Technology

Everyonefavorite endless, serene snowboarding game just made the leap from mobile to the Mac App Store. Available now for $9.99, AltoAdventure for Mac is a desktop port of the side-scrolling snowscape game thatwon hearts and accolades since it first hit iOS in 2015.

Earlier this year, the team behind AltoAdventure introduced a second game, AltoOdyssey, which trades the first gamesnowy terrain for sand and sun while maintaining its charm. If you&ve already spent some time with AltoOdyssey, the Mac version of the classic is a good reason to circle back.

The gameserene setting and blissed out music make AltoAdventure eminently replayable, even if you&ve already sunk tens of hours into lengthening your scarf in an infinite procedurally generated snowy world dotted with charming villages, dramatic slopes and many, many things to trip over.

If you&ve yet to dive into AltoAdventure, and we really recommend that you do, the Mac version is probably a good starting place. For everyone else, progress in the game syncs across devices through iCloud, so ita good excuse to push a little further into one of the most thoughtful, pleasant mobile game experiences to date.

And while you&re hanging out in the Mac App Store, don&t forget to update to Mojave — Applelatest desktop operating system is available now.

Airbnb head of engineering will leave the company before the end of 2018 to pursue other projects and focus on his family. The news was first reported by The Information and later confirmed to TechCrunch by Airbnb.

Curtis joined the home-sharing platform in 2013 after about two years as the director of engineering at Facebook.

Airbnb will work withHeidrick - Struggles to find his successor, who will be named chief technology officer, a title some at the company had expected Curtis to receivelast year, per The Information. Airbnb has several other holes in its C-suite; italso in the process of hiring a chief marketing officer and a chief financial officer.

&For a while, Mike has been thinking about making this change to take a long break,& an Airbnb spokesperson told TechCrunch. &After discussing this change with [CEO] Brian Chesky, they agreed that Mike would step down after helping the company choose his successor.&

Curtis may be feeling the early-stage itch. When he joined Airbnb nearly six years ago, he told TechCrunch he was particularly excited about how early the company was: &the opportunity with where we can take it is limitless,& he said.

But Airbnb is no longer a little startup, itone of the most valuable private tech companies in the world.

In Curtis& tenure alone, the engineering team grew from 40 people to more than 1,000 and the company raised more than $4 billion andgarnered a $31 billion valuation. Now, itgearing up to go public in 2019.

Microsoft is hosting its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida this week. And although Ignite isn&t the household name that MicrosoftBuild conference has become over the course of the last few years, ita massive event with over 30,000 attendees and plenty of news. Indeed, there was so much news this year that Microsoft provided the press with a 27-page bookletwith all of it.

We wrote about quite a few of these today, but here are the most important announcements, including one that wasn&t in Microsoftbooklet but was featured prominently on stage.

1. Microsoft, SAP and Adobe take on Salesforce with their new Open Data Initiative for customer data

What was announced: Microsoft is teaming up with Adobe and SAP to create a single model for representing customer data that businesses will be able to move between systems.

Why it matters: Moving customer data between different enterprise systems is hard, especially because there isn&t a standardized way to represent this information. Microsoft, Adobe and SAP say they want to make it easier for this data to flow between systems. But italso a shot across the bow of Salesforce, the leader in the CRM space. It also represents a chance for these three companies to enable new tools that can extract value from this data — and Microsoft obviously hopes that these businesses will choose its Azure platform for analyzing the data.

2. Microsoft wants to do away with more passwords

What was announced: Businesses that use Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) will now be able to use the Microsoft Authenticator app on iOS and Android in place of a password to log into their business applications.

Why it matters: Passwords are annoying and they aren&t very secure. Many enterprises are starting to push their employees to use a second factor to authenticate. With this, Microsoft now replaces the password/second factor combination with a single tap on your phone — ideally without compromising security.

3. Microsoftnew Windows Virtual Desktop lets you run Windows 10 in the cloud

What was announced: Microsoft now lets businesses rent a virtual Windows 10 desktop in Azure.

Why it matters: Until now, virtual Windows 10 desktops were the domain of third-party service providers. Now, Microsoft itself will offer these desktops. The company argues that this is the first time you can get a multiuser virtualized Windows 10 desktop in the cloud. As employees become more mobile and don&t necessarily always work from the same desktop or laptop, this virtualized solution will allow organizations to offer them a full Windows 10 desktop in the cloud, with all the Office apps they know, without the cost of having to provision and manage a physical machine.

4. Microsoft Office gets smarter

What was announced: Microsoft is adding a number of new AI tools to its Office productivity suite. Those include Ideas, which aims to take some of the hassle out of using these tools. Ideas may suggest a layout for your PowerPoint presentation or help you find interesting data in your spreadsheets, for example. Excel is also getting a couple of new tools for pulling in rich data from third-party sources. Microsoft is also building a new unified search tool for finding data across an organizationnetwork.

Why it matters: Microsoft Office remains the most widely used suite of productivity applications. That makes it the ideal surface for highlighting MicrosoftAI chops, and anything that can improve employee productivity will surely drive a lot of value to businesses. If that means sitting through fewer badly designed PowerPoint slides, then this whole AI thing will have been worth it.

5. Microsoftmassive Surface Hub 2 whiteboards will launch in Q2 2019

What was announced: The next version of the Surface Hub, Microsoftmassive whiteboard displays, will launch in Q2 2019. The Surface Hub 2 is both lighter and thinner than the original version. Then, in 2020, an updated version, the Surface Hub 2X, will launch that will offer features like tiling and rotation.

Why it matters: We&re talking about a 50-inch touchscreen display here. You probably won&t buy one, but you&ll want one. Ita disappointment to hear that the Surface Hub 2 won&t launch into next year and that some of the advanced features most users are waiting for won&t arrive until the refresh in 2020.

6. Microsoft Teams gets bokeh and meeting recordings with transcripts

What was announced: Microsoft Teams, its Slack competitor, can now blur the background when you are in a video meeting and it&ll automatically create transcripts of your meetings.

Why it matters: Teams has emerged as a competent Slack competitor thatquite popular with companies that are already betting on Microsoftproductivity tools. Microsoft is now bringing many of its machine learning smarts to Teams to offer features that most of its competitors can&t match.

7. Microsoft launches Azure Digital Twins

What was announced: Azure Digital Twins allows enterprises to model their real-world IoT deployments in the cloud.

Why it matters: IoT presents a massive new market for cloud services like Azure. Many businesses were already building their own version of Digital Twins on top of Azure, but those homegrown solutions didn&t always scale. Now, Microsoft is offering this capability out of the box, and for many businesses, this may just be the killer feature that will make them decide on standardizing their IoT workloads on Azure. And as they use Azure Digital Twins, they&ll also want to use the rest of Azuremany IoT tools.