Memorial Day weekend is still more than half a work week away, but the most of the sales have already arrived at some of the biggest online retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot, and Walmart. While prices may not be quite as good as Prime Day or the Black Friday season, these discounts are still a great opportunity to save money. To help you sort through what's live and what isn't, I've put together a quick list of all of the biggest Memorial Day sales already happening ahead of the weekend. I'll be updating this page with all of the new sales as they go live ahead of the weekend.The Best Memorial Day Sales Live NowThe Biggest SaleAmazon Memorial Day SaleSee it at AmazonTech and AppliancesBest Buy Memorial Day SaleSee it at Best BuyRetailer SaleWalmart Memorial Day SaleSee it at WalmartFurnitureWayfair Memorial Day saleSee it at WayfairPC and LaptopsHP Memorial Day SaleSee it at HPAppliances and FurnitureHome Depot Memorial Day SaleSee it at Home DepotClothing and Outdoor GearREI Anniversary SaleSee it at REIRetailer SaleTarget Memorial Day SaleSee it at TargetAppliances and FurnitureLowes Memorial Day SaleSee it at LowesSelect DealseBay Memorial Day SaleSee it at eBayRetailer SaleCostco Memorial Day SaleSee it at CostcoMattressesCasper Memorial Day SaleSee it at CasperMattressesDreamCloud Mattress SaleSee it at DreamCloudPC and LaptopsDell Memorial Day SaleSee it at DellPC and LaptopsLenovo Memorial Day SaleSee it at LenovoGaming chairs and desksSecretlab Memorial Day SaleSee it at SecretlabShoes and SportswearAdidas Memorial Day SaleSee it at AdidasFurniture and KitchenwareCrate&Barrel Memorial Day SaleSee it at Crate&BarrelKitchenwareWilliams Sonoma Memorial Day SaleSee it at Williams SonomaMattressesSleep Number Memorial Day SaleSee it at Sleep NumberAppliancesLG Memorial Day SaleSee it at LGClothingMacy's Memorial Day SaleSee it at Macy'sSportswear and Outdoor GearDick's Sporting Goods Memorial Day SaleSee it at Dick'sOffice FurnitureFlexiSpot Memorial Day SaleSee it at FlexiSpotGaming ChairsAndaSeat Memorial Day SaleSee it at AndaSeatTuft & Needle Memorial Day SaleSee it at Tuft & NeedleI've been covering and shopping Memorial Day sales for years and, honestly, I'm not that impressed with a lot of the discounts we've seen so far from these retailers. That being said, it is still fairly early in the week and I expect to see prices drop a bit more before the weekend. Memorial Day isn't until May 26 this year, and many smaller retailers will likely launch their sales closer to the actual holiday weekend.Should you shop Memorial Day sales or wait for better discounts?The biggest question around Memorial Day sales in general is whether you should shop now or wait for better deals later in the year. In the past, we could usually count on upcoming sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday to have the lowest prices of the year on just about everything. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of confusion around tariffs and price increases in 2025 and it seems almost certain that baseline prices on many goods in the U.S. are probably going to go up before the end of the year.If you're hoping to save as much money as possible in 2025, Memorial Day sales are definitely worth considering. Tariffs on most Chinese imports are likely to affect prices later in the year, so if you find a really good price on something you need right now, don't hesitate to pick it up before the price can go up.What Should You Buy During Memorial Day Sales?While there are certainly exceptions, I have generally found that the best Memorial Day sales tend to be for the same few categories every year. Unlike bigger shopping events like Black Friday, discounts tend to be more focused around home goods, consumer electronics, and clothing. Here's a quick breakdown of what is absolutely worth buying during Memorial Day weekend.Top Deals TodayAfter combing through all of the Memorial Day promotions that are already live, I've found that the Amazon sale has the best overall discounts. This includes things like a Star Wars LEGO set deal and discounted iPads that are at their best prices of the year. Below I've curated some of the top deals from that sale into a neat little catalog for you to browse.Lowest Ever Price65" LG Evo C4 4K OLED Smart TVLowest Ever PriceThe New Apple iPad 11-inchLowest Ever PriceRing Battery DoorbellLowest Ever PriceThrone of Glass Hardcover Box SetLowest Ever PriceLEGO Star Wars The Mandalorian HelmetLowest Ever PriceKingdom Come: Deliverance IILowest Ever PriceSamsung 49" Odyssey OLED G9 (G95SC) Series Curved Smart Gaming MonitorSee it at AmazonLowest Price EverChar-Broil 3-Burner Cabinet Style Gas GrillLowest Ever PriceTraeger Grills Woodridge Pro Electric Wood Pellet Grill and SmokerLowest Ever PriceColeman Pro 45qt Ultra-Light Premium Hard CoolerFurniturePerhaps the overall best thing to buy during Memorial Day sales is furniture. Unless you're getting a really cheap nightstand from Ikea, furniture is generally expensive. Memorial Day deals are an excellent time to save a ton of money on pretty much every type of furniture, including desks, gaming chairs, and outdoor patio options. While you can find these deals at most major retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, I'd recommend starting with the Wayfair Memorial Day sale. Though if you're on the hunt for a gaming chair specifically, the Secretlab sale and AndaSeat sales are the way to go. There are also some pretty good discounts at FlexiSpot on various types of office furniture, including popular standing desks.FurnitureWayfair Memorial Day saleSee it at WayfairGaming chairs and desksSecretlab Memorial Day SaleSee it at SecretlabFurniture and KitchenwareCrate&Barrel Memorial Day SaleSee it at Crate&BarrelOffice FurnitureFlexiSpot Memorial Day SaleSee it at FlexiSpotGaming ChairsAndaSeat Memorial Day SaleSee it at AndaSeatMajor AppliancesPurchasing a major appliance for your home is going to be expensive no matter when you do it, but Memorial Day sales can help mitigate that cost a fraction. Major appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and ovens are all on sale right now across quite a number of retailers. You can find these deals at Costco, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Lowes currently. Some of the sales are straight discounts while others are a buy one, get one free situation. Below are the sales I'd recommend shopping if you're on the hunt for new appliances. Best Buy is a great option for most brands, but you can also get a free refrigerator from LG direct if you're only looking for the best fridge deal.Tech and AppliancesBest Buy Memorial Day SaleSee it at Best BuyAppliancesLG Memorial Day SaleSee it at LGAppliances and FurnitureHome Depot Memorial Day SaleSee it at Home DepotRetailer SaleCostco Memorial Day SaleSee it at CostcoAppliances and FurnitureLowes Memorial Day SaleSee it at LowesTVsThere are actually a lot of good times to buy a new TV throughout the year, but Memorial Day weekend is consistently one of the best times to find discounts on newer TVs. This likely has something to do with the TV release cycle as we are now about halfway through the year and the latest TVs have finally started to drop in price. If you're looking to buy a great new television for a good price, I'd recommend picking up the LG C4 that just dropped to its lowest price ever. However, there are already plenty of other TV deals to choose from.Lowest Price Ever65" LG Evo C4 4K OLED Smart TVLowest Price EverSAMSUNG 55-Inch Class QLED 4K QN85D Series Mini LEDLowest Price EverLG 55-Inch Class UT75 Series LED Smart TV 4K2024 ModelSony - 65" Class BRAVIA 8 OLED 4K UHD Smart Google TVMattressesAlthough mattresses technically count as furniture, I've broken them out into their own category because of the sheer number of Memorial Day mattress sales. Memorial Day weekend is far and away one of the best times to buy a mattress every year – you likely won't find lower prices even on Black Friday. Most major retailers have mattress promotions right now and you can find deals at Amazon, Walmart, and even Costco. However, I'd recommend shopping direct from the manufacturer to save the most money. The DreamCloud mattress sale will get you up to 60% off a new mattress right now.MattressesDreamCloud Mattress SaleSee it at DreamCloudTuft & Needle Memorial Day SaleSee it at Tuft & NeedleMattressesSleep Number Memorial Day SaleSee it at Sleep NumberMattressesCasper Memorial Day SaleSee it at CasperClothingHoliday weekends are almost always a good time to find discounts on clothes. This is largely thanks to their proximity to a change in seasons. In the case of a Memorial Day weekend, you should be able to find some of the best prices of the year on both summer and winter clothes. Winter clothes are most likely to be part of clearance sales during this time and you should be able to find good deals on things like jackets, sweaters, and other outdoor gear. Meanwhile, every major retailer will have a sale on some sort of summer-related clothing as we head into warmer weather. I'd personally recommend checking out the REI Anniversary sale happening right now as it is its biggest sale of the year. There's also an adidas sale that is pretty good if you're looking for some athleisure deals.Clothing and Outdoor GearREI Anniversary SaleSee it at REIShoes and SportswearAdidas Memorial Day SaleSee it at AdidasClothingMacy's Memorial Day SaleSee it at Macy'sSportswear and Outdoor GearDick's Sporting Goods Memorial Day SaleSee it at Dick'sLaptops and PCsIf you're looking to buy a new laptop or PC this year, I'd recommend making a purchase sooner rather than later. This is especially true if you're trying to find the best time to buy a gaming PC this year, because GPU prices are already on the rise. The best Memorial Day sales tend to be directly from the manufacturers, so that's usually where you'll want to look. Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have at least part of their Memorial Day sales live right now. You can also check out Best Buy and Amazon if you're looking for brands like Acer and LG at a discount, however.PC and LaptopsHP Memorial Day SaleSee it at HPPC and LaptopsDell Memorial Day SaleSee it at DellPC and LaptopsLenovo Memorial Day SaleSee it at LenovoTech and AppliancesBest Buy Memorial Day SaleSee it at Best BuyKitchenwareMany of the same stores that have furniture sales are likely to have discounts on kitchenware as well during Memorial Day weekend. There is a clear crossover between furniture and the kitchen, which means now is a good time to find discounts on things like dining tables and small appliances all at once. Major online retailers like Amazon and Target have discounts on these types of things, but if you're looking for only kitchenware deals, I'd suggest taking a look at the Williams Sonoma sale. It is a lot of higher-end stuff, so discounts like these are worth checking out whenever they come around.KitchenwareWilliams Sonoma Memorial Day SaleSee it at Williams SonomaGrillsIf you're hoping to pick up a new barbecue before the summer season, Memorial Day sales are arguably the best time to do so. Pretty much every major retailer that has outdoor furniture on sale is going to have grills discounted right now as well. Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, and Lowes all of discounts on popular grill brands ahead of the weekend. I'm personally planning on shopping the Home Depot sale to get a new grill this year, so that's my suggestion for anyone else. If you happen to miss this sale, you can also find deals just as good or better near the end of the summer during Labor Day sales.The Biggest SaleAmazon Memorial Day SaleSee it at AmazonRetailer SaleWalmart Memorial Day SaleSee it at WalmartAppliances and FurnitureHome Depot Memorial Day SaleSee it at Home DepotRetailer SaleCostco Memorial Day SaleSee it at CostcoAppliances and FurnitureLowes Memorial Day SaleSee it at LowesVideo GamesMemorial Day sales aren't exactly the very best time to buy video games, but that doesn't stop there from being Memorial Day video game deals. Most of the discounts are from across a variety of retailers, but Amazon and Woot have the most prominent price cuts right now. Some of the most popular video games of the last year are on sale right now, including Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 and Kingdom Come Deliverance II. GameStop is also having a surprisingly good sale with popular games as low as $15 right now.$15 and $30 Game Sale at GameStopSee it at GameStopKingdom Come: Deliverance II (PS5, XSX)Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 (PS5, XSX)Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (PS5, XSX, Switch)Silent Hill 2 (PS5)Sid Meier's Civilization VII (PS5, XSX, Switch)Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition (Switch)Star Wars Jedi Survivor (PS5, XSX)Star Wars Outlaws - Limited Edition (XSX)Suikoden I & II HD Remastered (PS5, XSX, Switch)Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1 (PS5, Switch)Dragon Age: The Veilguard- Deluxe Edition (PS5, XSX)Final Fantasy XVI (PS5)Diablo IV (Xbox)Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PS5)Super Mario RPG (Switch)Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (PS5)When Do Memorial Day Sales End?Quite a few Memorial Day sales still haven't gone live yet, so there is still plenty of time to shop before the deals are gone. Most Memorial Day sales will be ending at the end of actual Memorial Day – which is Monday, May 26 this year.Jacob Kienlen is a Senior SEO Strategist and Writer for IGN. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has considered the Northwest his home for his entire life. With a bachelor's degree in communication and over 8 years of professional writing experience, his expertise ranges from books and games to technology and food. He has spent a good chunk of his career writing about deals and sales to help consumers find the best discounts on whatever they may be looking to buy.

In the peaceful countryside of Zayas de Báscones, Spain, a new winery by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos is quietly emerging. The Bodegas Dominio d’Echauz winery is designed to be more than just a site for making wine. Once finished, it will function as an archive, a research lab, and a sanctuary focused on preserving and studying rare grape varieties. This thoughtful approach blends modern architecture with a mission to protect local wine heritage, making the winery an important space for both production and conservation in the region. Designer: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos Unlike many wineries built for scale, this project takes a more modest, thoughtful approach. The planned curved white structure will follow the natural lines of the surrounding vineyards, making it feel like a seamless part of the landscape. Despite its understated appearance, the building stands out for its innovative use of materials and focus on sustainability. The winery will be built mainly from hempcrete blocks—a mix of hemp fibers, lime, and water—known for being both strong and environmentally friendly. These blocks will form two curved walls, adding both stability and a gentle visual appeal. A single-pitch metal roof will top the structure, while Diathonite, a cork-based insulating mortar, will coat the walls, floors, and ceilings to improve insulation throughout. These materials work together to create a unified, seamless look while delivering strong thermal performance. This helps keep the interior temperature stable, which is essential for wine aging and can reduce or even remove the need for mechanical cooling or heating. The winery’s minimalist white color scheme and natural finishes align with Fran Silvestre’s broader design philosophy. Here, these choices are both practical and beautiful. The white cork render reflects sunlight, helping the building stay cool during Castile’s hot summers. Its low profile keeps the structure discreet, blending it into the landscape. Despite its simplicity, the design leaves a lasting impression. Inside, the space is organized for efficiency. Grapes enter at one end, move through fermentation, and age in oak barrels before bottling. The layout also provides space for tasting, gatherings, research, and storage. These thoughtful design choices highlight the winery’s true mission. Rather than focusing on mass production, the space is dedicated to micro-vinification—small batches that explore the preservation and potential of rare grape varieties. Developed with Vitis Navarra, the project aims to protect grapes at risk of extinction, creating a living genetic archive rather than chasing high output. In the context of shifting climates and changing tastes, these lesser-known varietals could shape the future of winemaking. The first collection, called Basajaun after a Basque forest spirit, symbolizes the winery’s role as a quiet guardian of natural and cultural heritage. When finished, the winery will be more than just a place for wine; it will stand as a living archive of sustainability and stewardship. The post Spanish Winery Made From Hempcrete Blocks Is Setting A New Standard For Sustainability & Wine Heritage first appeared on Yanko Design.

Behind the film’s invisible visual effects by Cinesite, including environments, aerial surveillance footage and those stunning F-18 show of force shots.  Warfare, written and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, is based on Mendoza’s own experiences as a US Navy SEAL in a deadly moment during the Iraq War. It follows the action as a Navy SEAL platoon takes over a suburban Ramadi street before they come under attack. When they attempt to flee and call in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, an IED explosion results in severe casualties and a further rescue. Cinesite, led by visual effects supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp, was responsible for the film’s visual effects. This ranged from taking original plates for the house and surrounding street areas shot at at an airfield and fleshing out the environment to resemble the Iraqi city, to realizing gunfire and weapon hits, and some dramatic ‘show of force’ F-18 shots.  Here’s how they did it. The shoot The film was shot at Bovingdon Airfield Studios in Hertfordshire, UK. The Ramadi street set was completely built there as an outdoor location in the airfield’s car park. “Initially,” recounts Stanley-Clamp, “the plan was to build just the one house and digitally do the rest. But then the plan went to six houses in close quarters around the hero house where the incident takes place. It grew finally to eight houses, one was a complete working house, with a working staircase, and then the houses off it are flattage, but good flattage with enough depth to work.” Surrounding the housing set were two ‘massive’ bluescreens, as Stanley-Clamp puts it. “They were 20 feet high by 120 feet wide. Then I had a couple of floating bluescreens on Manitou’s that we could drive in to plug a gap here and there.” Cinesite was then responsible for extending the street environment and completing some sky replacements. “Production designer Mark Digby’s set was so well-built,” says Stanley-Clamp. “Sometimes, with a set for a castle or something like that, when you get up close to the set, you can tell it’s plaster and wood and canvas. But the textures we sourced from Mark’s set are what we use to duplicate and replicate out the rest of the build in CG. Our build was completely based on their architecture.” The IED explosion As a Bradley Fighting Vehicle arrives at the house and members of the platoon leave to enter it, an IED fixed to a lamppost is detonated next to the tank. Special effects supervisor Ryan Conder orchestrated the explosion. “It was shot with a lot of dust and debris and with light bulbs inside so that it was very bright,” says Stanley-Clamp. “We had prepped visual effects simulations to add to the dust and debris, but Alex essentially said, ‘No, it works, that’s what I want.’ What we did add was some burning phosphorus that stays alight for around four minutes. There was also a small pick-up bluescreen shot for a soldier falling.” “After the main explosion,” continues Stanley-Clamp, “there’s the moment where there’s just a lot of smoke. We added about 45% more smoke and tiny particulate, so small you barely register it, but you “feel” it’s presence. There’s a lot of subtle compositing work going on inside there. At one point, two of the soldiers are standing almost next to each other, but they don’t know that they’re standing next to each other. So we were having to roto each soldier off the plate and then layer smoke back over them and then reveal them and push them back. It was a lot of fine-tuning.” Prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis delivered a number of prosthetics and bloody make-up effects for the resulting IED explosion injuries. Cinesite’s contributions here were only minimal, advises Stanley-Clamp. “There’s one particular shot where we put in a fluid blood sim running as a character cuts open the trouser leg. Arterial veins and things should be pumping a little bit of blood, so we put some fluid blood in running off the wound and a couple of other little embellishments.” Show of force At three points in the film, platoon members call in a ‘show of force’ from an F-18, which involves a loud fly-by the house designed to intimidate those surrounding it with an almighty sound and pulsating wave of dust and debris.  “The show of force was going to happen only once,” notes Stanley-Clamp, “and it was one of those shots where we were told, ‘You won’t  see the jet, just hear it.’ Well, in the end, they wanted a trailer-type shot for this. Also, that first show of force is the only time we used a bit of fancy camera kit where we were on a long arm and dropped the camera down. Usually, we were right there all the time with the platoon. For that shot, Alex said, ‘Faster, faster, faster—what happens if you run it double speed?’ We ran it double speed and it worked.”  “We worked with the physics of the environment and we measured everything out,” adds Stanley-Clamp. “I mean, it’s traveling at something like 400 miles an hour. With the camera coming down, there was actually a weird optical illusion. It made it look like the plane was going up. So we had to do some tricky things to make that work.” For the resulting wave of dust and debris, Cinesite had Lidar scans of the set, and used a model of the houses and street to aid in simulations and extra backdrafts, utilizing Houdini. Says Stanley-Clamp: “We even went in and added moving palm trees, put more sand on the ground that could lift up, and then would scrape it back so you are left with patches of exposed ground.” Stanley-Clamp’s other main memory of those show of force moments was the sound. “So, the set was rigged for sound, meaning, the sound was built into our set. When that show of force happened, the first time it happened, I was looking for that fucking jet! Where did that come from?! It was absolutely deafening. Same goes for the call to prayer, the dogs barking, people chattering out in the street, it was all there.” Aerial surveillance Inside the house, the platoon has a computer with aerial maps and surveillance of their location, showing the house from above and movement around it. These screens were initially intended to only be featured briefly, but Stanley-Clamp took it upon himself to prepare some graphics that could be played back during the shoot. “In editorial,” he says, “they started to cut in the graphics that had been made, and they found it really helped with the exposition. So, they needed more.” Using the CG models constructed for the set extensions, Cinesite expanded the buildings out to a full grid of streets and residences. Adding in soldiers and other people was then necessary for the surveillance screens. At a pick-up shoot back at Bovingdon airfield, this time on the actual runway, a large 400 foot long bluescreen was laid on the ground, and a drone used to film action from 200 feet up in the air.  “We used this to film the equivalent of running down a street,” outlines Stanley-Clamp. “We had actually previs’d it with walk cycles that I had generated myself, but Alex said, ‘It’s got to be real people. Not mocap. You can tell they’re pixels, you can tell.’ For a day shoot, I got hours and hours and hours of footage, which I could never have generated in CG. Plus, I got whole platoons to walk down the street, not just individual people.”  The result was a collection of elements that brought some realistic-looking parallax to the surveillance screens, suggests Stanley-Clamp. “In fact, at one of the test screenings with some marines, the feedback from them was, ‘Where did you get hold of the footage? It’s so good.’ They thought it was real footage.” For the actual look of the footage, Cinesite consulted with Mendoza on whether it took on an infrared, ultraviolet or ‘heat seek’ look, the latter of which is what they settled on. “Right up until very close to the end,” notes Stanley-Clamp, “I thought, ‘It’s not quite right.’ So we grunged it down and raised it back up. It was looking too clean. We had to remember this was set in 2016 and effectively the tech then is a little different. You can buy night-vision goggles now or shoot night vision with drones and the quality’s ridiculous. But we had to go back to the reference, although we found that it can be hard to find that old reference.”  Subtle effects Warfare’s use of subtle visual effects extended also to weaponry. For shots requiring the Bradleys to fire from their central gun barrels, Cinesite provided a large muzzle flash and resulting smoke, timed to practical explosions rigged to buildings. Gunshots and muzzle flashes were also added to soldier firearms, along with accompanying CG bullet, phosphors and masonry hits.  Cinesite’s muzzle flashes related directly to the choice of camera. The film was shot largely on a DJI Ronin lightweight camera (the DOP was David J. Thompson) that allowed for fast set-ups and being able to maneuver in small spaces. “We did some experiments and found that shooting at 30 fps gave us the best retention of muzzle flashes,” explains Stanley-Clamp. “You would not always see a muzzle flash go off, so sometimes we’ve enhanced a muzzle flash that’s in there or put additional ones in.” “It was a bit different for something like tracer fire,” adds Stanley-Clamp. “You might think trace fire is there the whole time. It’s not. It’s about every fifth shell that goes off, that’s where you will get a tracer fire. Alex would be counting them. ‘No…no…now!’ That was a good learning curve.”  The post How an airfield in the UK was turned into the Iraqi city of Ramadi for Alex Garland’s ‘Warfare’ appeared first on befores & afters.

Unity 2022.2 includes updates to the Splines package, accessible through the Package Manager, which offers you the ability to draw and use spline paths in your game or other creation. For developers, this means you can easily build out rivers, roads, camera tracks, and other path-related features and tools. If you’re an artist, you get a consistent, Unity-supported experience across all these toolsets using our Splines solution. Several default components are also included with the Splines package, so you can use this new artist tooling right away.If you’d like to jump right into learning and discussing the new Splines package, head over to the Unity Splines forum post.A “spline” is a type of path that is often used in both 3D and 2D creative tools. Essentially, you set a few points as if you are mapping out a road, then optionally tweak how the path curves around those points, and, finally, connect more branching points if you need them… that’s your spline!Splines are often used to:Create rivers and roadsSet camera tracksDefine areas or shapesThe Splines package enables you to create and use splines as easily as you would any other object. Open the GameObject menu to create a spline, then add whatever components you want to use that spline’s path.As an artist, this means you just need to learn one set of tools to draw roads onto your terrain, define camera paths, or extrude mesh shapes for level design. Even better, the spline you draw for your camera can be reused to place a path on the ground, to navigate characters, or anything else. Just add or swap out components as needed.For developers, the Splines package provides a robust and standardized framework to build on. Create your own custom components or Unity Asset Store packages. For more information, see the Splines API documentation.Create or open a project on Unity 2022.2 or later, then install the Splines package using the Package Manager.To create a spline:1. From the top menu, select Create > Spline > Draw Spline.2. Click in the Scene view to place points for your spline. If you want to add a curve to the path, click and drag when you place a point.3. When you are done drawing, press Escape, or select a tool in the Tools overlay.4. Use the Editor’s standard select and transformation tools to edit the shape of the spline. For more information, see the Splines documentation.Splines is the first major feature to use our new tooling system, contextual workflows. Contextual workflows use overlays to get you the right tools at the right time. You can see them in action in these cases:Simplify editing with Tool context: Select a spline to see an icon appear at the beginning of the Tools overlay. This icon indicates the Tool overlay’s Tool context. Click the Tool context icon to change your Tool context from GameObject to Spline. Now you can dive right into editing the spline’s finer details using the standard Editor tools and controls.Customize with Tool Settings: Activate a spline tool to see new options in the Tool Settings overlay. This shows you which options are available so you can pick what you need on the fly.Discover new tools with component tools: Select a spline, and if that spline has any component tools, they appear at the bottom of the Tools overlay. If a package or asset uses components to add new tools, you can find them at the bottom of the Tools overlay – no need to search through the Editor.The best part here is that contextual tooling can work with any toolset in Unity, including the Unity Asset Store or other custom creations. If you’re a tool developer and need help setting this up, start with the tools documentation, or reach out on the Unity Forums.Speaking of components, we’ve included three to meet the common uses cases:Instantiate: Generate copies of an item along a spline. Use the Instantiate component to create objects like fences, trees, stone walkways, and so on.Animate: Move a GameObject along a spline. Use the Animate component with cameras, characters, or in situations where you need to define movement in Unity.Extrude: Build a tube mesh along a spline. Use the Extrude component to create and easily edit shapes like wires, pipes, ropes, noodles, and more.New in Splines 2.1, you can build splines with multiple, branching paths. Activate the Draw Splines tool, and begin drawing new parts onto the spline. This also enables you to create disconnected spline sections.You can directly manipulate splines quickly without having to hunt through menus for the right transform tool or gizmo. When you are editing spline points, click-drag a point to move it. No tool activation needed! This is designed to bring 2D-like simplicity of editing to splines.When editing spline points, these new options are available in the handle orientation dropdown. Parent enables you to move, rotate, or scale items relative to their parent element. Element gives you precise editing using the selected item’s directionality.Splines was built to be a foundation for other tooling, especially tools from the Unity Asset Store and custom creations. The package includes a robust API and samples for developers to learn from or customize. Check out the Splines API documentation to get started.The Splines package has been publicly available for almost a year now. Your continuous input has been fantastic, and we’re excited to hear even more, especially from artists, with this major update. Comments here are great, and for deeper discussions we hope to see you on the Splines forum thread.

Tryx also launched its first CPU air cooler along with a new case that can accommodate a cross-flow fan

When Chelsea Riggs, CEO of Brooklyn-based haircare brand amika, envisioned a new workspace, she wanted it to be the antithesis of a standard business hub. “It’s intentionally designed to be the anti-office, a place where the boundaries between work and inspiration are fluid,” she says. CIVILIAN was selected to design the 19,000-square-foot open office, located at 25 Kent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The designers envisioned a space that was elevated yet still welcoming. It is a headquarters that enhances productivity, and encourages the staff of young creatives to re-engage with a physical office after the era of remote work – with an emphasis on collaboration. “We didn’t want it to be a typical corporate office, but a reflection of their energy and culture,” notes Ksenia Kagner, co-founder of CIVILIAN. The reception area sets an inviting tone, with a bespoke travertine desk with rounded edges. Beige tiles decorate the exposed columns, while strategically placed acoustic treatments minimize distracting noise. In the main work area, instead of assigned desks, employees tend to tasks at 25-foot-long communal tables that seat 20 people on each side, complete with outlets and linear lighting. This arrangement supports a dynamic environment and fosters interaction between teams. Many of the furnishings are custom-made items with gentle curves that echo organic forms. Ten upholstered nooks and private phone booths limit sight lines and are ideal for heads-down, focused work. The executive offices function as shared huddle rooms which feature soft seating and breakout areas of varying sizes. These areas democratize access and still allow for privacy when needed. A window-side lounge with views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline serves as a prime gathering spot for staff and visitors. The company’s signature colors are hot pink and vivid orange, found on packaging and printed collateral. Rather than highlight an accent wall with one of the bold hues, the team chose a sophisticated earthy palette of beige, gray, stone, and cream tints to serve as a backdrop for the vibrant shades and graphics. The interplay of plush fabrics, limewash finishes, and delicately painted surfaces invites exploration. White oak brings in a warmth that balances out the concrete elements. “There was a focus on texture and surface quality as a contrast, which really made the products and displays stand out,” says CIVILIAN co-founder Nicko Elliott. Flexible planning and the introduction of thoughtful design moments throughout improves the overall feeling within. The headquarters showcases the company’s unique identity while optimizing space and performance. It also now doubles as an event space in the evening, which exemplifies the studio’s holistic vision for the client. “The office is not just a place where people come to clock in and work, it has become a platform for amika as a haircare industry leader,” adds Kagner. For more information on CIVILIAN, visit civilianprojects.com. Photography by Sean Davidson.

In May 2015, prominent right-wing intellectual Charles Murray published a book calling on the superrich to fund an American rebellion against their government.Titled By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, the book argued that the growth of the regulatory state was worse than dangerous: It was an existential threat to the American way of life. For this reason, federal authority had become fundamentally illegitimate. The normal political process — most notably elections — was hopelessly compromised, to the point where no candidate promising to roll back the size of the state could hope to win.The best solution, in Murray’s eyes, was for wealthy donors to fund a legal defense designed to facilitate a mass campaign of civil disobedience against the regulatory state. This so-called Madison Fund would defend people accused of noncompliance in court and pay any assessed fines if they lose. With enough donations, the Madison Fund could ensure that nearly anyone could disobey regulations with impunity.By the People has largely been forgotten today. It was published one month before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower, announcing a presidential bid that would alter the course of history. Trump’s rejection of old GOP orthodoxies, including its libertarian hostility to programs like Social Security, suggested that Murray’s anti-government radicalism might belong to an era of the past.But the events of the second Trump term, most notably DOGE’s lawless gutting of the federal government, suggest that the book deserves a second look. Its extreme hostility to the very idea of liberal governance, its skepticism of democracy, and its faith in the primacy of the wealthy over the law all prefigured the way that Trump and Elon Musk would assail key functions of government in 2025.Moreover, it helps us understand why mainstream conservatives — the sort who pledge unending fealty to the Constitution and the founders — have been so okay with all of this. It’s not only that people on the right fear crossing Trump; it’s also, in part, that they share his belief that the American government is no longer worthy of respect.For if the state has become too big to command legitimacy, to the point where ordinary citizens are justified in disobeying it, then why should anyone care if the duly elected government breaks laws in pursuit of shrinking itself?By the People, explainedCharles Murray has been a leading intellectual figure on the right for a very long time. Generally speaking, his work has focused on class and race inequality in the United States — and, more specifically, with the idea that welfare programs either do little to fix these problems or actually make them worse.His most (in)famous book, 1994’s The Bell Curve, argues that much of America’s class and racial stratification can be explained by gaps in IQ — suggesting, in one of its most provocative chapters, that white people have higher IQs than Black people due to their superior genes. The book made theorizing about genetic differences between the races acceptable among certain corners of the mainstream right, paving the way for scientific racism’s resurgence in the Trump era.By the People is, in some ways, a more ambitious book than The Bell Curve. Moving away from social policy, Murray strays into the realm of political theory — arguing not just that liberal policies have bad consequences, but that that they are fundamentally illegitimate uses of state power. The concept of “legitimacy,” generally speaking, refers to the principle used to assess whether a particular government is morally justified in exercising political power. In Murray’s view, the key principle is government non-interference in personal affairs. The modern regulatory state, and its involvement in life ranging from setting education policy to licensing barber shops, has become so corrosive of American liberty that it cannot be seen as legitimate.“It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone,” he writes. “At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right.”Charles Murray speaking at the 2013 FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Gage Skidmore/Flickr Creative CommonsTo support this claim, he quotes a list of luminaries — ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Grover Cleveland — to argue that Americans have almost always believed in a state whose legitimacy is grounded in self-limitation.“The federal government lost its legitimacy in theory during the constitutional revolution of 1937-1942, lost its legitimacy in practice during the 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since,” he writes. “It is by that historical understanding that many of us who are devoted to limited government have thought of ourselves as living in a post-American country, governed by people who mouth the clichés about America as the land of the free without understanding what freedom means.”It may occur to you, at this point, that Murray has a democracy problem. Very few Americans actually agree with this libertarian vision of the American state, and they express that disagreement by electing non-libertarian politicians. In a democracy, the key principle of legitimacy is not libertarian theories of rights but rather popular sovereignty. It is the people, collectively, who decide on the limits of power — under conditions of free debate and exercised within constitutional constraints. If the people think the regulatory state is legitimate, why should Charles Murray and his libertarian friends get to ignore the laws that everyone else voted for?By the People offers two contradictory answers to this question. The first is that the people really have turned on the government, a big claim Murray supports with data showing a consistent decline in trust in government over the years. But this is measuring something different than basic legitimacy. Moreover, Murray once again has a democracy problem. If voters really were so furious about big government that they believed the entire state was illegitimate, then why aren’t radical anti-government politicians winning in landslides? To this, we have Murray’s second answer: that the people are bought off. They have become so dependent on government goodies that there is no hope for a return to pre-New Deal America.“The proportion of Americans who depend on the federal government to put food on the table, whether through welfare, Social Security, a government paycheck, or a paycheck financed by a federal contract, will continue to increase, and it will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections,” he writes.Here Murray betrays himself: admitting, implicitly, that he does not really care about popular sovereignty. He admits that people routinely choose, in democratic elections, to authorize and reauthorize an expansive state — but dismisses their right to make a choice he personally finds antithetical to liberty. He is certain his libertarian view of legitimacy is true, regardless of what the people think, and thus is convinced that people like him are justified in ignoring the law.But how could anyone ever hope to win a fight against the federal leviathan when the people have been bought off by Social Security? This is where his “Madison Fund” financing civil disobedience comes in: Murray believes that successfully defending people who ignore regulations will help others realize that a better future without government interference could actually be possible.And it all starts, in his mind, with one good billionaire.“The Madison Fund could get started,” he writes, “if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars.”By the People as Trumpist urtextMurray’s specific vision for a “Madison Fund” was certainly idiosyncratic. But his broader argument about legitimacy was widely shared on the 2010s right, heard often among the Tea Party types who dominated conservative politics for most of the Obama presidency.Indeed, By the People was received warmly among traditional conservatives, some of whom described its wild arguments as helpfully restrained. “If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day,” Charles C.W. Cooke writes in National Review. Some even suggested it didn’t go far enough. Writing in Law and Liberty, Lenore Ealy argued that Murray gave short shrift to the concerns of social conservatives. And that liberal America “created for itself a soft despotism” where people from various “identity groups” wield power to silence “men and women unwilling to subsume their identity in the will of the State.” Rolling back the state is not far enough, Ealy says — there needs to be a revolution in “cultural mores” that beats back identity liberalism.By the People remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.It is striking that, even before Trump, the idea that the modern American state was fundamentally illegitimate was such a prevalent view among conservative activists and intellectuals. The question was not whether the right must always defer to the democratic process, but how far it might have to go to get around it.In Trump’s second term, we are seeing the fruits of this vision. In many ways, you can draw a straight line between the basic premises of By the People and Trump’s assault on the federal government. The mechanisms are very different, but the ends are strikingly similar.During the 2024 election, Elon Musk became the billionaire anti-government donor Murray dreamed of, contributing “a few hundred million dollars” to the Trump campaign. His alignment with Trump got him appointed the head of a government-slashing committee that we now know as DOGE; once in power, he and his allies attempted to gut the functioning of various different federal agencies (to various degrees of success).Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2025 in Maryland. Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDOGE was not an effective cost-cutting mechanism. Nor has it turned up significant evidence of fraud. What it has accomplished, rather, is make federal agencies less capable of implementing duly authorized regulations. Effectively, it’s done what Murray wanted from the opposite end: decreasing the scope of the regulatory state not by resistance from the bottom, but a top-down effort to strip its capabilities. (Nor is Musk alone in this; look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s firing of large chunks of America’s public health officials).The legal authority for all of this is dubious at best. Trump and DOGE have simply asserted the power to mass-fire employees and redirect congressionally appropriated funds, even though there are good reasons to believe that they do not have the legal authority to do either. Like Murray, they do not see the law as morally binding. These aren’t just simple parallels. The influence of ideas like By the People’s helps us understand why a conservative movement that once claimed to stand for the constitutional order has become comfortable with Trump wrecking it.The essential idea of Murray’s book, and much of pre-Trump conservatism, was that the federal government had become hostile to founding American ideals: that the administrative state represents an unconstitutional cancerous growth on a brilliant governing framework.“We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 2015 concurrence. “The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.”If you take this position, thinly veiled comparisons to fascism and all, then the fact that Trump and Musk have frequently exceeded legal boundaries starts to look a lot less problematic. Through this lens, the administration is trying to rescue the Constitution’s original design from a liberalism that has corrupted it. Any legal violations along the way are offenses against a political order that at present does not deserve citizens’ allegiance. In February, the news outlet NOTUS asked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) about the lawfulness of the Trump/Musk agenda. Tillis conceded that it “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” However, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that” — because “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”Thom Tillis is not a firebreather: He’s a purple state senator widely seen as a moderate. That he would take such a permissive position on what even he admits is lawbreaking shows the corrosive influence of Murray-style thinking on the right today.By the People, on its own, may be a mostly forgotten book. But it remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.Correction, May 21, 9:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misdescribed Trump’s 2015 descent down the golden escalator at Trump Tower.See More:

Got a project that’s too contemporary for your client? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards! The clock is ticking — submit your work ahead of the Main Entry deadline on June 6th. Spiral staircases are famously beautiful but notoriously tricky to design, particularly in section. (Ask any architect who’s ever tried!) Still, the payoff is worth it. Beyond their visual appeal, spiral stairs can save space, guide circulation, and even become striking centerpieces within a building. The projects below prove there’s more than one way to embrace the twist, using unexpected materials and creative details to shape spaces in offices, schools, restaurants and parks. Even when things get complicated, these nine stairs make a strong case for taking the spiral route. OFFICE @ 63 By Sanjay Puri Architects, Navi Mumbai, India Popular Choice Winner, 12th Annual A+Awards, Commercial Interiors (<25,000 sq ft.) A curved steel staircase rises through the center of this workplace, connecting three levels in one continuous movement. Perforated and matte-finished, it feels both solid and light. Its underside, lined with warm tones, softens the otherwise industrial palette. Set within a tall, multipurpose space used for exhibitions and gatherings, the stair becomes a quiet focal point. Surrounded by concrete, cork, glass and exposed metal, it stands out not just as a route between floors, but as an element that gives the entire space rhythm and focus. La Maison de Beauté Carita, L’Oréal-Luxe By Le studio REV, Paris, France At the center of Carita’s Paris beauty house, part of the L’Oréal portfolio, a curved staircase rises through what was once a closed courtyard. The space is now topped with a tall glass roof that brings in soft, natural light. Pale marble, pink onyx and brushed metal set a quiet, polished tone. The staircase is kept light with floating steps and slim supports. It connects the levels clearly and efficiently, without blocking views through arched openings. In a building designed around care and detail, the stair adds just the right touch of structure and calm movement. Sjustjärnan, New Nordic Headquarters for E.On By Kanozi Arkitekter, Malmö, Sweden A wide, open staircase connects the floors of E.ON’s Malmö headquarters, rising through a central glass atrium that joins the two curved volumes of the building. Designed to encourage movement and connection between departments, the stair is placed at the heart of shared circulation. Materials are simple and natural: light wood treads, glass balustrades and metal accents, chosen to support the building’s focus on well-being and daylight. Generous landings allow for pauses and casual interaction, reinforcing the workplace’s flexible layout. With no assigned desks and no divided entrances, the building encourages a sense of togetherness and the staircase plays a clear role in making that daily flow visible and accessible. The Learning Center at Quest By KSM Architecture, Chennai, India Jury Winner, 12th Annual A+Awards, Architecture +Learning A vivid red spiral staircase rises along the facade of this learning center in Chennai, connecting the top floor library to a rooftop cafeteria and terrace. Attached to the exterior, the stair adds a moment of surprise to the otherwise calm, ribbed concrete surface. Made from perforated metal, its bright finish contrasts with the muted palette of the building while echoing the colorful window frames scattered across the elevation. Inside, a separate metal stair winds through a central atrium, linking five stacked classrooms and open learning spaces. Together, the staircases reflect the school’s focus on movement, openness and curiosity — key principles in its interest-based approach to education. Varee Valley Restaurant : Jungle Junction By NPDA studio, Thailand Inside this forest-side restaurant in Northeast Thailand, a white spiral staircase rises slowly through the center of a light-filled dining area. Designed for pause and perspective, the stair leads visitors to a rooftop platform that opens up to the surrounding trees. Built with slender steel members and a delicate footprint, it reflects the lightness of the overall structure and mirrors the verticality of nearby tree trunks. The stair wraps around a central cylindrical column that also serves as a rainwater drain and light shaft, drawing daylight into the heart of the space. The Opera Park By Cobe, Copenhagen, Denmark Jury Winner, Public Parks & Green Spaces, 12th Annual A+Awards At the heart of this new harbor front park in Copenhagen, a spiral staircase descends through the center of a circular greenhouse, wrapping gently around a subtropical garden. The stair connects the café at park level with an underground parking facility, guiding visitors down through layers of greenery. Slim metal railings trace its curve, while the surrounding glass enclosure creates the feeling of walking through an open-air terrarium. The park itself spans six themed gardens across a former industrial island, offering paths, ponds and planting from around the world. In this setting, the staircase becomes part of a wider idea: architecture that supports slow movement, seasonal change and a close connection to nature. Balmy Palmy By CplusC Architects + Builders, Sydney, Australia In this compact holiday home raised above a rocky slope, a yellow spiral staircase links the natural ground to the open-air platform above. Built from powder-coated steel, it curves tightly between tree trunks and timber posts, bringing a sharp contrast to the greens and browns of the site. The stair leads into an outdoor area that connects the home’s simple rooms, with views of the treetops, the bay and the sky shifting between the leaves. Designed to limit excavation and preserve the forest setting, the staircase plays a clear role in the project’s minimal footprint — serving as a key access point and everyday reminder of the landscape it rises from. Dental Clinic By IFAgroup, Gdańsk, Poland Jury Winner, Hospitals and Healthcare Centers, 12th Annual A+Awards Jury Winner,  Architecture +Health, 12th Annual A+Awards Photos by Hanna Połczyńska This dental clinic, once a granary, is organized around a wide spiral staircase that rises through its three-story foyer. Clad in warm wood, the stair connects waiting areas, dental offices and training spaces while giving the interior a clear center. It’s surrounded by concrete, brick and steel surfaces that reflect the building’s industrial past. Live piano music and soft lighting help create a calm atmosphere, while sound-absorbing materials keep the space quiet and focused. Envisioned as more than a circulation route, the stair shapes how people move, wait and gather inside. Concept WRRF Yixing (Water Resource Recovery Facility) By SUP Atelier of THAD, China Inside this water treatment facility, a spiral staircase sits next to a café and community area. Built from metal with clean, simple details, it leads visitors through spaces designed to educate the public about recycling and sustainability. Large windows around the stair offer clear views of the nearby farmland and waterways, connecting visitors with the natural setting. As part of the facility’s open, welcoming design, the staircase makes it easy to see and understand how wastewater is turned into clean water and renewable energy. Got a project that’s too contemporary for your client? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards! The clock is ticking — submit your work ahead of the Main Entry deadline on June 6th. Top image: The Learning Center at Quest by KSM Architecture, Chennai, India The post 9 (Somewhat) Unconventional Takes on The Beloved Spiral Staircase appeared first on Journal.

Reading Time: 4 minutes The marketing landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation driven by artificial intelligence. AI has evolved beyond a mere marketing assistant that expedites tasks. With AI Agents, marketers can now delegate entire tasks, from initiation to completion. Despite the current hype surrounding AI, its impact on the future is undeniable and likely to be permanent. Amara’s Law perfectly understands the current situation. What is Amara’s Law? The law says that we often overestimate a technology’s short-run impact and underestimate its long-run impact. This is very similar to Gartner’s Hype Cycle. With so much hype around AI, it can be very overwhelming. So, it’s critical to look beyond all the hype and figure out real-world AI uses and how to fit those solutions into your business workflows. Rise of AI Agents “AI Agents” has to be the buzzword for 2025. You might have seen people talking about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms. There are a lot of opinions; some say it’s just hype, and a few say it’s the next big thing. So it comes down to: But is it worth all the hype? AI agents are intelligent, autonomous systems that understand natural language and leverage business context to reason through complex tasks and take action on your behalf, while operating within set guardrails. If we look at Customer Engagement specifically, there are tons of practical use cases. Its usage ranges from campaign creation to onboarding to analytics/optimization. 1. Campaign Creation  If we specifically look at campaign creation, the AI agents can do everything from – Choosing an audience segment Crafting campaign content Deciding the best channel and time to send The current way we’re segmenting users with filters works, but it’s not super easy to learn. It takes time to create segments using filters, and you need to know your events and attributes pretty well. This means marketers need to seek additional support. However, using AI agents, you can effortlessly create targeted customer segments in seconds using natural language. Creating a segment is as easy as typing a prompt like “Identify customers who abandoned the credit card application process”. That’s it. Basically, you can use AI agents to turn ideas for a customer segment into reality with just one instruction. It’s super quick to get things done this way, and you don’t need to learn anything complicated or leverage additional tools. 2. Customer Journey Orchestration  Building adequate multi-touch flows for customer experiences is often time-consuming and complex, involving intricate logic and a steep learning curve. AI Agents addresses this by using AI to translate customer journey ideas into optimized flows instantly. This AI-driven approach dramatically reduces build time, enabling marketers to brainstorm and ideate with AI, focusing on strategy and creativity. Customers can create and refine flows using natural language and receive tailored recommendations. 3. Analytics & Optimization  AI Agents can also assist in – Data Querying – Ask in natural language to create appropriate charts for the data. Data Monitoring – AI detects an anomaly and conducts RCA and regression models to uncover the “why” for the movement of your metrics. Data Interpretation – AI explains what’s happening in a chart/data. 4. Decisioning Agents  Marketers face the challenge of moving from “best fit for a segment” to “true 1:1 fit for an individual”. This requires optimizing interactions with the right message and incentive, for each customer, in the right channel, at the right time and frequency – something that’s not humanly possible at scale. Decision-making agents address this by leveraging Reinforcement Learning and Generative AI to enhance user context. They optimize delivery by determining the best message copy, send time, and channel. Incrementality testing can measure the impact of decision-making agents, providing transparency in decision-making. This enables marketers to achieve more effective and personalized customer experiences. Benefits of AI Agents Implementing AI agents for customer engagement has multiple benefits. The benefits of AI agents extend beyond simple automation, creating value through enhanced efficiency, cost optimization, real-time audience insights, and elevated customer experiences. Here are a few – Improved Productivity: AI agents handle routine inquiries and tasks simultaneously, freeing human agents to focus on complex issues. They operate in real-time to provide the latest customer insights. This seamless workflow integration allows businesses to accomplish more with existing resources. Reduced Costs: By automating repetitive tasks, brands can significantly lower operational expenses while maintaining a great customer experience. Improved Decision Making: AI agents analyze vast amounts of customer data to identify patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. They provide consistent, data-driven recommendations free from human biases or fatigue. Real-time insights allow brands to anticipate customer needs and proactively engage with them. Impact of Generative AI on Customer Engagement  Generative AI continues to improve, driving growth in Customer Engagement across various segments. The number of martech software products has grown by a whopping 27.8% in the last 12 months, the highest in the last few years. If we look back, adoption curves used to be measured in years. But with generative AI, adoption is growing in months or even weeks. One significant challenge is accurately gauging the real-time adoption of Generative AI. It’s like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. This difficulty is akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. We can all agree that Generative AI has many useful use cases. However, multiple reports suggest marketers leverage it mainly for brainstorming campaign copy ideas and for writing the copy itself. That’s why we launched Merlin AI Copywriter and Designer last year. With Merlin AI, we have successfully merged the advantages of Generative AI with the world of Customer Engagement. You can read more about it here.  Wrapping It Up  AI is transforming Customer Engagement beyond automation with intelligent AI agents handling complex marketing tasks autonomously. Despite the hype around AI agents and generative AI, they offer real benefits like improved productivity, cost savings, better decisions, and enhanced customer experience through streamlined processes and insightful analytics. Leveraging Generative AI and AI agents is now critical for the sustained success and growth of consumer brands. The post AI in Customer Engagement – AI Agents, Gen AI, Future and More appeared first on MoEngage.

Macworld Just when you think Apple’s long-running dispute with Epic Games is finally over, someone manages to find a way to spin it out even longer. There’s always time for one more lawsuit, one more appeal, one more acrimonious tweet. And if two multibillion-dollar corporations can’t find a way to resolve their differences amicably, what hope have the rest of us? At the end of April, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued what felt at the time like a conclusively unambiguous ruling demanding that Apple comply instantly with previous measures and adding more on top. The company, it was made plain, will not merely have to allow other payment systems within iOS apps, but refrain from sabotaging them with satirically high fees and off-putting verbiage. That should have been that, but Cupertino is still feeling punchy. Epic thought, not unreasonably, that its Fortnite game would now be allowed back on the App Store, having originally been kicked off for the practices which Apple has just been told it must allow. But life is full of surprises. “Apple has blocked our Fortnite submission,” Epic tweeted on May 16, “so we cannot release to the U.S. App Store or to the Epic Games Store for iOS in the European Union.” But here’s the kicker: Epic promptly decided to retaliate by taking the game dark on iOS worldwide, including versions delivered through Epic’s own store. That might sound like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but this will hurt Apple too. And users. In fact barely anyone will have a nose by the time this is over. On the face of it, it makes little sense to prevent Fortnite from returning to iOS. It’s an immensely popular game with hundreds of millions of players across a wide range of platforms, and being able to play it on iPhone makes the iPhone a more appealing device. Even if Apple made zero revenue from sales and in-app purchases, it would still be worth having the title on iOS purely for the sake of user happiness. Conversely, refusing to allow it generates masses of bad PR and resentment, which is poison to a company that depends so much on its image. In this particular case, that zero-revenue idea isn’t entirely inconceivable, because Epic is a big enough company with a reputable enough storefront that it could (assuming the judge’s ruling isn’t watered down on appeal) cut Apple entirely out of the transactional loop. But most games developers don’t have that luxury. They will, at the very least, offer their own and Apple’s payment systems side by side, and I’m convinced that most users would vastly, vastly prefer to buy through the official App Store. Ask yourself this: How easy is it to find jailbreaking instructions online? And yet, how many (or how few) people do you know who actually jailbreak their iPhones? While following this saga, it’s occurred to me that I don’t actually want to buy iOS apps from alternative stores. I just want that to be an option because competition is healthy and would encourage Apple to lower fees and generally treat developers better. Having a bunch of different places to go whenever I want to buy something new or update what I’ve got is a dismaying prospect; I don’t want to enter my payment details in a dozen different websites and constantly worry about whether they can be trusted. But other people might. The App Store itself is one of Apple’s all-time great products, delivering such a reassuring, frictionless one-stop-shop experience that software became for the first time an impulse buy. It won’t lose its magic just because there’s another option. I get why Apple tried to maintain its control of iOS app installs and purchases; it has shareholders to think about and can’t just wave away swathes of revenue without pushback. But the vigor and uncompromising fierceness with which the company has defended that revenue stream has been alarming, to say the least, and may prove costly too. At multiple points in the saga Apple could have yielded a little and reached a compromise acceptable to all parties: allowed sideloading under strict limits; allowed third-party payment systems with a moderate instead of laughably high revenue cut. Instead it pushed and fought and, as the judge put it, “willfully chose not to comply.” And now it appears to be pursuing petty revenge which will hurt itself just as much as the opposition, for no clear rational reason. Saying that someone never knows when they’re beaten sounds like a compliment (“People should know when they’re conquered.” “Would you, Quintus? Would I?”) but often it just means suffering more than you need to for a lost cause. Apple lost this war, and choice was the winner. Now it needs to accept the result and get on with making that outcome work for its users… who are, after all, supposed to be the priority. Foundry Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too. Trending: Top stories Apple is doomed because Apple isn’t doomed. Mahmoud Itani reveals 10 hidden Apple Watch features you’ve probably never used–but should. If the iPhone 17 Air is anything like the Galaxy S25 Edge, I don’t want it. The first thing Jason Cross installs on every new Mac is this little free emoji utility. If iPadOS 19 is going to be more like the Mac, it needs these 9 features stat. Podcast of the week When WWDC rolls around in June, it’ll be two years since Apple announced visionOS and the Apple Vision Pro. In episode 934 of the Macworld Podcast, we examine the state of Apple’s spatial computing platform and what Apple could have in store at WWDC and beyond. You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site. Reviews corner iPad Air (M3) review: Only slightly better, but still the best. Verbatim TurboMetal SSD review: Stylish portable drive. PowerPhotos 3 review: Time-saving Apple Photos tool for power users on the Mac. EcoFlow Power Hat review: A sun hat with solar panels. The rumor mill Apple is reportedly working on the hybrid Mac we all want–and it could arrive in 2028. Folding and curved iPhones are both predicted in 2027 ‘product blitz.’ In fact the iPhone 18’s edgeless curved display seems like a certainty now. iOS 19 will reportedly use AI to extend the iPhone’s battery life. Software updates, bugs, and problems A bizarre iPhone bug is causing some audio messages to fail. Here’s why. iOS 18.5 may be a minor update, but it has one major iPhone upgrade. Apple’s months-old C1 modem has a serious security flaw. And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.