Software & Apps - Page 112

Got friends who run an Android or Blackberry - when you have an iPhone or iPad - and wished you could play games against each other? Well, rub your genie bottle one more time and that wish will come true.

Yesterday we wrote about how the Intel AppUp app store for netbooks went out of beta and was released to the world. While initially we had some issues logging in, those problems have gone away today and now we can provide a first impressions look at the software, how it works and what we think of it at this stage of the game.

Here in Texas its way too hot most of the year and things are way to spread out to walk most places on foot. In other parts of the country walking is one of the most common forms of travel though with folks in New York City and other major metropolitan areas hoofing it all the time. If you are visiting a section of a city on foot that you aren't familiar with and use an Android device Google has a new way to help you get around.

I use Gmail for my personal email account and over the years I have ended up on mailing lists for stuff that isn't spam, but really isn't that important to me. What that means is that while Gmail does a decent job of filtering all the offers for pills to make my Johnson larger into the spam folder, I still end up wading through tons of mail to find the stuff that is important to me and I need to respond to.

The results of a BitTorrent specific study have been published this week by researchers at the University of Ballarat which claim that only 10% of torrents available on the net are legit, whilst the remainder all breach copyright. They used Torrentz.com to make this analysis; a search engine that combines results from all the most popular BitTorrent sites such as Demonoid, TorrentBay, BitReactor etc.

After acquiring On2 in the second half of last year, maker of the VP8 video codec, Googles plans were to open-source this codec eventually and they've done just that today with an official launch.

GPU acceleration is one of the biggest talks of the town when focusing on ways to go beyond the limitations of older, traditional computational methods and we're seeing it being harnessed in more and exciting ways as time goes on.

One of the biggest software makers of all, Microsoft is now taking it on for use in their latest Office 2010 product suite with the help of AMD and their supporting Radeon HD 3000, 4000 and 5000 series graphics cards. PowerPoint users in particular will be able to benefit in several ways if running one of these graphics cards in their system. But there's also many other new capabilities and benefits across the board when making use of graphics acceleration versus earlier Office releases.

We've known for a while now it would be arriving very soon and here 'tis. Microsoft has just officially announced Office 2010 as well as SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.

Initially it is only available to business customers, but consumers will be able to purchase it as of June 15 at prices ranging from $99 to $499 U.S. depending on which Office version you opt for.

If your looking for more ways to benchmark your system using real world applications as opposed to synthetic methods (FutureMark etc.) Zardon of KitGuru has just made mention of a new update to his real world benchmark script designed for Adobe's Photoshop. It can work with Photoshop CS5, CS4 and is also compatible with Photoshop 7 (but the results will differ depending on what version you run).

Microsoft has offered embedded versions of Windows for many different needs for a long time. Today Microsoft has announced the latest version of Windows Embedded called Windows Embedded Standard 7 has hit RTM.

While Microsoft's Windows 7 Touch Pack was first made available to OEMs selling Windows 7 PCs last year, Microsoft have now made it available for all at their Download Center.

The war between Steve Jobs and Adobe has heated up. Apple has now put wording into the SDK for iPhone OS 4.0 that prohibits the use of third party compilers or code translators. This means the new iPhone OS packager that Adobe plans to release in Creative Suite 5 will not be allowed in applications submitted to the App Store.

"3.3.1 - Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."

However, while this is only more evidence that Jobs is on a mission to steal consumer choice and fair usage the new wording has zero effect on Apple products that are jailbroken. What Apple has effectively done is to push more developers to repositories like Cydia and Rock. By using these they will be able to provide apps that are developed using tools they have invested in heavily. But Adobe is not the only ones out in the cold, Novel and their Mono Touch is also being left out now.

We contacted Adobe to ask them how they felt and received this reply

"We are aware of the new SDK language and are looking into it. We continue to develop our Packager for iPhone OS technology, which we plan to debut in Flash CS5"

I for one hope that someone can legally do something about this move by Apple that is extremely anti-competitive and monopolistic.

Some more explicit details on HP's answer to iPad which it calls the Slate have surfaced thanks to Engadget getting hold of a presentation slide that reveals more on the specs and confirms the $549 U.S. launch price for the base model.

The popular DirectX 11 benchmark from Unigine Corp. called Heaven has seen a major update this week, taking it to Version 2.0.

Following on from our 1-2 Punch article that went up over a month ago, Our VGA reviewer Shane has been made aware of some more exciting details via access to the release notes for the soon to be released ATI Catalyst 10.3 driver suite.

Following yesterdays coverage on AMD's plans to significantly enhance its Catalyst Drivers in its next two driver sets (10.2 and 10.3), today sees the 10.2s officially released.