Stree 2 has etched its name in cinematic history by becoming the highest-grossing Hindi film ever, surpassing the lifetime collections of Shah Rukh Khan's Jawan.

Alia gives us a peek into their lives on the season premiere episode of The Great Indian Kapil Show, on which she was a special guest, along with Karan Johar, to promote their upcoming film, Jigra.

Bollywood is celebrating Daughter's Day with beautiful pictures on social media.

The 70th National Awards saw some beautiful moments on stage and off it.

With the Ramayana as the central element, the coming together of Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Ranveer Singh and Tiger Shroff along with Kareena Kapoor and Deepika Padukone upped the superstar quotient further.

In terms of the opening day, Rohit Shetty's film may take the lead since he has assembled a big star cast and each one will bring their own fanbase.On the other hand, the Kartik Aaryan-starrer will entice an audience of its own, since, as a franchise, Bhool Bhulaiyaa has done quite well.

Between the two films, more than Rs 225 crore (Rs 2.25 billion) comfortably came in the first three days itself.

Sino-Russia Arctic Relations: The View from Singapore Sino-Russia Arctic Relations: The View from Singapore

The ‘cooling-as-a-service’ model ensures you can leave energy-efficient air conditioning to your service provider

Oceans can be tapped as a source of food and proteins in the future

I just created a massive dataset of all the AI generated metadata of the videos of the WeAreDeveloper World Congress and I wanted to extract only the tags. The dataset is a huge array with each item containing a description, generated title, an array of tags, the original and their title, like this: { “description”: […]

When the web started one of the best parts about it was the naming of things. To “surf the web” implied fun and adventure and to “browse” implied serendipity. And we seem to have lost that. Let’s go back. When I discovered the internet it was pretty much just taking off. I didn’t go to […]

The centre incorporates GenAI features for generating risk summaries and improving productivity among security teams.

Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up

HCLTech has maintained a presence in Singapore for over 40 years, serving as its Southeast Asian operations hub

This approval comes with certain voluntary commitments that the parties must adhere to

Shyamala Miss’ class explores the variety of compositions by Saint Tyagaraja and what makes them special.

Around 80 per cent of the total commercial fleet in India is leased against 53 per cent of the same, globally

IATA shares proposes 65 per cent of aviation-emitted carbon will be abated through sustainable aviation fuel

How the human element can help the airline appease passengers and employees

In a letter to States and UTs, the Director General of Health Services Atul Goel has said to discourage stubble and waste burning, and spread awareness among people about reducing firecrackers during festivities

Time-restricted eating, also known as the 16:8 diet, became popular for weight loss around 2015. Studies have since shown it is also an effective way for people with type 2 diabetes to manage blood glucose

'You have to fight your own battles and I fought mine.'

'There was this music director who approached me for a song. He called me to his house for practice.''I took my mother with me and I felt he did not like that.''It took me a while to gauge his intentions.''That really scarred me.'

'Television actors are people who play with fire.'

'There must have been some wonderful genetic disorder due to which I was attracted towards filmi songs.'

'When you are new, you don't know how the industry works'. 'But when you know where you are headed, the possibilities of being conned or facing unpleasant instances is reduced.'

Paul Lewis did an interesting article a while back about avoiding unnecessary paints through disabling hover effects as the user scrolls, which is a great approach. The down side being managing all your hover states through a parent class. UPDATE: I’ve done a follow up article which demonstrates a more robust technique. .hover .element:hover { … Continue reading "60fps scrolling using pointer-events: none"

If you’re familiar with iOS development you will know that a UITableView is very efficient when displaying a list of data. A simplification of what it does is display enough cells to fill the viewport plus a few more either side. As you scroll it re-uses cells that are now out of the viewport so … Continue reading "UITableView in JavaScript, list view with re-usable cells using flexbox"

Kuchipudi exponent Bathina Vikram Goud talks about underlying problems in the field of dance training.

Despite a deluge of debut performances across the globe, very few young dancers seem to make it to the professional stage

Employees with expertise are retained. Mastery, rather than dabbling at the periphery of what you do, is the key

‘We intend to bring a revolutionary change in the agriculture sector with a special focus on promoting animal husbandry,’ Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu tells the hill State’s milk producers

Shivraj Singh Chouhan has also been allocated the Rural Development Ministry in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's new Cabinet

The country is among those most vulnerable to water management risks, and has the poorest access to basic services, including water, among G-20 economies, the rating major flagged

A gesture of love and solidarity from estates and communities in East London to Grenfell and their local community.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

The most significant user interface change from iOS 17 to iOS 18 are the navigation differences in Apple's Photos app. The ubiquitous tab bar that's became the default navigation model in mobile apps is gone and in its place is one long scrolling page. So how does it work and why?

Most mobile applications have adopted a bottom bar for primary navigation controls. On Android it's called bottom navigation and on iOS, a tab bar, but the purpose is the same: make the top-level sections of an application visible and let people move between them.

And it works. Across multiple studies and experiments, companies found when critical parts of an application are made more visible, usage of them increases. For example, Facebook saw that not only did engagement go up when they moved from a “hamburger” menu to a bottom tab bar in their iOS app, but several other important metrics went up as well. Results like this made use of tab bars grow.

But in iOS 18, Apple removed the tab bar in their Photos app. Whereas the prior version had visible tabs for the top-level sections (Library, For You, Albums, Search), the redesign is just a single scroll view. The features previously found in each tab are now accessed by scrolling up and down vs. switching between tabs. One notable exception is Search which stays anchored at the top of the screen.

In addition to the persistent Search button, there's also a Select action and user profile image that opens a sheet with account settings. As you scroll up into your Photo library a persistent set of View controls appears at the bottom of the screen as well. The Close action scrolls you to the end of your Photo library and reveals a bit of the actions below making the location of features previously found in tabs more clear.

It's certainly a big change and given the effectiveness of tab bars, its also a change that has people questioning why? I have no inside information on Apple's decision-making process here but based on what I've learned about how people use Google Photos, Yahoo! Photos, and Flickr, I can speculate.

1. By far the dominant use of a Photo gallery is scrolling to find an image whether to share, view, or just browse.
2. Very few people organize their photo libraries and those that do, do it rarely.
3. People continue to have poor experiences with searching images, despite lots of improvements, so they default to browsing when trying to find photos.
4. Most automatic curation features like those found in For You just get ignored.

All that together can easily get you to the design answer of "the app should just be a scrolling list of all your Photos". Of course there's trade-offs. The top-level sections, and their features are much less visible, and thereby less obvious. The people who do make use of features like Albums and Memories now need to scroll to them vs. tapping once. But as iOS18 rolls out to everyone in the Fall, we'll see if these trade-offs were worth it.

Singapore : Horizon Books, 2002.

London : Wellsweep, 1994.

Karachi : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Stroud, Gloucestershire : Amberley, 2020.

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2024.