Wireless Charging Standard Gets One Step Closer

A single wireless charging standard for smartphones and tablets just got a bit closer to becoming a reality. Two of the largest wireless charging groups, the Alliance for Wireless Power and the Power Matters Alliance, have buried the hatchet and are officially joining forces. 

That’s great news for consumers as it means the two organizations, which represent dozens of companies including Samsung, Intel, Starbucks, Duracell and Qualcomm, will now share their technologies for implementation into future devices. Currently, Nokia and LG are among the few major gadget makers selling devices that support wireless charging.

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The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) holds the Rezence brand of wireless magnetic resonance charging. The Power Matters Alliance (PMA), on the other hand, provides wireless charging stations in select Starbucks and McDonald’s Stores, as well as an API that can turn individual charging spots into a global charging network.

Under the terms of the agreement, A4WP will adopt PMA’s induction specification for multi-mode induction and magnetic resonance implementations. The PMA, for its part, will use A4WP’s Rezence charging standard for its transmitters and receivers. 

“This announcement delivers a compelling message for the industry to commit and deliver wireless charging devices now,” said Kamil Grajski, president of the Alliance for Wireless Power. 

However, there’s still one major obstacle blocking a universal wireless charging standard from entering the market. The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which includes 200 companies such as  HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony, uses the Qi wireless charging standard that isn’t compatible with the A4WP’s Rezence standard. 

Still, that leaves just two competing standards rather than three. If the A4WP and PMA eventually bring the WPC into their alliance, you may be able to finally kiss your charging cables goodbye.  

A newspaper man at heart, Dan Howley wrote for Greater Media Newspapers before joining Laptopmag.com. He also served as a news editor with ALM Media’s Law Technology News, and he holds a B.A. in English from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: OmniPage 18 Standard has great OCR and page reconstruction

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) equals Acrobat XI at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. OmniPage, like Acrobat, also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

By default, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a bang-up job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

OmniPage 19 Ultimate is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
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Review: Aller Standard is a quirky, charming sans serif font

OpenType (TrueType flavored) Aller was created by Dalton Maag Ltd. for the Danish School of Media and Journalism. Aller Standard Edition is available for free (for up to 25 users within each organization) in three different versions: Aller and Aller Light, which include italic faces; and Aller Display.

A modern sans serif typeface family, all versions of Aller Standard include some interesting variations: in the regular form, the tail of the uppercase Q floats just below the baseline and ordinarily joined angles just barely touch in lowercase letters k, x, and y, giving the typeface a very airy appearance. Aller Display is a heavier weight, and includes complementary quirks: The lowercase letters in Aller Display are a combination of bubbly uppercase and lowercase glyphs, which give Aller Display somewhat of a dated look (reminiscent of a font created in the 1970s to try to look futuristic).

Aller Standard retains quirkiness without sacrificing legibility.

All versions are legible at text sizes, and also work well at display sizes; plus they include upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, mathematical symbols, some diacritics, and special characters.

These variations of Aller Standard are free for personal and commercial use for up to 25 users within an organization. For additional users, please contact Dalton Maag. Preview and print embedding is allowed. Typographic versions are available for a fee.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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