Software & Apps - Page 68

Opera 35 for desktops and laptops is out, and with it comes a couple new juicy features as well as some small but appreciable tweaks.

First, the now standard tab muting feature has been added. This is very handy for when a tab plays sounds unexpectedly, or when you want to silence a tab to listen to something else or just to have quiet. Simply click the volume icon and the sound is immediately off.

Next is the overhauled download manager. The new interface looks very slick with functionality to match. The categories menu on the left will prove very useful for when you've been downloading a lot on a given day or if you're the lazy type and don't clear your download history much or at all. Additionally, there's now a warning in place when exiting the browser while downloading something.

AMD recently launched a new open-source initiative called GPUOpen, a new philosophy backed by optimized software that's specifically designed to let developers harness more graphical power regardless of platform--PC or console. Team Red will discuss GPUOpen at GDC 2016 in March, and open up about the new project and how it'll shake up the world of gaming.

GPUOpen is essentially AMD's answer to NVIDIA's GameWorks, and will give devs more power over GPU integration and provide them with a wealth of tools, effects, SDKs, and a huge collaborative network of open-source software and connections with other developers. AMD also wants to use GPUOpen to remove the hardware limitation disparity between PC and consoles by giving "open and unrestricted access" to graphics hardware.

"GPUOpen is a new philosophy spearheaded by AMD that aims to bridge the gap between console and PC game development by allowing optimal access to the GPU for developers," reads a statement provided by AMD. "GPUOpen is a portal to effects, SDKs, libraries and tools that provides various levels of GPU access and functionalities for real-time graphics and content creation. GPUOpen marks the beginning of a new era where developers are able to achieve their artistic and technical vision via open and unrestricted access to the GPU."

MD has just rolled its new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.1.1 drivers, bringing performance optimizations and long-overdue CrossFire support to a number of games.

The new Crimson drivers add CrossFire profiles for Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, allowing both games to leverage the power of multi-AMD video cards. Just four days ago AMD promised hotfix optimizations for Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it's great to see they've delivered.

Gamers instantly noticed the absence of CrossFire support in both games upon release, especially Crystal Dynamic's performance-demanding Rise of the Tomb Raider. Based on our Rise of the Tomb Raider PC analysis, AMD cards pushed their own muscle against NVIDIA's GPUs, despite the fact the game's engine was built with Team Green hardware.

Windows 10 is continuing to jump up the adoption ladder, especially when we look at the latest figures from NetMarketShare, which show Windows 10 has a global OS market share of 11.85%, up from 9.96% in December.

If we compare Windows 10's global OS market share of 11.85% against Windows 8.1 and its 10.4%, and even Windows XP with 11.4%, we can see Windows 10 is doing quite well so far. Microsoft said last month that Windows 10 is the fastest growing version of its OS ever, with 75 million installations in the first month, and 110 million after 10 weeks. In December, Windows 10 had found its way onto 200 million active devices, which is getting closer to Microsoft's plans of having Windows 10 on 1 billion devices "in two or three years".

Not to be outdone by Alphabet's announcement of 1 billion monthly users of Gmail, Facebook has announced that WhatsApp is now home to 1 billion monthly users, too.

With WhatsApp still charging its $1 annual subscription fee to its users, with over 1 billion users - that's a nice amount of pocket change for WhatsApp each year, just on its annual subscription fee. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his personal Facebook account, where he said: "One billion people now use WhatsApp. Congrats to Jan, Brian and everyone who helped reach this milestone!"

He continued: "WhatsApp's community has more than doubled since joining Facebook. We've added the ability for you to call loved ones far away. We've dropped the subscription fee and made WhatsApp completely free. Next, we're going to work to connect more people around the world and make it easier to communicate with businesses. There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people. This milestone is an important step towards connecting the entire world".

A site spotted by The Next Web allows you to use Windows 95 in your browser, thanks to the power of Javascript and emulator software Emscripten and DOSBox.

To try it head out, head here and click the 'Start Windows 95' button. Be warned the disk image is 131MB uncompressed, so it will take a few minutes to load on an average connection, and even once loaded, it will probably run slower than you remember for a variety of technical reasons. Once you're in, click the Fullscreen button to gain control of the OS.

Windows 95 launched 20 years ago and was a landmark OS for Microsoft. Support for it ended just a day prior to 2002.

We all know about the security and privacy issues surrounding Windows 10, but the latest look into the Edge browser might scare people off - and if anything, bar them from using Microsoft's nifty new Windows 10 web browser.

Thanks to security researcher Ashish Singh, we're finding out that private browsing data using Edge's InPrivate mode might not be deleting the web browsing history - that's meant to be completely private - after all. According to Singh, who looked at the "Container_n" table that stores web history, anyone can see the tabs that were opened while browsing the web using the InPrivate mode in the Edge browser. Eek.

Singh explains: "Therefore any skilled investigator can easily spot the difference and get concrete evidence against a person's wrongdoings. Plenty of artifacts are maintained by the browser, which makes examination quite easy. However, there are stages where evidence is not so easy to find. The not-so-private browsing featured by Edge makes its very purpose seem to fail". The Verge was able to find evidence in the WebCache of a site visited while using Edge and using InPrivate mode, using Singh's method. Microsoft told The Verge: "We recently became aware of a report that claims InPrivate tabs are not working as designed and we are committed to resolving this as quickly as possible".

The latest Firefox build, now up to 44, can give you push notifications even after you close the browser. They've also removed support for the RC4 encryption cipher and added some very powerful, and easy to use, developer tools.

The push notification feature lets you receive all notifications from any website that you give permission to, and if it's not loaded in a tab you'll still get the notification through Firefox itself. Mozilla says it's a useful feature for getting dynamic updates about weather and even your social network feed.

They've also stopped support for the aging RC4 cipher that's used for HTTPS connections. It was originally designed in 1987 and is incredibly weak by today's standards. It doesn't take long to crack a this cipher with today's compute power. So if a website uses that as their method of connection, then you'll get a warning page and you won't be able to connect. Modern SSL certificates don't make use of that anyway, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue. And those developer tools? Very slick.

Cortana is getting quite the upgrade today, with new features that'll help you manage your schedule, and keep your promises. It happens to the best of us, we say we'll do something, forget to actually put in on the calendar, then we forget. Cortana is going to make sure that that doesn't happen anymore.

Microsoft Research has come up with a better way to integrate Cortana into the OS and to leverage her natural attentiveness in order to automatically recognize any sort of commitments you make in through email, and scheduling those for you on the calendar. The way they've done this is through the implementation of a new Natural Language Processing algorithm that can identify these things, determine a time-frame you're likely to setup, and remind you to do those tasks. Now there's no excuse for forgetting to pick up more coffee at the store.

Another new feature coming to Cortana is how she'll be able to better organize your calendar too. Not only will there be automatic scheduling of meetings, but you'll get notified of any conflicts in times and anything outside your normal routine will be flagged so you can adjust accordingly.

Some astute individual went ahead and taken everything that Presidential candidate Donald Trump has said throughout this past year, and has created programming language that follows all those statements and rules. And the language doesn't follow any sort of logic whatsoever.

The language was created by two Rice University students during a hackathon, Chris Brown and Sam Shadwell, and it's based on Python. This appropriately named TrumpScript uses the basis of his Presidential campaign philosophy as the groundwork for how it operates. So you can't play with floating point numbers that are smaller than 1 million and users from China or Mexico can't use it either.

There're a lot more little nuggets of humor floating inside this semi-usable language, and you can play with it right now by heading over to the github page. But even in this incomplete state, it's a lot of fun to play with and you can even add your own audacious logic to it if you'd like.

Microsoft's Office Insider Program used to only be for Windows users, letting you download beta updates that let you preview experimental upcoming features. Now Apple users can get in on the fun with a preview program of their own.

The Mac Preview Program lets Office 365 subscribers opt into the program by checking the appropriate box from inside the Microsoft Auto Update tool. It's simple and generally the features that get pushed to the insider program don't cause Office in general to be unstable.

The blog post announcing the insider program didn't specify anything Mac users can look forward to, though it's not too much of a stretch to think that whatever features come to the Windows version will also find their way to the Mac version as well.

Just how profitable has Android been for Google since it acquired the company? Thanks to Oracle's lawyer in their court proceedings against Google, Bloomberg reports that Android has generated $31 billion in revenue and $22 billion in profits since it launched.

Most of the money made has been from Google ads shown on Android phones, and from Play Store revenue. Oracle attorney Annette Hurst said: "Look at the extraordinary magnitude of commerciality here". Google, until now, has been keeping Android earnings a secret, has requested the judge to seal the transcript from that part of the hearing.

Google says the Oracle lawyer received her information from internal, confidential documents marked "Attorney's Eyes Only", and that they should never have been released. Google wrote in its request to the judge: "That non-public financial data is highly sensitive, and public disclosure could have significant negative effects on Google's business".

NVIDIA and the Khronos group had a developer day yesterday on the 19th where they talked about the proper application of Vulkan in games.

During the talk, Neil Trevett, who is the president of Khronos and a key employee of NVIDIA, went over how the open-standard API can be be used for some fantastic graphical effects. As you know, it's a low-level API with far less CPU overhead, that essentially spawned off of AMD's Mantle. Vulkan allows for greater access to the GPU than ever before, which is something that only consoles enjoyed previously.

Programming for Vulkan, and DirectX 12, is a different beast than DX11 or OpenGL. You can have explicit control over GPU functions and especially of multi-threading, which is a huge advantage that can lead to increased performance, or much better looking scenes at the same performance. So at this dev day, NVIDIA talked about how they're committed to the open-source API and how they want to help optimize their driver for it, to welcome it into the gaming world.

The government of British Columbia, Canada will be adding computer coding into its school curriculum over the next three years across all grades, including kindergarten. The new lessons will be integrated into mathematics and science programs, and apart of a new "applied design, skills, and technologies" (ADST) component. At the kindergarten level, it will be designed to encourage "exploratory and purposeful play" and stimulate ADST aptitude; older students will learn about computational thinking and programming in general; by the time grade 9 is over, students will be able to code on a basic level; high school students will be able to specialize in a particular area of technology.

The move serves as a pointed decision to address BC's technology skills shortage -- though the industry employs more than the forestry, mining, and oil and gas industries combined (86,000), there's traditionally been a much bigger focus on serving those now suffering industries instead. The government last month put up $100 million in funding for tech startups, so this is part of a broader plan. Google has put its money where its mouth is, too: its Codemakers program aims to bring programming to 100,000 Canadian children.

"Computer science skills ... are increasingly critical as technology is where all future job growth lies," said Jeff Booth, CEO of Vancouver's BuildDirect Technologies Inc., a web company that ships construction materials. "There is already a war for talent in technology that has companies like ours searching the world for the best engineers. ... It's very possible that computer coding and other technology skills may become as critical as reading and writing."

An interesting story has floated to the surface of the Internet over the weekend, where Microsoft has announced it will not support older operating systems on new platforms, in the very near future.

The company wrote: "Through July 17, 2017, Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and 8.1. During the 18-month support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices".

Considering Intel's Skylake architecture isn't that old at all, it's concerning that Microsoft will drop support for Skylake processors in Windows 7/8.1 next July. The Redmond-based OS giant has added that operating systems like Windows 7 were never designed for the latest and greatest technological advances we have on PC.

Back in November, screen dimming, sleep-friendly software f.lux was given the boot off iOS by Apple. The app developer claimed this was due to a misunderstanding over direct install privileges; some speculated because it isn't a true open source download, it contains major security vulnerabilities.

Then this week, we learned Apple had built its own take on f.lux. Named "Night Shift", it will debut in iOS 9.3 this quarter. In response, f.lux has expressed it's happy Apple is joining the cause, but it still has interest in getting back on the operating system.

"Our mission is to enable f.lux to advance the science, while providing customized solutions for each person. We intend to make f.lux better in every way than the app we designed back in 2009.

The research firm IDC conducted a survey about Windows 10 and has just now published the results of that survey. And the data they have seems to suggest that Windows 10 is quite the success. People actually enjoy it. And they're liking it far more than they did upgrading to previous releases.

Satisfaction is abnormally high for Windows 10. That is, 60% of those that said they have Windows 10 picked a "favorable" or "very favorable" rating when asked how they saw the OS. But not everyone enjoys the new OS, with 1 in 10 having chosen an "unfavorable" rating or lower. But the positive responses still outweighed the negative, indicating that it was at least generally a better and more smooth launch than 8 or 8.1.

The survey was given to 1,000 adults who owned PC's in the US and was carried out in September of last year. But with the survey being conducted so soon after the July 2015 launch of Windows 10, it might be that the responses were slightly colored with the relative "newness" of the new OS. If you weren't part of the preview program, it was different enough from 8.1 to feel better overall, despite issues that seemed to crop up later. Regardless, the Steam hardware survey shows that Windows 10 64 bit has a 31.25% share of all machines running Steam, which is up 2.44% over last November. That isn't insignificant.

The slow rollout of Skype Translator began about 14 weeks ago following its creation nearly two years ago; now it's finally public for everyone.

Translator lets you converse with others who don't speak your language, translating what each of you says with text so you can both understand each other. This works with video or text chats, although far fewer languages are supported for video at the moment (more will come).

To try it out, bring up a conversation window in Skype and click the globe icon just below the call button. If you don't see it, click Help > Check for Updates in the same window.

NVIDIA's latest beta update for its GeForce Experience software adds yet more juicy new features.

First up are desktop and windowed mode capture and streaming. Pretty self-explanatory: if you want to capture or stream non-game activities happening on your PC, you can now do that. As well, if you prefer to play your games in windowed mode, you can now do that while not being prohibited from recording or streaming. To access this unified mode, navigate to Preferences > Share and check "Turn on desktop capture for Instant Replay, Record, and Broadcast". Good to know: you can switch back and forth between fullscreen and desktop modes without interrupting recording or streaming, and you can capture screenshots while in this mode, too.

Next is new mic controls which allow you to change your recording device, adjust recording volume, and utilize mic boost. The new controls are in addition to the previously added ability to mute your mic and switch between Push-to-talk and Always on modes.

Microsoft finally retired Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 yesterday, after previously encouraging everyone to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11.

There's another reason to do so, even if you don't use Internet Explorer, according to Microsoft Senior Software Development Consultant Pat Altimore, who notes components of the browser are tied into the operating system.

"There are many components that constitute the browser," he writes. "Most of the components are part of the operating system including the JavaScript / HTML rendering engine (MSHTML.dll), the Web Browser control (ieframe.dll), and the Windows Internet Protocol Handler (WinInet.dll). The browser application (IExplore.exe) uses these OS components for script execution, rendering, HTTP requests, etc. When you upgrade the browser, you potentially upgrade all of these components."