Farmers associated with as many as 16 farmer outfits from the States Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand would be participating

Reduced import duty on produce and relaxed norms will affect farmers and traders here, they say

Farmers are afraid to go to the fields because of sporadic firing by armed miscreants from higher grounds 

‘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

Karnataka Agriculture Price Commission headed by Prakash Kammaradi submitted a report on the legally backed MSP to the government in 2018

Browsing the Web on your smartphone these days can feel like a gauntlet: accept this cookie consent, close this newsletter promo, avoid this app install banner. This morass of attention-seeking actions makes it hard to focus on content. Enter Apple's Distraction Control feature.

There's more than 7 billion active smartphones on the planet. This is the Web they are getting.

I won't get into how the Web became a minefield of pop-ups, banners, overlays, modals, and other forms of annoyance. For that you can take a look at my Mind the Gap presentation which goes into depth on why and what designers can do about it. But it's pretty clear the average mobile Web experience sucks.

And when things suck, people usually decide to do something about it. In this case, with iOS 18, Apple is giving average folks a chance to fight back with Distraction Control. When turned on, this new feature allows anyone to remove distracting elements on Web pages complete with a satisfying animation.

Newsletter pop-up? Boom, gone. Mobile app banner? Boom. Interstitial ad? Boom. Is it perfect? No. Elements might come back after you remove them if the page is reloaded. Accessing the control takes a few taps. But it's a way for people to fight back against Web clutter and we need more.

Increasingly when I see designers defaulting to more Ul controls and form elements in software interface designs, I encourage them to consider the implications of intent-driven instructions. Here's why...

For years l've used this image of Adobe Illustrator's user interface evolution to highlight the continuous march of "more features, more Ul" that drives nearly every software company's releases. The end result for end users is more functions they don't know about and don't use. Not great.

So what's the alternative? Perhaps something like Christian Cantrell's Photoshop assistant demos. In this series of videos, Christian uses natural language instructions connected to Photoshop's APIs to do things like mask the subject of a series of photos, blur the background in images, create layers and more. All without needing to know how and without clicking a bunch of windows, icons, menus, and pointers (WIMP).

Intent-driven instructions to mask the subject of multiple images in Photoshop:

Intent-driven instructions to mask the blur the backgrounds of multiple images in Photoshop:

Intent-driven instructions to create layers and objects in Photoshop:

While these kinds of interactions won't immediately replace conventional graphical user interface controls, it's pretty clear they enable a new way of control software with hundreds of features... just tell it what you want to do.

As the functionality and scope of Web sites and applications has grown over the years, so has the prevalence of Help pages. Nearly every feature has an explanatory article outlining how to use it and why. But most Help pages are walls of text making them hard to act on. So a few years ago, we tried something different.

First let's look at the status quo. This Help page from Amazon is both pretty typical and by those standards, pretty good. It's specific to one topic, brief, outlines steps clearly, and includes links to help people accomplish their intended task. Companies iterated to these kinds of Help pages because they mostly work and because they're less work.

Keeping Help text up to date and accurate is less labor-intensive than updating images or videos with the same information. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a lot of words and there's a reason many people turn to video tutorials to learn how to do things instead of reading about how to do them.

When building Polar several years ago, we wanted a more approachable and fun way of helping people learn how to use our product. And while you might say "the best Help pages are no Help pages -just make your app easy to use" not all Help pages are smearing over usability issues. Some introduce higher level concepts, others outline capabilities, and some serve as marketing for specific features.

So with those goals in mind, we iterated to a simple formula. Each concept or feature gets a Help page that has a title alongside 1-2 sentences and as many sections consisting of a title, 1-2 sentences, plus a graphic as needed.

This approach meant people primarily relied on images (or their alt tags if visually impaired) to figure out how to get things done. So we iterated a fair amount on the images to find the right balance of detail and abstraction. Make the UI too realistic and it becomes hard to focus on the relevant elements. Realistic UI images also need updating anytime the actual product UI changes. Conversely, make the image too simplistic and it doesn't provide enough detail for people to actually learn how to do things.

Of course, not all Help topics are well suited to an image but the process of trying to create one often triggers ideas on how to simplify the actual UI or concepts within a product. So it's worth the iteration.

But is a visual approach to Help pages able to scale? Assuming it works, can companies invest the time and effort needed to generate all these images and keep them up to date? Perhaps in a time of image generation AI models, it's increasingly possible through automated or supervised pipelines. Time will tell!

In her How to Use AI to Build Accessible Products presentation at Smashing Conf New York, Carie Fisher discussed using AI coding tools to test and suggest fixes for accessibility issues in Web pages. Here's my notes on her talk.

• AI is everywhere. You can use it to write content, code, create images, and more. It impacts how everyone will work.
• But ultimately, AI is just a tool but it might not always be the right one. We need to find the tasks where it has the potential to add value.
• Over 1 billion people on the planet identify as having a disability. Accessible code allows them to access digital experiences and helps companies be complaint with emerging laws requiring accessible Web pages and apps. Businesses also get SEO, brand, and more benefits from accessible code.
• AI tools like Github Copilot can find accessibility issues in seconds consistently, especially compared to the manual checks currently being done by humans. AI can also spot patterns across a codebase and suggest solutions.
• Existing AI coding tools like Github Copilot are already better than Linters for finding accessibility issues.
• AI can suggest and implement code fixes for accessibility issues. It can also be added to CI/CD pipelines to check for accessibility issues at the point of each commit. AI can also serve as an accessibility mentor for developers by providing real-time suggestions.
• More complex accessibility issues especially those that need user context may go unfound when just using AI. Sometimes AI output can be incomplete or hallucinate solutions that are not correct. As a result, we can't over rely on just AI to solve all accessibility problems. We still need human review today.
• To improve AI accessibility, provide expanded prompts that reference or include specifications. Code reviews can double check accessibility suggestions from AI-based systems. Regularly test and refine your AI-based solutions to improve outcomes.
• Combing AI and human processes and values can help build a culture of accessibility.

Australia’s new five-storey Rubik’s cube-inspired structure is a visual and sensory experience, complete with gnomes, tinsel curtains and a mist room.

A new power-packed version of the Audi R5 changes a good thing for the better

Whisky distiller Bill Lumsden opens up about his creative process

The BMW Z4 is effortlessly fast, and easy to ride

The 2020 Lamborghini Huracan Evo is a smart car that really gets to know your driving style

A tour of the Ulysse Nardin manufacture factory highlights age-old techniques of enamelling perfected by watchmakers

If you are looking for excitement and luxury, head for the Sands Resort

Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield, 2024.

Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., [2023]

London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]

Cincinnati : University of Cincinnati Press, 2021.

Lynnfield, Massachusetts CAST [2024]

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Cham : Springer, [2024]

Toronto : Canadian Scholars, 2024.

Cham, Switzerland : Springer, [2024]

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2024]

Cham, Switzerland : Springer Nature, 2024.

The actor will be seen in upcoming releases Kapp and Kunjammini’s Hospital

Kannada actor Kishore hopes the response to ‘Kantara’ will encourage Kannada filmmakers to explore new content in different ways

The organisation, Poovulagin Nanbargal, uses the birth dates and birth places of popular Tamil actors to highlight how climate change, such as increasing hot days, has affected the State over the decades

The two biggest box office successes of 2022 - “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick” - were shut out.

Director Srikanth Odela’s Telugu film ‘Dasara’, starring Nani and Keerthy Suresh, is set in the vicinity of coal mines in rural Telangana

Upendra’s gangster drama is similar to ‘KGF’ in more than just the looks, flavour, and genre; it’s a rip-off loaded with empty shells of everything that made Prashanth Neel’s films enjoyable

As the Telugu film ‘Balagam’ wins hearts and international awards, director Venu Yeldandi talks about how he wanted the film to reflect native culture and relationships in Sircilla, Telangana

Samantha Ruth Prabhu opens up on being all grace and poise for ‘Shaakuntalam’ to being covered in bruises while filming action sequences for ‘Citadel’

TheWriter of two of the best period dramas in the recent history of Malayalam cinema, Gopan Chidambaram talks speaks about how Thuramukham, a play written by his father in 1968, was adapted to the screen and why he often gravitates towards historical tales

The trial against actor Saif Ali Khan is likely to begin from June 15 as the court issued summons to witnesses in the case

From being hailed as the poster boy of new age Telugu cinema to understanding the business of cinema, writer-director-actor Tharun Bhascker Dhaassyam discusses his roller coaster journey. He also offers a glimpse into his new film ‘Keedaa Cola’ 

Sashi Kiran Tikka, director of ‘Goodachari’ and ‘Major’, looks back at the indie approach to filmmaking, collaborative work atmosphere and his days at the New York Film Academy

Director and actor Tharun Bhascker Dhaasyam’s new Telugu crime comedy ‘Keedaa Cola’ stars Brahmanandam, Rag Mayur, Chaitanya Rao, Raghu Ram and others 

Boyapati Sreenu and Ram Pothineni’s Telugu action entertainer titled ‘Skanda - the attacker’

‘Baby’ is the most emotional film he has done so far, says actor Anand Deverakonda, while asserting that it’s a gender-sensitive film with Vaishnavi Chaitanya’s character as its backbone

It’s hardly about sticking two screens together with a hinge. The real innovation is how the two displays work in tandem as one device

Hackers have been targeting delivery, postal, financial services and human resources

The ‘Train a Trainer’ programme will enable new discoveries in the areas of healthcare, energy, environmental systems, smart materials, and beyond

‘Besides demanding ransom from the victim, these evolved threat actors steal the encrypted data and sell it in the open market to make dual income’

Covid-19 themed attacks continue to be used by hacker groups to make quick money