Welcome to WOW Weekly. Sony unlock an extra core and release the much awaited Playstation 2 games for the Playstation 4 on the Sony store with added features and benefits that might just make them worth spending your money. Apple release it programming language, swift, and all its tools with an open source license. Our new releases this week include Linux Mint 17.3 and GIMP.
Sony Playstation
Sony have unlocked an extra core in their Playstation 4 processor unleashing extra power to game developers. Unfortunately current games cannot access this power unless they are willing to patch their games to add support but future games can use this extra power to build more awesome games.
On the subject of games, following on from 2 weeks ago when Sony announced that they were going to publish PS2 games to the Playstation Store for purchase they have released 8 games. All the games have been enhanced to work with the PS4. Enhancements include trophy support, 1080p rendering, remote play, activity feeds, 2nd screen support for the manuals with Playstation Vita or the Sony App, live broadcast and share play. The downside is that if you have already got these in PS2 format you will have to buy them again so if you are not prepared to shell out a few quid for the new features you could always dust off the old PS2 or PS3!
- Dark Cloud £11.99 (SCE Worldwide Studios)
- Grand Theft Auto 3 £11.99 (Rockstar Games)
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas £11.99 (Rockstar Games)
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City £11.99 (Rockstar Games)
- Rogue Galaxy £11.99 (SCE Worldwide Studios)
- The Mark of Kri £11.99 (SCE Worldwide Studios)
- War of the Monsters £7.99 (SCE Worldwide Studios)
- Twisted Metal: Black £7.99 (SCE Worldwide Studios)
Apple Open Source Swift
Apple have published Swift, their programming language and all its tools which are publicly available on GitHub.
Swift is a replacement language for C-based languages like C, C++ and Objective-C. It was designed to create the best available language and its uses range from systems programming, mobile and desktop apps and scaling up to cloud services. Swift was designed to make writing and maintaining programs easier for the developer and focuses on being safe, fast and expressive.
New Releases in Brief
GIMP 2.9.2 Development Version
The popular open source image editor, Gimp has released a developement version. The new features in this version has enhanced support for file formats (WebP, PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS), 16/32bit per color channel processing, layer blendering, better colour management tools. All the tools in GIMP are now GEGL based. The new unified transform tool combines rotation, scaling and skewing. Several existing tools have also been updated.
Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa
The Cinnamon version includes the latest 2.8 release which has better support for QT5 applications and comes with upgraded applets and the workspace switcher now displays a desktop representation of your windows. Nemo file manager has had really useful updates to include quick preview by default and quick-rename which enables you to quickly change the file names, although this is disabled by default.
The Mate version (1.12) has an updated application menu, better integration with video players, VLC, Totem etc.
Both versions include better support with multiple desktops and peripherals and the software sources tool detects your location and tests the mirrors near you, it detects if your PPA’s are compatible, protects against corrupted mirrors or cache. The driver manager detects drivers in the background and will now refresh the cache before looking for drivers. Libre Office has also been updated to version 5 and Linux Mint will come with openVPN support by default.