frippery Move Clock

Finally, there is the simplest extension in the list. Frippery Move Clock, simply moves the position of the clock from the center of the top bar to the right, next to the status area.

The LF Edge umbrella organization for open source edge computing that was announced by The Linux Foundation last week includes two new projects: Samsung Home Edge and Project EVE. We don’t know much about Samsung’s project for home automation, but we found out more about Project EVE, which is based on Zededa’s edge virtualization technology. Last week, we spoke with Zededa co-founder Roman Shaposhnik about Project EVE, which provides a cloud-native based virtualization engine for developing and deploying containers for industrial edge computers (see below).

LF Edge aims to establish “an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system.” It is built around The Linux Foundation’s telecom-oriented Akraino Edge Stack, as well as its EdgeX Foundry, an industrial IoT middleware project..

Like the mostly proprietary cloud-to-edge platforms emerging from Google (Google Cloud IoT Edge), Amazon (AWS IoT), Microsoft (Azure Sphere), and most recently Baidu (Open Edge), among others, the LF Edge envisions a world where software running on IoT gateway and edge devices evolves top down from the cloud rather than from the ground up with traditional embedded platforms.

The Linux Foundation, which also supports numerous “ground up” embedded projects such as the Yocto Project and Iotivity, but with LF Edge it has taken a substantial step toward the cloud-centric paradigm. The touted benefits of a cloud-native approach for embedded include easier software development, especially when multiple apps are needed, and improved security via virtualized, regularly updated container apps. Cloud-native edge computing should also enable more effective deployment of cloud-based analytics on the edge while reducing expensive, high-latency cloud communications.

None of the four major cloud operators listed above are currently members of LF Edge, which poses a challenge for the organization. However, there’s already a deep roster of companies onboard, including Arm, AT&T, Dell EMC, Ericsson, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia Solutions, Qualcomm, Radisys, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, and WindRiver (see the LF Edge announcement for the full list.)

With developers coming at the edge computing problem from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives, often with limited knowledge of the opposite realm, the first step is agreeing on terminology. Back in June, the Linux Foundation launched an Open Glossary of Edge Computing project to address this issue. Now part of LF Edge, the Open Glossary effort “seeks to provide a concise collection of terms related to the field of edge computing.”

There’s no mention of Linux in the announcements for the LF Edge projects, all of which propose open source, OS-agnostic, approaches to edge computing. Yet, there’s no question that Linux will be the driving force here.

Project EVE aims to be the Android of edge computing

Project EVE is developing an “open, agnostic and standardized architecture unifying the approach to developing and orchestrating cloud-native applications across the enterprise edge,” says the Linux Foundation. Built around an open source EVE (Edge Virtualization Engine) version of the proprietary Edge Virtualization X (EVx) engine from Santa Clara startup Zededa, Project EVE aims to reinvent embedded using Docker containers and other open source cloud-native software such as Kubernetes. Cloud-native edge computing’s “simple, standardized orchestration” will enable developers to “extend cloud applications to edge devices safely without the need for specialized engineering tied to specific hardware platforms,” says the project.

Earlier this year, Zededa joined the EdgeX Foundry project, and its technology similarly targets the industrial realm. However, Project EVE primarily concerns the higher application level rather than middleware. The project’s cloud-native approach to edge software also connects it to another LF project: the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

In addition to its lightweight virtualization engine, Project EVE also provides a zero-trust security framework. In conversation with Linux.com, Zededa co-founder Roman Shaposhnik proposed to consign the word “embedded” to the lower levels of simple, MCU-based IoT devices that can’t run Linux. “To learn embedded you have to go back in time, which is no longer cutting it,” said Shaposhnik We have millions of cloud-native software developers who can drive edge computing. If you are familiar with cloud-native, you should have no problem in developing edge-native applications.”

If Shaposhnik is critical of traditional, ground-up embedded development, with all its complexity and lack of security, he is also dismissive of the proprietary cloud-to-edge solutions. “It’s clear that building silo’d end-to-end integration cloud applications is not really flying,” he says, noting the dangers of vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability and privacy.

To achieve the goals of edge computing, what’s needed is a standardized, open source approach to edge virtualization that can work with any cloud, says Shaposhnik. Project EVE can accomplish this, he says, by being the edge computing equivalent of Android.

“The edge market today is where mobile was in the early 2000s,” said Shaposhnik, referring to an era when early mobile OSes such as Palm, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile created proprietary silos. The iPhone changed the paradigm with apps and other advanced features, but it was the far more open Android that really kicked the mobile world into overdrive.

“Project EVE is doing with edge what Android has done with mobile,” said Shaposhnik. The project’s standardized edge virtualization technology is the equivalent of Android package management and Dalvik VM for Java combined, he added. “As a mobile developer you don’t think about what driver is being used. In the same way our technology protects the developer from hardware complexity.”

Project EVE is based on Zededa’s EVx edge virtualization engine, which currently runs on edge hardware from partners including Advantech, Lanner, SuperMicro, and Scalys. Zededa’s customers are mostly large industrial or energy companies that need timely analytics, which increasingly requires multiple applications.

“We have customers who want to optimize their wind turbines and need predictive maintenance and vibration analytics,” said Shaposhnik. “There are a half dozen machine learning and AI companies that could help, but the only way they can deliver their product is by giving them a new box, which adds to cost and complexity.”

A typical edge computer may need only a handful of different apps rather than the hundreds found on a typical smartphone. Yet, without an application management solution such as virtualized containers, there’s no easy way to host them. Other open source cloud-to-edge solutions that use embedded container technology to provide apps include the Balena IoT fleet management solution from Balena (formerly Resin.io) and Canonical’s container-like Ubuntu Core distribution.

Right now, the focus is on getting the open source version of EVx out the door. Project EVE plans to release a 1.0 version of the EVE in the second quarter along with an SDK for developing EVE edge containers. An app store platform will follow later in the year. More information may be found in this Zededa blog post.

Learn more about LF Edge 

We just published a brand new 18 part text tutorial series over on DevGa.me, Getting Started with Godot Step by Step Tutorial Series.  This tutorial walks you through the entire game creation process using Godot 3.1, from creating your initial project, to publishing your game with details step by step instructions and screen shots.  Even better it’s got professional quality art assets from Game Developer Studios and is completely open source!

The tutorial consist of:

Getting Started with Godot

Setup and Project Creation

Creating your Title Screen

Playing Background Music

Global Data via Autorun

Creating a Simple UI

Creating the Main Game Scene

Creating Parallax Clouds

Creating the Player

Handling Input

Add a Scene Animation

Creating Bullets

Creating the Enemies

Configuring the Collisions

Populating the Game World

Adding Shooting to the Game

Making Things Explode

The Final Code

Building your Game for Windows

If you need more detailed information on any subject we cover, be sure to check our existing Godot 3 Tutorial series, that goes into much more technical detail.  There will be a step by step video version available shortly.  There is also a 70pg PDF version of this tutorial available for Patreons.

Programming Art Design Godot Tutorial 2D

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Classic Nintendo memorabilia is increasingly hard to come by nowadays. On the digital front, it’s much the same, with classic wallpapers and screensavers somewhat a thing of the past.

If you are in need of a digital retro fix, Nintendo preservation specialist “The Forest of Illusion” has uploaded a lovely Japanese Super Mario Collection screensaver set to the internet archive, with the help of a few others. This set was originally released by Nintendo as a CD-ROM for Microsoft Windows in 1997 and contains a total of six screensavers. Take a look at the original CD case and disc in the above and below photos.

In addition to screensavers, which you can see for yourself over on the internet archive, wallpapers and programs have also been uploaded. These include Mario themed calculators and clocks. The downside is these particular programs only work properly with a Japanese version of Windows 3.1, 95 or Windows 98. For the majority of readers that likely don’t have one of these older computers, check out the photos below:

Do you like old school digital content? Tell us below.

• 
• by Liam Doolan
• 10 hours ago

It’s Saturday (unless you’re reading in this in the future, of course) which means that it’s time for yet another weekend Talking Point. As always, we’ve rounded up various members of the Nintendo Life team and forc- *ahem*… kindly asked them to share their weekend plans, so make sure to give them a read before getting involved with our poll and comment sections below. Enjoy!

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

This weekend, I’m actually headed out to London for a gaming meetup with friends, so I’ll be once again admiring my Switch’s portable capabilities in airports, planes and trains. I’ve got a friend with me, so it’ll likely be some good old fashioned Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Smash Ultimate and Splatoon 2. Maybe even a little two-player Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!. I’m sure we’ll either annoy the heck out of the other passengers on our flight across the pond or start some cool aeroplane-wide Mario Kart tournament with everyone else – who knows!

Jon Cousins, Japan correspondent

Intentionally avoiding the horrors of a certain classic remake (because I’m a massive wuss and can’t be playing that kind of malarkey at the moment), I’m delving into a wonderfully wacky world I’ve had my eye on for quite some time: Pikuniku. Trying to stay away from footage and reviews as much as possible (apart from our handsome talisman Alex’s video) it’s as if George Orwell made a Mr Men game and I absolutely adore it.

It actually inspired me to revisit a Switch launch game – Snipperclips. Of course, the co-op and competitive multiplayer are hilariously brilliant, but I again appreciate the single player with its charm, moments of methodical thinking and fun puzzle solving.

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer

This weekend I’ll be returning to a platforming gem almost no one seems to remember from the sixth gen, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. It’s been given an HD makeover and it’s headed to Switch so of course I’m going to see if it’s got what it takes to live again in a new era of consoles. I’ll also likely doing be doing my usual thing of flitting between Warframe and Paladins because, presumably, I’m only truly happy when I’m shooting things to death in a game!

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

This weekend looks like it might be a pretty busy, time-consuming one for me, so my gaming time might be sadly limited. Having said that, I’m sure my recent rediscovered love for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will make an appearance at some point – I’ve never really played Mario Kart online before, as I don’t tend to like playing anything online really, but I’ve been enjoying the added tension that actual, real-life humans can provide. I need to get out more, I know.

Elsewhere, I still haven’t found the time to play GRIS, despite the fact that it’s been sitting on my console for over a month now. Hopefully I can get a little bit of time to start that soon as I’ve only heard wonderful things.

Liam Doolan, news reporter

Earlier this week I bought Mutant Mudds Collection, Xeodrifter and Soccer Slammers in the Atooi sale on the Switch eShop. So this weekend my plan is to play them all. Mutant Mudds is a game I’ve been meaning to revisit for a long time to try out the additional modes Super Challenge and Mudd Blocks. When I’m not playing either of these, I’ll be spending time in the Metroid-inspired game Xeodrifter, while trying to come to terms with the fact the development of Metroid Prime 4 has been reset.

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

Moe weekend! It will be all about Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes for me; I welcome all this Suda51 insanity with a passion and despite knowing full well no one will remember the game by the year’s end, I am certain this is one of the 2019 Switch GOTY candidates. Elsewhere a bit of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and as much as I can possibly fit into Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition. Hmm, I got a bit of the sniffles… hopefully not the G Virus.

My game of the week goes to Pikuniku! What a delightful, minimalist journey where a flying kick solves most issues. If only real life were this simple…

Gavin Lane, contributing writer

This weekend I shall be mostly playing Downwell, OlliOlli: Switch Stance and When Ski Lifts Go Wrong, all for your reading pleasure over the coming week(s). It would be nice to make a dent in the backlog, too – Dark Souls Remastered isn’t going to play itself! – but I’ll also be knee-deep in IKEA furniture, so most of my time will be spent spinning teeny Allen keys and shooing cats out of empty packaging.

Don’t feel too sorry for me, though. Without wanting to spoil anything, that Downwell is still per-ritty good.

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

The launch of the original iPad on January 27, 2010 saw pundits guaranteeing its failure, some Apple fans disappointed, and Steve Jobs turning out to be right. Again.

In the last few months before the much, much anticipated iPad was launched on January 27, 2010, competitors had been talking up their own tablets. Then suddenly it was rumored that Apple’s one was going to be called the iSlate and competitors such as Microsoft were calling everything they could ‘slate PCs.’

Three days before the iPad was announced, Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer even unveiled three such slate PCs. He did so in his typical hesitant, clunky style and launched a video that was over practically before he’d introduced it.

Given that and the way he belabored that all the slate PCs he showed were prototypes, it all felt a little desperate. Apple was coming, it seemed to say, and rivals were afraid.

Microsoft, for one, should really have been feeling chagrin. As far back as 1996, its founder Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead that “in the future lots of people will be taking handwritten notes on computer tablets rather than paper.”

True, by then we’d already seen the Apple Newton so Gates’s book wasn’t as visionary as it seemed to think. However, Microsoft had done more than talk about tablets, it had released Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992. Then by the early 2000s, companies were making Pocket PCs.

Microsoft had tablets long before Apple. Many, many companies had tablets. It was just that nobody was buying them.

So this is where we were in early 2010. The entire computing industry was waiting for an Apple tablet, the world’s press was going to cover its launch. And then, as now, Apple didn’t say a word about what was coming.

The earliest official indication of something, anything, happening came on January 18, 2010, when Apple issued a press invitation to the launch. It was less cryptic than usual as it blatantly said: “Come see our latest creation.”

At 10am Pacific on Wednesday, 27 January, 2010, Steve Jobs stepped out onto the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. He didn’t pause the way he had with the iPhone three years before. He didn’t say that this was a day he’d been waiting for.

Yet he could have done because as we found out much later, the story of the iPad began much earlier. It began earlier even than the iPhone.

Origin story

You know that the Newton was Apple’s first tablet computer, albeit one that needed you to use a stylus instead of your fingers. It’s debatable whether there is really a line from the Newton MessagePad to the iPad but if this were a case of evolution, we’ve found the missing link.

That 2012 video is a demonstration of a pen-based Mac that was made around 1992 but never shipped as a commercial product in the US. It was called the Apple Penlite and the version shown here is a stylus-based tablet version of the Macintosh PowerBook Duo.

Reportedly, though, there was also a version that ran with what we would now call multi-touch gestures.

Apple dropped that and it dropped the Newton but in 2004 Steve Jobs revealed that Apple had continued looking at a PDA. “We got enormous pressure to bring back the Newton or do a PDA and we looked at it,” he said at the D2 All Things Digital Conference. “And we said, wait a minute, 90 percent of the people who use these things just want to get information out of them, they don’t necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis. Cellphones are going to do that.”

At the time, he said this as if that were the end of it, that cellphones were a market that Apple could never compete in. Yet by this moment in 2004, Apple had produced a technology that would end up becoming the iPhone. It’s just that it wasn’t looking at a phone then, it was looking to do a tablet.

That image and others were later to be used as exhibits in an Apple vs Samsung court case where we also saw photographs of later prototype iPads.

It’s odd just how unclear and uncertain the origins of the iPad are given that it and the iPhone are so important to Apple and that none of this was so very long ago. Yet while the CAD drawings show a date of 2004, Walter Isaacson claims in his Steve Jobs biography that the idea for the iPad didn’t come until 2005.

Even then he recounts two different versions. One is that Jony Ive and his team had been working on improving the trackpads of the MacBook Pro when they developed multi-touch. Ive showed Jobs a version of their attempt to move multi-touch onto a screen. Isaacson reports that Jobs then said that “this is the future.”

Alternatively, Isaacson also recounts a version that sounds more colorful and apocryphal but which he backs up with quotes from Jobs and Bill Gates. Reportedly Gates and Jobs were at a dinner party for the birthday of a Microsoft engineer who, says Jobs, “badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software.”

Apparently this wasn’t a new topic for this unnamed Microsoft engineer —”this dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it” —but each time the conversation was about using a stylus. “But he was doing the device all wrong,” continued Jobs. “As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead… I was so sick of it that I came home and said ‘F*** this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.'”

What is clear that this work to make a tablet was changed into making a phone. We know this from how Jobs, Ive and others have said so, but also from the fact that it happened. The iPhone came out in 2007 and it wasn’t until 2010 that the tablet appeared.

It’s not as if the road from idea to tablet was easy but once the iPhone was done, and also was such an overwhelming success, the iPad was at least more assured.

Except that Apple was new to tablets and so many other companies had tried and failed. The iPad’s success was of course going to be down to its technology but also very much to how Apple positioned it.

And as much as unveiling the hardware on January 27, 2010, Jobs was really selling us on the idea of an iPad.

Showman

Steve Jobs got a standing ovation when he stepped out onto that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts stage and he got it before he even said “Good morning.” He got the welcome because this was his public return to Apple after having taken six months leave while recovering from a liver transplant.

The extent of applause did seem to surprise him and he did still look ill, but he was soon into a very astutely prepared presentation.

Twice he teased about being there to show us all something new and then instead said he wanted to tell us other things first. He gave a typical update on the state of Apple and of course the numbers were impressive, or at least they were at the time.

While they’ve now all been dwarfed by the company’s later success, in January 2010 Jobs was able to report that the company had sold its 250 millionth iPod. He was able to say that there were 284 Apple Stores and that they’d seen 50 million visitors in the last quarter. He could tell us that there were now over 140,000 applications in the App Store and that they’d been downloaded over 3 billion times.

It was all the regular stuff but in this presentation it was specifically laying the ground work for how Apple was the company to deliver a tablet. How it was the firm that would of course get this right.

After the numbers about the stores, Jobs showed an image of himself and Steve Wozniak from the earliest days of Apple and then paused. “We started Apple in 1976,” he said. “Thirty-four years later, we just ended our holiday quarter, our first fiscal quarter of 2010, with $15.6 billion dollars of revenue. That means Apple is an over-50 billion dollar company. Now, I like to forget that because that’s not how we think about Apple but it is pretty amazing.”

It was also the cue for him to expand on the revenue number, to talk to us about how Apple gets this from three product lines. Those were the iPod, iPhone and the Mac.

“Now what’s really interesting about this is that iPods are mobile devices,” he said. “iPhones are mobile devices. And most of the Macs that we ship now are laptops. They’re mobile devices. Apple is a mobile devices company, that’s what we do.”

Remember that competitors had been making tablets for at least a decade. Here was Steve Jobs saying that Apple was bigger and better than them all. “It turns out that by revenue, Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.”

He belabored the point, driving home that Apple was larger than Sony —or at least that company’s mobile devices business —and the same with Samsung and Nokia.

With us all now fully briefed on Apple’s stature in the mobile devices market, he finally went into the iPad part of the presentation. Or appeared too.

“But before we get to that,” he said to laughter, “I want to go back to 1991 when Apple announced and shipped its first PowerBooks.”

Now he was underlining Apple’s hardware expertise and how it led the industry. He spoke of how the PowerBook made the laptop into what we now recognize as one. “It was the first laptop that had a TFT screen the first modern LCD screens. It was the first laptop that pushed the keyboard up, creating palm rests and had an integrated pointing tool, in this case a trackball.”

Amazingly, we’re only just over six minutes into this presentation but Jobs has primed us to think that Apple is the best mobile devices company in the world and also the best at making laptops.

And finally, it was here.

“A question has arisen lately,” said Jobs. “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone. The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. They’re going to have to be far better at doing some really important things. Better than the laptop. Better than the smartphone.”

He sketched out some tasks like browsing the web, doing email, reading.

“If there’s going to be a third category of device, it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise it has no reason for being. Now, some people have thought that that’s a netbook. The problem is that netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

He dismissed netbooks for their lack of speed, lack of quality and poor software. He said they’re “just cheap laptops and we don’t think that they’re a third category of device.”

And then he said “But we think we’ve got something that is and we’d like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it the iPad.”

It’s as well that Jobs had done all this work positioning the iPad because just about the instant that slide appeared, so did the first criticisms of the device. The very first criticism, though, was valid. It was about the name iPad.

Among many references online to Maxi-Pad tampon and among Twitter references to #iTampon, there were criticisms that clearly no women work in Apple’s naming department. Fast Company‘s Alissa Walker or perhaps her headline writer said it best, though, in a piece called “Apple’s iPad Name Not the First Choice for Women. Period.”

Slated

If you got an original iPad when it actually went on sale in April that year, your first reaction was surprised at how small it was. Then after a few minutes of using it, you tended to forget that and even come to think the opposite. Seeing a full website page at a time did feel like, as Jobs said, “holding the internet in your hands.”

The majority of critics did not wait to get one, did not wait for it to go on sale, before they were pronouncing the iPad a certain flop.

Business Insider called it “a big yawn” and a disappointment, saying that Jobs “didn’t deliver.”

InfoWorld didn’t even wait for the announcement, let alone the product, before it went a bit crazy with the idea of a “coming Apple tablet-pocaplypse.” Written for IT professionals in corporations, it advised “an outright ban [on the iPad] is in order.” It even told them to make any excuse they liked but ban the iPad and “seek to contain the situation by offering up an alternative tablet solution running the IT-supported and IT-approved Windows 7 operating system.”

John C Dvorak was always more of a clickbait and shock-jock style of pundit but he at least waited until the announcement, even if he didn’t see an iPad himself. Still, he reckoned it was a serious misstep. “I’m of the opinion and hope that this device is only released as a market test and placeholder for something more spectacular in the future,” he wrote.

Spectacular future

If Dvorak’s notion of a market test was bizarre for a business writer, you could say that he was right that something more spectacular would be coming in the future.

Despite the critics, despite being late to the whole idea of tablets, Apple made the iPad and we bought it in our millions. It’s had some ups and downs since that 2010 launch but it’s also got progressively more spectacular.

You’ve seen how shockingly huge the bezels on the original model now seem to us. Here’s another way to see the difference between then and now.

The main image is a home screen from the current 11-inch iPad Pro. The two devices have slightly different dimensions. The original iPad was 9.56 inches by 7.47 inches and the 2018 model is 9.74 inches by 7.02 inches.

However, look at the inset image. That’s the home screen of an original iPad and it’s rendered here to scale. This is how far just the quality of the iPad screen has come since January 27, 2010, when Jony Ive said that the iPad was “magical”.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

RESIDENT EVIL 2 / BIOHAZARD RE:2 is Now Available on Steam!

A deadly virus engulfs the residents of Raccoon City in September of 1998, plunging the city into chaos as flesh eating zombies roam the streets for survivors.

An unparalleled adrenaline rush, gripping storyline, and unimaginable horrors await you.

Witness the return of Resident Evil 2.