A theme emerged when Apple’s director of artificial intelligence research outlined results from several of the company’s recent AI projects on the sidelines of a major conference Friday. Each involved giving software capabilities needed for self-driving cars.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov addressed roughly 200 AI experts who had signed up for a free lunch and peek at how Apple uses machine learning, a technique for analyzing large stockpiles of data. He discussed projects using data from cameras and other sensors to spot cars and pedestrians on urban streets, navigate in unfamiliar spaces, and build detailed 3-D maps of cities.
In celebration of the holiday season, Apple last night through a Beer Bash event with singer Gwen Stefani. Apple generally throws these concerts as a perk to employees and on a semi-annual basis.
For me, the biggest improvement in MarsEdit 4 is its light feel: it is now highly responsive, and I haven’t seen a single spinning beachball since upgrading. It’s like switching to a nippy text editor from a rather overweight page layout app, only you get to keep all the features, and gain plenty more.
Ultimately, the experience of using the Surface Precision Mouse with a Mac ends up being a mixed bag. A lack of any Mac-compatible software from Microsoft seems like an early oversight and a missed opportunity to sell the Surface Precision Mouse to more than just Windows users.
The mouse itself is comfortable, and while I found it connected to my Mac more reliably than Logitech’s MX Master series, I still experienced Bluetooth issues when I fired up my wireless headphones. Perhaps this has more to do with how the new 15″ MacBook Pro communicates with Bluetooth mice than it does the mice themselves (since I’ve had worse hiccups with the Logitech MX Master). If Apple’s vision for the future is to be truly wireless, they need to do a better job supporting third-party Bluetooth devices.