Software & Apps - Page 50

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Microsoft announced the news that it would be retiring its first-ever browser -- Internet Explorer -- after 27 years on Windows.

The memes flew out the door pretty quickly, with so many jumping in and taking a laugh that Internet Explorer was used by billions of people to purely download another browser: Google Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and many others. But, back in 1995 when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer (IE) as an add-on with "Microsoft Plus!" for its flagship Windows 95 operating system, I was there.

It was the portal to the internet for a then 12-year-old tech and gaming nerd, as it was launching before "the internet" was really a thing. You got AOL CDs in the mail... people referred to it as the "Information Superhighway"... and the world was totally (but didn't) end at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000. We survived the "Millenium Bug". But now, the browser that delivered all that information through those tubes... has been retired.

Meta is planning on taking TikTok in a head-to-head as major changes are coming to Facebook that will make the platform directly compete with ByteDance's highly popular app.

According to a leaked internal memo, originally made public by The Verge, Mark Zuckerberg, and other Meta executives want to compete with TikTok, and to do this, several changes need to be implemented to Facebook. Firstly, the memo states that Meta developers are planning a complete redesign of the Facebook app, and the overhaul will mostly concentrate on Facebook's main feed being transformed into what was described as a "discovery engine" by Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app at Meta.

These changes would implement major changes to Facebook's main feed that will prioritize recommended content from pages, users, as well as people/pages that aren't being followed. Essentially, Facebook's main feed would be changed to similar to how TikTok's "For You" page works. Notably, the memo states that users will see fewer posts from friends and family, as well as the addition of bringing Messenger back to the Facebook app as the company believes that users will use Messenger as a vehicle to share discovered content.

Adobe is planning on rolling out a free-to-use web-based version of Photoshop, and testing has already begun in Canada.

Adobe wants to give creatives the power of photoshop in a web-based browser as the massive software company has begun testing a "freemium" version of Photoshop that can be accessed through a free Adobe account. The "freemium" aspect of the software is described that way by Adobe because the company plans to eventually put pay-walls up for some features that will be accessible to those that have subscribed.

The idea behind the web-based free version of Photoshop is to allow users to try out the software before they subscribe to receive the full product. Additionally, as explained by Maria Yap, Adobe's Vice President of Digital Imaging, the free version of Photoshop won't require a high-end machine to run, making the program much more accessible to users.

AMD has just released its latest Radeon GPU drivers, with the release of the new Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.5.2 drivers. You can grab them right here (569MB download).

The new AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.5.2 drivers include support for Sniper Elite 5, as well as the new Hitman 3 Ray Tracing Update. The new drivers also add Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) with Radeon 6000 series processors that pack integrated graphics.

AMD includes up to 8% more performance in DX11-based games for the Radeon RX 6950 XT on the new AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.5.2 on the Radeon RX 6950 XT, versus the previous software driver version 22.5.1. Not bad, but exclusive to the new flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT.

More than 10,000 people reported Google Maps being down on Friday morning last week, as users were able to get onto the app/website but couldn't see anything besides an erased Earth.

On Friday morning at around 2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT individuals took to Twitter to report Google Maps being down across Android, iOS and desktop applications. Users during this time were able to plug in new addresses/locations, pull up directions, and use the as per normal, but couldn't see any visual representation of the map.

DownDetector, a website dedicated to tracking connectivity issues for apps and websites reported that more than 12,000 people around the world reported the outage at the same time. Google Maps was down for approximately 90 minutes, and during that time it took down a multitude of features on other apps that use Google Maps as infrastructure such as Waze, Snapchat, Lyft, Accenture and more.

Robert McGrath, the Schar School of Policy and Government associate professor at George Mason University developed the new app.

Called the Ukraine VIINA Dashboard, the app runs in a browser and visualizes real-time data collected from media sources in Ukraine on a map of the country. The interactive map populates with data points at the relevant location from a given news report, detailing the event type (military or non-military) and links to the original media outlet.

The Russian government is now facing a digital storage crisis as Western cloud services have pulled their services from the country.

Western cloud storage providers have pulled out of Russia following heavy Western sanctions designed to cripple the Russian economy. According to reports, the Russian government is looking at several different ways to solve the problem of finding hosts for Russia's data, and some of those solutions include leasing all available data storage across Russia or seizing all data storage from Russian businesses that have left the country.

A Russian media outlet, Kommersant, reported that the following parties; Sberbank, MTS, Oxygen, Rostelecom, Atom-Data, Croc, and Yandex, believe they have just two months to find a solution to the data crisis before running out of currently available storage space. At the moment, Russian data firms are looking towards domestic data storage services to host data, with just one Russian mobile carrier MegaFon having to increase its storage capacity by five times its current levels.

Germany's federal cyber security agency has dropped warnings about the Russian-owned Kaspersky antivirus software.

The warnings come from Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) that announced a warning for German citizens, advising not to install Kaspersky antivirus software on the ground of the federal agency finding doubt in its "reliability of the manufacturer." The BSI now recommends replacing Kaspersky antivirus with alternative products.

A Kaspersky company spokesperson told The Register that the decision by Germany's cybersecurity agency is politically charged and is not based on a technical assessment of Kaspersky's products. Additionally, the Kaspersky spokesperson said that Kaspersky has shown support for the BSI and across Europe, while also being a private global company that doesn't have any "ties to the Russian or any other government."

The largest streaming company in the world is the latest to jump into the ban-everything-to-Russia bandwagon, with Netflix suspending its services to the country.

Netflix has now suspended its streaming services to Russia, as well as any and all projects and productions the company was working on in the country. A spokesperson for Netflix told CNBC: "Given the circumstances on the ground, we have decided to suspend our service in Russia".

There are reportedly over 1 million subscribers in Russia, with four original productions in the works being canned. They might still make the light of day, but we won't know for a while now. AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA have all stopped sending anything to Russia, so gamers and now people who stream movies and TV in the country are going to suffer because of the actions of their leader. No chill at all.

I'm sure by now we all know what's going on between Russia and Ukraine, with Russians being shut out from the developed world... and now, VPN downloads are skyrocketing in the country. Duh.

Russians are jumping all over the world of VPNs (Virtual Private Network) because the outside world is getting harder to access, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and everything in between now offline to Russian citizens on the internet. But with new numbers from AppFigures, VPN downloads in Russia have absolutely exploded -- by a huge 1200% -- on the Apple App Store and Google Play Stores.

The use of a VPN allows Russians who are banned from the internet, letting them bypass the blocks that the world is putting up around them. The thing is, how much longer can those people download VPN apps from the App Store and Play Store... if those stores were to go offline in the coming days. Hell, it could happen at any moment. Apple and Google could bring down the App Gauntlet, taking down both app platforms and taking down VPNs with it.

Did you know you can now run Android apps on Windows 11? Well, if you didn't know -- now you do -- and if you did, do you know what hardware you need to run Android apps on Windows 11? It's not much.

Microsoft recommends that you have an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPU -- or if you're a laptop user, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8c or above. There's also a requirement for an SSD, and 8GB of RAM -- although 16GB of RAM is recommended -- and would make your system much smoother overall, let alone run Android apps in Windows 11 smoother.

You'll need to install the Amazon Appstore from the Microsoft Store, onto Windows 11 before you can run Google's mobile operating system -- Android -- and its apps. What a mess... using Amazon through Microsoft to access a Google product, to run on a Microsoft operating system. Okie dokie.

TechPowerUp has released the latest version of GPU-Z with GPU-Z v2.44.0 supporting a bunch of new chips -- including new designs from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.

GPU-Z 2.44.0 has support built-in for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, RTX 3080 12 GB, RTX 3070 Ti Mobile, RTX 3050 Ti Mobile (GA106), RTX 2060 12 GB, GT 1010, MX550, GTX 1650 Mobile (TU117-B), RTX A2000 (GA106-B), RTX A4500, A10G, A100 80 GB PCIe, CMP170HX, and the CMP70HX... and that's just NVIDIA.

Moving onto AMD, GPU-Z v2.44.0 supports the Navi 24-based Radeon RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, RX 6300M, RX 6500M, PRO W6300M, PRO W6500M, and PRO W660M. Intel has new support with GPU-Z v2.44.0 with its new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" non-K processors, Alder Lake mobile processors, and Xeon processors based on the Rocket Lake CPU architecture are now supported.

It seems that most people aren't upgrading to Microsoft's latest version of its operating system, with less than 1% of PC users upgrading to Windows 11.

This is according to Lansweeper, an IT asset management firm, which says only 0.21% of PC users are running Windows 11. This is flying in the face of Microsoft offering Windows 11 as a free upgrade for Windows 10 users and comes days after Microsoft CEO Nadella Satya off-loaded over half of his Microsoft stock.

Lansweeper investigated data from over 10 million Windows devices in both businesses, and home users, finding that Windows 11 is the 5th most popular OS overall. Hell, there are more people using both Windows 8 (ugh) and Windows XP than there are people running Windows 11. There's 3.62% of people running Windows XP, and 0.95% running Windows 8.

UL Benchmarks is taking storage benchmarking to the next level, with the introduction of the new SSD Benchmark, a new storage-focused benchmark that will test your gaming PC and its included SSD, hybrid SSD, or regular mechanical HDD.

It won't cost you much, where if you already own 3DMark Advanced Edition then you're looking at $2.99 for the new 3DMark Storage Benchmark DLC. UL Benchmark explains on its own website: "The 3DMark Storage Benchmark DLC extends 3DMark Advanced Edition with a dedicated component test for measuring the gaming performance of your SSD and other storage hardware".

"It supports all the latest storage technologies and tests practical, real-world gaming performance for activities such as loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams".

MOV is not one file format but rather a format envelope that can be made up of any of dozens of codecs, resolutions, and frame rates from basic DV through H.264, HEVC to ProRes, and other pro formats. However, most apps on your computer try only to support MOV with codecs that come from common consumer cameras. Converting MOV to MP4 before posting to social media or sharing with someone who doesn't have a Mac is therefore a pretty good way to avoid compatibility issues.

In this article, I'm going to offer a quick primer on how to convert MOV to MP4 with a great converter. Whether you're an experienced user or a newbie for video conversion, you can turn any 4K/HD videos from MOV into MP4 easily.

WinX Video Converter - Some of you may have heard of it, but for those who haven't, WinX Video Converter is a free MOV to MP4 video converter which is incredibly helpful to convert any video into the format you want with the best results.

Windows 11 is now officially here and right after Microsoft's new operating system launched, an update was pushed out that reduced AMD Ryzen CPU gaming performance by up to 15% on some systems.

Microsoft is working on a fix for the Windows 11 update, that will boost performance back up on AMD Ryzen processors. The company notes there's an issue with high L3 cache latency, which reduces gaming performance by up to 15% depending on the AMD Ryzen CPU being used.

In some testing, the folks at TechPowerUp found that the L3 cache latency that normally is at 10ns is at a much higher 31.9ns in the new Windows 11 update on the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X processor. Before the update, the latency was at 17ns... quite the increase.

Steve Jobs first approached Dell back when he founded NeXT back in 1985, where he wanted Dell to partner with his new company and run the NeXT operating system on Dell PCs.

At the time, the former Apple CEO said that the NeXT operating system was superior to Windows, but Dell founder and current CEO Michael Dell said he told Jobs at the time that it just wasn't going to happen because there was no software for it and "zero customer interest".

Dell talked about Jobs in his new book "Play Nice But Win" where Dell talks about how as a teenager, he was in love with the Apple II. He talks about meeting Jobs and how he asked Dell to license the Mac operating system and use it on Intel-based Dell PCs. In the end, Dell and Apple became competitors and both have enjoyed meteoric rises over the last couple of decades since Jobs asked Dell to put Mac OS on Dell systems powered with Intel processors.

Wondershare PDFelement Pro is a piece of software that makes it incredibly easy to edit, create, and convert PDF files on Windows and Mac operating systems.

The company has a bunch of features and tools built into PDFelement that give you full control over your PDF life, and is a great alternative to Adobe software, other software, and even browser extensions and the like that let you manipulate PDFs.

Where we have Wondershare doing things differently is offering its PDFelement Pro software with a slick UI, a box of features, and more to make editing and creating PDFs easier than ever before. If you're part of a bigger organization then Wondershare is also looking out for you by including 256-bit AES password encryption for the ultimate protection of your files and PDF documents.

Vlogs are an important part of the content we create and share every day. Imaging approximately 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, all around the world. Unlike other videos, vlogs are typically recorded with a cellphone or a hand-held camera. They are not as hard to produce as other videos.

But when it comes to editing a vlog, you'll definitely need decent video editing software to put everything together. So, what vlog editing software do vloggers use? And what's the best vlog editing software? You'll find the answers in this round-up.

VideoProc Vlogger is a free vlog editing software newly released by Digiarty Software. This novice-friendly yet powerful non-linear program comes with a rich set of tools to suffice various editing demands. It's a free non-linear video editor with no watermark.