Google has launched the second beta of Android Q. This version brings multitasking bubbles, foldable emulator, zoomable microphones, and more exciting features. User privacy has been the focus of Android Q so far.

The first beta already brought features like blocking permissions to background apps, clipboard managers are killed and even runtime permissions for older apps are changing. Android Q beta 2 brings major changes to how apps access local files.

Android creates isolated storage sandboxes for each app using scooped storage. The feature no longer requires apps to access special permission to write their own files. Other apps can directly access the data from another app's sandbox. This makes it safer and easier for apps to access files of other apps on internal and external storage.

There are several permission changes with Scooped Storage as well. READ_MEDIA_AUDIO now grants permission to the Music folder. READ_MEDIA_VIDEO will give access to the videos folder. READ_MEDIA_IMAGES gives access to the Photos folder.

Android Q has changed the naming structure for all external storage devices. Earlier all the external storage devices like flash drives, SD cards were listed under the single external volume.

Best practice that developers should follow for scooped storage:

• Storing shared media files: Developers working on apps that handle files that users share with other apps (like photos), need to use MediaStore API. There are specific collections for common media files. For other file types, you can store these items in new Downloads collection.
• Storing app-internal files: If your app doesn't have files that are to be shared with other apps, you need to store them in your package specific directories. This will keep files organised and limit file clutter. Developers are advised to call Context.getExternalFilesDir()
• Working with permissions: For MediaStore, permissions are not necessary for apps that only access their own files. Your app will need to request permission from the user to access media that your app previously contributed.
• Working with native code or libraries: The recommended pattern is to start media file discovery and pass the file's associated file descriptor in the native code.
• Working with many files: It is recommended to use Content.Provider.applyBatch() if your application needs to perform bulk of file operations in a single transactions.

This version of Android includes 'compatibility mode' that disables these new restrictions. This mode is available only for apps installed before a device updated to Android Q. If the app is built for Android 9 Pie or older.

Such complaints weren't that uncommon in years past, but with current quality control technology they are very uncommon today with U.S., Asian, or German cars (though they do happen).Even with all of these qualifications, Tesla is largely viewed as the gold standard for electric cars. By a significant margin, it is the company to beat.

The Jaguar I-Pace: A Pretty Face Hides Some Ugly Mistakes

This is clearly subjective, but of the shipping electrics (and most that aren't shipping, the Porsche being the obvious exception), I think the I-Pace is the best-looking car. It does conform to the European/U.S. standard for charging plugs (both normal and high speed), and it is a member of the far more popular SUV class.

Fit and finish are first rate, though lower-cost versions have been accused of having too much plastic (something that also plagued the Model 3). As with the Tesla, there appears to have been a strong focus on handling and safety.

With clear Range Rover influence, the I-Pace also appears to have decent off-road capability, although taking an electric off-road for any distance is problematic, due to a lack of chargers and an inability to carry anything like spare fuel.

The Tesla charger network supports mostly Teslas. (You can get an adapter to use non-Supercharger Tesla stations, but these take hours to charge the car and are impractical outside of emergency use).

While there are networks of chargers being installed, we are far from critical mass with high-speed chargers, which aren't stable at the moment. Yes, the plug is set, but the latest chargers are 450KW monsters, or nearly 4x as powerful as existing Superchargers. Right now, there are no cars that can use this power (including the I-Pace). Worse, there is no communication from Jaguar to indicate if there is a path to upgrade the car at some later date.

While expected range was supposed to be in the mid to high 200-mile range, the I-Pace has fallen short, even though it has a huge battery. This may be because Jaguar is ensuring the battery will last for the life of the car, or it could be the result of using a front motor that doesn't freewheel when not in use. There is no clarity on the cause, however, and Jaguar so far has not communicated a fix.

One big difference is that patching on a Tesla is like Christmas, because you often get cool new surprise features. One of my last patches on the Jaguar rendered the center display inoperative, and it took nearly three weeks to get the car so it could be driven again. Over-the-air patching is now a well-known process with the tech community, and there is no reason this should have happened it proper testing practices had been used.

One weird difference between the Model 3 and the I-Pace is that the Model 3 isn't positioned as a performance car, yet it not only has a track mode (good luck fast-charging it at the track), but also has a performance version that would embarrass most muscle cars.

The I-Pace is positioned as a performance car and it doesn't seem to have the same level of performance that the Model 3 does in its performance configuration. This is the same issue I had with the Tesla Model S vs. the Fisker Karma.

The Tesla looked like a regular sedan but was incredibly fast, while the Fisker looked like a supercar but performed in line with a relatively slow sedan. It felt like the cars' guts were (or should have been) swapped at birth. The car that didn't look fast was, and the car that did wasn't. Granted, the I-Pace would dust a Fisker, but that really isn't saying much.

Wrapping Up: I Still Prefer the I-Pace
The primary reason that I prefer the I-Pace is that I don't drive sedans. I drive sports cars and small SUVs. Right now, Tesla doesn't build a car that is in my preferred class. If there were an I-Pace with the high-end Model 3's performance, or a Model 3 SUV, I would be on the shortlist to buy it.

I live in Bend, Oregon and most everything I do is within 30 miles of the house. I have five cars, so if I need to go a longer distance, I'll pick something else. The I-Pace has been brilliant in the snow and ice (I have Bridgestone Blizzard tires on it), and it is rare enough that people do compliment the car and wave when they see it (those exchanges are always fun when you have a relatively unusual ride).

The I-Pace is one of the most comfortable cars, both in the front and back seats, that I've ever owned. I own three Jaguars and used to be a Jaguar mechanic in my youth -- but honestly, given my experience, if Tesla were to build a small attractive SUV, I'd likely switch. To keep me on board, Jaguar would have to improve its customer communications, and better protect the car from future technical advances, particularly with charging.

Jaguar simply hasn't been enlisting advocates as well as Tesla does, and this is something only Porsche seems to fully get. That may explain why Porsche's coming electric has been sold out, mostly to old Tesla owners. (It also is the first car that will be able to use the new 450 KW chargers, and on paper it is faster than a Tesla.)

Would I buy the car again? In a minute. I really am having a ball with the car. Still, car companies like Jaguar need to understand the disruptive nature of Tesla's customer approach. Otherwise, Tesla will continue to outmaneuver them, and it must be embarrassing to be upstaged constantly by a firm that is so new in what has been a well-established market.

By the way, I keep getting notices from Jaguar wanting me to write a review of the I-Pace, but each review I've written has been kicked back for things like mentioning Tesla or the problems I've had with the car. You don't learn by forcing reviewers to talk exclusively about the positive. Oh, and the review submission form goes only to 2018 and this is a 2019 car… .

No list of Marvel films – or of any films – can be without Nicolas Cage. Here he plays the terrifying Ghost Rider. By day: stunt motorbike rider Johnny Blaze. By night: a flaming skeleton forced by Satan to ride around collecting souls for hell on his lethal chopper.

There is something funny, understated and self-deprecatory in the superpowers of Ant-Man – chiefly an ability to get really, really small – and Paul Rudd was perfectly cast in this likable Marvel movie, originally written by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish. Like many Marvel films with a more obvious comic touch, it has grown in retrospect.

Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were in their late 20s when they played Peter Parker, but Tom Holland was just 21 when he made his bashful Spidey debut in Captain America: Civil War. As a result, he was instantly more credible as a high-school kid, coming under the wisecracking mentorship of Tony Stark. Holland has been absolutely great in the role since, instantly getting Marvel’s verbal and physical language of dynamic, yet self-aware superheroism.

Time-travel was a complicating factor in this X-Men movie – perhaps too much so – but it at least brought us Evan Peters’s Quicksilver, who features in the glorious “bullet-time” sequence, in which the lightning-fast teenager ambles around catching bullets in the air as they are shot towards Magneto and Prof Xavier, all set to Jim Croce’s yearningly melancholicTime In a Bottle.

Sam Raimi made a splash with this, the first of his original trio, and he persuaded a new generation to love Spider-Man as the existential underdog, the winner who is also a loser. Filmed before 9/11 but released afterwards, Raimi had to junk a spectacular shot of a helicopter being caught in webbing strung between the two WTC towers, along with much contingent narrative.

 Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man. Photograph: Allstar/Marvel/Sportsphoto Ltd
The casting of Robert Downey Jr as the central pillar of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was very important – his quicksilver wit and his handsomeness, salted with cynicism and bleariness, allowed the films a crucial difference in tone and feel to previous superhero movies, giving them a new kind of savvy comedy. The first Iron Man, directed by John Favreau, isn’t my favourite, but it was a vital foundation of Marvel’s filmic cosmos.

For sheer grandeur and a very literate, almost Shakespearean sense of cosmic power politics, director Kenneth Branagh gave us a very enjoyable drama centred on the great deity Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth. He has issues with his father, Odin, played – perhaps inevitably – by Anthony Hopkins. Tom Hiddleston played his malcontent evil brother, Loki, in the great tradition of Jeremy Irons’s Uncle Scar in The Lion King. The giant universal vistas of Asgard, Jotunheim and Earth are created with surreal brio.

Doctor Strange is the most avowedly, even pedantically freaky hero in the MCU: the statutory Stan Lee cameo has the great man on a city bus, chuckling over a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception – the closest a Marvel film will come to actually advocating drug abuse. Benedict Cumberbatch cemented his unique A-list status as Dr Stephen Strange, the wealthy and temperamental neurosurgeon who is terribly injured in a car crash, but then ascends to a higher level of psychokinetic mastery thanks to Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One. The landscape-folding moments of surreality are more lightly managed than in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

 Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange.

A fascinatingly downbeat movie from the Marvel canon: superpowers are one thing, but no-one said the chracters were immortal. So, what happens when superheroes get old? This film goes some way towards an answer with this tale of Logan: X-Men’s Wolverine – seen at some stage in future, making an incognito living as a limo driver while caring for a decrepit Charles Xavier, and enduring severe pain every time his claws are unsheathed.

In the great bible of Marvel, the cataclysmic Avengers: Infinity War is the nearest to the Book of Revelations. It’s the closest the franchise comes to actually showing us the awful reality of an end to everything – that unthinkable final curtain the mighty battles between good and evil appear to have been gesturing at before now. The management of tone is expert: at one moment tragic, the next funny, and the next just exciting.

Marvel humour is at its most studenty and self-aware in this movie about the mutant mercenary assassin who first emerged on screen as a cameo in X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. It’s also very macabre and very funny. Ryan Reynolds is once again Deadpool, the black sheep of the X-Men family.

The two great enemies of picnics get co-billing in this hilarious, charming and distinctly lovable film tackling the micro-universe, the second in the Ant-Man series. Paul Rudd is great as Ant-Man and Evangeline Lilly is formidable as the Wasp. Michael Douglas has a certain old-school aplomb as Dr Hank Pym, and Michelle Pfeiffer has a great supporting turn as the Wasp’s mother, Janet van Dyne.

This was the first of many X-Men films, and in Bryan Singer it had a director overtaken by controversy, although at the time, the only controversy concerned the film’s extraordinary – or crass – “concentration camp” scene set in Poland in 1944. This was the movie that brought us Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Professor X and Magneto.

Not everyone agrees, but my favourite of the Iron Man films is the third – because of the lip-smacking relish brought to the writing and directing by Shane Black, a master of action comedy. Downey Jr is on fine form as the titular mercurial mogul and, in an age when we have to endure Elon Musk and his unwieldy submarine, Stark’s persona seems charm itself.

Perhaps this is the quintessential MCU film, which introduced mainstream audiences to the idea of mashing up the lives and existences of superheroes to have them work together and encroach on each other’s adventures while playing everything more or less deadpan. This one teamed Iron Man, Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor, Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) – creating a virtual blood-sugar overload of superhero potency. They faced Hiddleston’s outrageously evil Loki. Johansson is superb as Black Widow.

Director James Gunn has fallen on his sword for inappropriate tweets, but this hasn’t cancelled the claim his Guardians of the Galaxy movies have on the hearts of Marvel fans. Again, the keynote of comedy is all-important. Chris Pratt plays Peter Quill, the Han-Solo-ish intergalactic freebooter, listening to his retro playlist on an old-school Sony Walkman and commanding a ragtag multi-species crew, a tree-shaped creature called Groot, a huge guy called Drax, a talking raccoon called Rocket and a green alien called Gamora. There is a rush of absurdity, but excitement as well.

Sam Raimi’s second film in the original Spider-Man series is often thought the best of the trilogy, and perhaps even the best Marvel film. It’s certainly the most serious, and taps into the melancholy self-questioning of Spider-Man, while Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus is still the best Marvel supervillain.

This sequel to 1998’s Blade was directed by Guillermo del Toro with a swirling, demonic energy. The story once again concerns the charismatic daywalker, played by Wesley Snipes. It is a delirious Gothic-tech martial arts movie and the fight sequences Del Toro unleashes are horribly exciting. Not a typical superhero film, in many ways, but a great one.

This superb film is a deliriously entertaining Afrofuturist adventure, with strange echoes of Rider Haggard. Black Panther was established as one of Marvel’s greatest heroes, and Ryan Coogler’s movie showed that having a nearly non-white cast was not simply a matter of diversity signalling – it was a colossal box office hit across the board, with a richer and more cultish element of fantasy than other Marvel films. (It also boasts MCU’s first woman cinematographer: the Oscar-nominated Rachel Morrison. Marvel Studios’ president, Kevin Feige, has promised to get more women writers and directors on board, with next year’s Captain Marvel co-written and co-directed by Anna Boden. So far, the only Marvel female writing credit is Nicole Perman for Guardians Of The Galaxy.)

 Somehow the Marvel planets came into alignment more perfectly, more sublimely, with this film than with any other Marvel movie: it is smart, visually exciting and perhaps above all, funny. And it’s funny in a way that only Marvel movies can be, demonstrating that comedy need not undercut or send up the drama, but that it can be an integral part of it. Taika Waititi was an inspired choice as director, and Hemsworth and Cate Blanchett are tremendous as Thor and Hela, the goddess of death who also happens to be Thor’s half-sister.a