OMEN by HP unveiled new hardware and mobile software innovations for gaming enthusiasts on the eve of the industry’s big Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany. On the hardware front, the OMEN Obelisk is the latest addition to the company’s desktop gaming family. On the software side, OMEN Game Stream for Android will bring OMEN experiences to gamers looking to connect and play on the go.

Also unveiled are new features for the OMEN Mindframe Headset – the world’s first headset with active earcup cooling technology – to add comfort and audio benefits for both competitive play and streaming.

“HP is focused on delivering incredible experiences that fuel the future of gaming and enable the community to perform at their best,” said Kevin Frost, vice president and general manager, Consumer Personal Systems, HP Inc. “Integrating the newly announced NVIDIA GPUs and teaming up with HyperX to provide high-performance memory for our OMEN Obelisk and future desktops demonstrates our commitment to building a world-class ecosystem comprised of the world’s best gaming solutions.”

Gamers are always hungry for the latest and greatest generation of components such as graphics cards and memory. The OMEN Obelisk will be one of the first systems to carry the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series of GPUs by way of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, powered by all-new NVIDIA Turing architecture, giving gamers access to the world’s ultimate gaming architecture. The integration of HyperX high-performance memory within the OMEN Obelisk is another critical part of engineering a desktop to utilize the latest GPUs, RAM and other components through an industry-standard upgrade path vital to gaming at the highest levels, both now and in the future.

“HyperX is pleased to work with HP and provide HyperX FURY memory in all upcoming and refreshed OMEN by HP gaming PCs,” said Mark Leathem, general manager, HyperX Peripherals Division, when speaking to the memory integration. “With over fifteen years of experience delivering gaming memory, the HyperX brand is a great fit with HP’s vision of providing exceptional PCs for gamers.”

The OMEN Obelisk Desktop addition to the family of OMEN Desktops has been engineered with peak performance and customization so PCs can keep up with the latest in gaming. With a DIY-friendly, industry-standard upgrade path, along with options for the latest graphics and processor architectures, gamers can continually achieve the performance they expect.

Top features of the OMEN Obelisk are detailed in HP’s press release and include world-class power and storage, latest series of NVIDIA GPUs, HyperX integration, strategic cooling with extensive venting that takes advantage of thoughtfully placed components to generate optimal airflow, and a customizable and clean design.

The OMEN Game Stream feature of the OMEN Command Center enables gamers to harness the power of their OMEN on other Windows 10 devices to play games on their big screen TV. The addition of Android functionality later this year will add a new array of devices for gamers to stream their OMEN experience. OMEN Command Center comes preinstalled on all OMEN PCs, providing features such as Network Booster and System Vitals. It also supports customization and settings adjustments for the latest accessories, such as the OMEN Sequencer Keyboard, OMEN Reactor Mouse and OMEN Mindframe Headset.

Speaking of which, the forthcoming OMEN Mindframe Headset is the world’s first headset with active earcup cooling by way of HP’s patented thermoelectric driven Frostcap technology. It has been built with comfort in mind, while also delivering top-notch sound quality. The OMEN by HP team has made further additions prior to launch, including noise cancellation, real-time audible feedback via sidetone to take advantage of noise cancellation, and new fabric cups for improved breathability.

Regarding pricing and availability, the OMEN Obelisk Desktop is expected to be available in September via HP.com and other retailers for a starting price of $879.99. OMEN Game Stream for Android is expected to be available later this year via the Google Play Store for free. And the OMEN Mindframe Headset is expected to be available in October via HP.com and other retailers for a starting price of $199.99.

Updated August 20, 2018 11:27 am

Video

By Andrew O’Hara
Monday, August 20, 2018, 12:18 pm PT (03:18 pm ET)

Here we are, less than a week following iOS 12 beta eight with the ninth. This build has barely changed from what we’ve seen before, begging the question —will this be the final beta?

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This build —16A5362a —is only a couple removed from the last beta we received in the middle of last week.

That explains why there were no noticable visual changes and extremely similar performance to the last time around. In our tinkering, we saw buttery smooth animations and not a single dropped frame. With performance like this, and a small increment from the last, we would not be surprised if this was the last beta preceding the GM.

Check out what changed last time in betas 7 and 8.

Find any other changes? Reach out to us on Twitter @AppleInsider or @Andrew_OSU.

You’ve probably got an image of something like Holedown in your brain already. That brick-breaker sort of layout, with numbered blocks ominously floating above an empty void. Little white orbs get rapid fired out from a point at the lower edge, and ricochet madly off of the blocks. The blocks don’t break on contact, though. Instead, every tap of a ball subtracts a number, and when that number reaches zero, the block is finally slain.

If this sounds familiar, it means advertising works. On mobile versions of social media sites, you’ve probably seen a sponsored video of this colorful menagerie, punctuated with a “click here” or “download now” option. You may have even taken the plunge down the rabbit hole and sunk some time into it. You wouldn’t be alone, Ketchapp’s Ballz was quite the free-to-play success in 2017.

There’s an amusing irony here. Ketchapp is a developer infamous for cloning the number puzzle game Threes! and releasing a free to play version of it called 2048 before Threes! could officially launch. This is among the best known examples of a trend in mobile games that isn’t going away. But where games are often cut out at the knees by imitators who create free to play copies with dubiously low production value and stuffed to the brim with ads, Martin Jonasson turns the formula around. In every single way, Holedown is the best version of this alt-brick breaker sub-genre.

Part of this is the concept. As some nameless, identity-less space explorer, you must drift to cosmic entities and mine them for their riches. From asteroids, to a sun, to an endless black hole, you must drill until you reach the core. Your tools are a clip full of smiley balls, that are rapid fired into the rocks below. The colorful rocks at the blocks you much break, which get increasingly harder to do as the numbers stretch into ridiculous amounts.

Each turn, the blocks inch towards you, slowly encroaching on your safe zone. If it crosses that red line at the top, your drilling vessel crashes, and you lose. Literally turning Ballz on its head is its own form of poetry but adding a crawling death wall mechanic really brings a sense of urgency to every shot. Blocks come in various, Tetris-like shapes and sizes, and they’re oriented randomly as they move to crush you, so every run through the six unique stages is different.

You may surprise yourself with how much critical thinking you do during any given round of Holedown. At first, it becomes simply a game of ‘kill the closest block to you.’ But as the numbers get bigger, you have to get cleverer. You start aiming for foundation blocks, that if you zap will cause everything on top of them to collapse, as well. There are blocks that can never mover, and must be drilled the hard way, they start becoming priority. Target blocks start being shoved behind big buffer blocks, so you have to weigh your options. Do you just blast through this as fast as possible, upgrading your ball threshold with collectable crystals to get more bang for each buck? Or do you try to work the angles and start pinging balls off of the rounded edges of near blocks in hopes that you can bounce your way to the target.

Once the wave of disgust hits you after you watch a string of balls haphazardly only hit your target once, and not the three or four times you’ve planned for, you come to realise that Holedown has drilled its way into your soul. It’s such a satisfying layer cake of simple, yet effective design choices. It only asks for such little space, input, and attention from you, and maximizes every moment of it. That’s what good mobile games are all about.

Another big factor is the look. It has a colorful, modernist simplicity that you can expect from the creator of twofold, inc. and rymdkapsel.  There’s a little alien worm thing in the bottom right cheering you on for some reason. It’s awkward and ultimately just for show, but it’s got good energy, so no one is really upset.

There are a few hitches in the system that can make some play experiences inconsistent. For example, the big green line that you aim with draws reliable path to where the first ball in your string will hit. With it, you can start to use some rudimentary geometry to figure out what sorts of bounces you’ll get after the initial one. As you begin to line the aiming string up close to some bricks, things may not be as they suggest. On more than one occasion, the line told me it would pass narrowly by a block, and instead would clip it, ruining the shot.

Also, as the procedural generation of the rising blocks adds a sense of uniqueness to each game, it can get carried away. Sometimes, a level will spawn with a block that has an immense number on it, with no other blocks nearby. You’ll sometimes be left to wonder “how was I ever supposed to solve this?” This is especially true on later planets, where the biggest of blocks can be insane.

These are ultimately blips in a system that is impeccably well put together. Holedown is enjoying its time in the greater gaming spotlight, a rare achievement for a mobile game. It’s simple gameplay has an inescapable gravity. It’s charm beguiles you, and soon every train ride, bathroom trip, or lunch break has just enough time in it for block breaking. Don’t let the modest price tag scare you away from the ‘it’ mobile game of the summer.

In just 4 months since GIMP 2.10 was released, we have now seen 4 major patches (yeah, the versioning could use some work… ) that have brought rapid improvement to the open source raster art package.  The 2.10.6 release brings several new features including vertical text layers, two new filters, improved straightening and more.

Details from the news file:

Core: - Render drawable previews asynchronously. - Merge the file view filter and file format lists in GimpFileDialog. The presence of 2 lists was very confusing. Filters: - New "Little Planet" (gegl:stereographic-projection) filter. Tools: - Halt the Measure tool after straightening. - Add an "orientation" option to the measure tool, corresponding to the "orientation" property of GimpToolCompass (i.e., it controls the orientation against which the angle is measured, when not in 3- point mode.) The orientation is "auto" by default, so that the angle is always <= 45 deg. Note that the "orientation" option affects the tool's "straighten" function, so that the layer is rotated toward the current orientation. - Text layers can now represent vertical texts, with 4 variants: left-to-right and right-to-left lines, and forcing all characters to be upright or following Unicode's vertical orientation property. See also: * https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/ * http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest...tation.txt User Interface: - The Dashboard dockable dialog now has an "async" field to the dashboard's "misc" group, showing the number of async operations currently in the "running" state. - New Preferences option to enable/disable layer-group previews, since these can get quite time-expensive. Translations: - New language: Marathi - 9 translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.

You can learn a great deal more about this release in the release notes available here.

GameDev News GIMP

We’ve spent our summer building innovative tools to help students of all ages and levels get the most out of learning, the minute they walk back into your classroom.  In this latest edition of What’s New in EDU, we’re excited to share a new batch of features and enhancements to help you encourage independent learning and engage your students – and we’re kicking it off with the expansion of Minecraft: Education Edition.

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Transform your classroom with Minecraft: Education Edition for iPad

Today, we are excited to announce we’re bringing the magic of Minecraft: Education Edition to iPad. Now, students can tap into the power of iPad to build historic monuments, swim through coral reefs with the Update Aquatic, bring creative stories to life, experiment with chemistry, and document their learning with the camera and portfolio features.

Educators trying Minecraft: Education Edition for the first time can get started with a beginner’s tutorial world and access a number of free class resources on education.minecraft.net. A global community of Minecraft Mentors offers year-round onboarding and classroom support, right alongside the growing Minecraft: Education Edition community – now with 35 million licensed teachers and students in 115 countries.

“Minecraft: Education Edition on iPad unlocks new and intuitive ways of collaborating and sharing and has revolutionized the way our students and teachers explore curriculum and projects,” says Kyriakos Koursaris, Head of Education Technology for PaRK International School. “The features allow for deep and meaningful learning, and the values it promotes, from inclusivity to 21 century skills, empower everyone to use technology with extraordinary results,” said Koursaris.

Here’s how to get Minecraft: Education Edition on your school’s iPads next month:

If your school district is already licensed through Microsoft:

If your school is licensed through Microsoft 365 for Education (A3 or A5), you already have access to Minecraft: Education Edition. You will be able to download the app onto iPads in September. To learn more, visit this webpage. What’s more, we’ve updated Intune for Education so it’s easier than ever for IT administrators to manage student devices from one unified, streamlined console.

If you’re interested in trying Minecraft: Education Edition on iPad in your school but have not purchased a license in the past:

Minecraft: Education Edition is licensed via yearly subscriptions that are purchased through the Microsoft Store for Education, via volume licensing agreements and through partner resellers. To learn more, visit our webpage on how to license Minecraft: Education Edition.

Minecraft: Education Edition is licensed via yearly subscriptions, purchased through Authorized Education Partners, or directly from the Microsoft Store for Education. To learn more, visit our webpage on how to license Minecraft: Education Edition.

And for Minecraft players and families who play outside of school:

We’re excited to share that players of the Windows 10 PC and Xbox console version of Minecraft can now use the Chemistry Resource Pack, released originally for Minecraft: Education Edition.

The Chemistry Resource Pack introduces lab tables, element blocks and items that are craftable only using the new chemistry features. With this added feature, players can create elements and combine them into compounds, build a periodic table and combine materials using chemistry to create new items like helium balloons, sparklers, latex, and underwater torches. Learn and experiment with the building blocks of chemistry in the world of Minecraft!

To get the Chemistry Resource Pack, go to the ‘Create New World’ option in the game and, under the ‘Cheats’ menu, toggle the ‘Education’ option.

What else is new in Microsoft Education this month?

Office 365 Education:

Microsoft OneNote helps teachers organize class content, create and deliver interactive lessons, provide feedback, and collaborate. Graphing in Math Assistant is now available in OneNote Online – this tool helps students visualize math problems and equations as they learn the steps to solving a problem.

OneNote is also making improvements to help you save valuable teaching time. Roaming Ink enables Pens and Ink preferences that follow you from device to device. You and your students can easily reuse the custom pens and ink you love, even when you switch devices. Learn more about using OneNote in your classroom.

Open Up resources:

We’re extremely excited to partner with Open Up Resources to offer high quality, free curriculum materials through Microsoft OneNote and Forms. Since the partnership announcement, we’ve been working to incorporate Open Up curriculum seamlessly into OneNote and Forms.

Using OneNote Class Notebook to access the Open Up curriculum, teachers can distribute course materials on any device. Students can write, draw, collaborate, and save their work automatically in their personal digital notebooks. Open Up content in OneNote integrates seamlessly with common LMS and SIS platforms. Using Open Up in Forms, teachers can access one-click assignment and efficient scoring. Get started using Open Up curriculum now.

Technology can be a wonderful tool to help personalize learning for every student in your class. To help students customize reading even more, we’ve added additional colors for page themes in Office Lens. Choose from the expanded selection with the latest update of Office Lens (version 2.15) for iPhone or iPad. Read more details here.

Closed captioning in Stream is also now available so you can make a lesson more accessible by recording it and adding captions.

Microsoft Teams:

Microsoft Teams is the digital hub that brings conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place. Educators can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and communicate with school staff – all from a single experience in Office 365 Education. Check out all the new updates in the Teams back-to-school blog post.

• Rubric Grading now available. Built directly into Teams, rubric grading helps increase assignment transparency for students and allows teachers to give more meaningful feedback. Customize your grading criteria with your own rubric to enable skills-based grading of your assignments.

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• Updates to the assignments experience on mobile: With new updates to iOS and Android apps, you can now access all of your assignments directly when you launch the Teams app and see a simplified list of upcoming tasks, across all of your classes. Students can work on their assignments directly on their phones and turn in.
• Archiving teams: Instead of deleting older teams, you can now archive the team, placing it in a read-only state. This way you can go back and reference what you covered last year, any time you want.
• Reusing assignments: Reuse assignments from current or archived class teams, bringing over instructions, attachments, and customizations from previous assignments to your new assignment.

• New Class Notebook and Staff Notebook tab app: Teachers can enjoy the new and improved Class Notebook and Staff Notebook settings directly inside of Teams. Just select “Manage.”

Skype in the Classroom:

Skype in the Classroom (SITC) is an online community that enables thousands of teachers to inspire the next generation of global citizens through transformative learning over Skype.

• New Activity Plans for your favorite Skype in the Classroom activities. Whether you are going back to school or in the middle of the academic year, make learning relevant and fun for your students by participating in one of the Skype in the Classroom LIVE learning experiences. Use the new Activity plans, written by teachers, to enrich your students’ learning experiences with activities and assessments aligned to ISTE standards. They can be followed step by step, or you can adjust them based on your classroom’s needs. Explore all activity plans here.

Microsoft Photos App:

The Microsoft Photos App makes it easy to tell stories with photos and videos. There is a built-in video editor, making it easy for you and your students to create movies using photos, video clips, music, 3D models, and Hollywood-style special effects. Whether it’s a group history project, a lab report, or a music video just for fun, the Photos app makes it easy to quickly assemble content, add titles, drop in music, enhance your story with special effects, and share. If you liked making videos with Movie Maker, you’ll love what you can do with the Microsoft Photos App.

• Newsroom-inspired 3D effects. We’ve added newsroom-inspired offerings to the 3D effects built into the Photos app. Now your class can add “LIVE” overlays to their video projects, and identify breaking news, 24-hour coverage, or inspiring sports stories.
• Video Editor tile: Jump directly into video projects, or start a new one quickly, with the new Video Editor Tile. Your next big story is only a click away.​

Surface Go  

When we sit down with our education customers, many tell us that they’re looking for hardware that seamlessly integrates with their larger ecosystem of Microsoft-powered devices. Beyond that, our education customers need a device that’s small and sturdy while still providing the performance their students need. And all of this has to be at the right price. That’s why we’re excited about what Surface Go offers for schools, and the magic that it unlocks within each student who uses it.

Surface Go equips both students and teachers with the quality and productivity that Surface is known for in a more compact – and affordable – package. At just 1.15 pounds and 8.3 mm thin, Surface Go packs amazing portable performance into a 10” device. Starting at just $399 MSRP for education customers, it represents a new entry point for the Surface family, while keeping the premium qualities that have come to define Surface.

Surface Go is a great device for schools looking for a Windows 10 device that offers tablet to laptop flexibility, pen and touch input, a natural typing experience with the Surface Go Type Cover, seamless digital inking, and the ability to run full desktop applications.

Early reception to the device has been positive and tech journalists across the world are excited for what Surface Go can do for education.

More information about Surface Go is available here. Education customers who are interested in purchasing Surface Go should contact their Microsoft sales representative or device reseller today.

Intune for Education makes it easy to set up and manage Windows 10 devices in just a few steps, including deploying apps or settings to users, and managing shared devices.

• iOS device management features are now available in Intune for Education. Intune for Education is already a great way to manage your school’s Windows 10 devices, and you will now be able to use it to manage apps and settings on your classroom iOS devices. With these new features, Intune for Education continues to grow as a unified, streamlined administrative console to manage your school devices.