Software & Apps - Page 86

Have you ever wanted to record your dreams? I've thought about it a few times, but honestly the concept of recording my subconscious scares the heck out of me. If a new Kickstarter campaign has its way, we will all be able to record our dreams soon and upload them to what is being billed as the "world's largest dream database."

SHADOW is an app that acts much like an alarm clock that gradually wakes you up with escalating alarms. Once awake, the app will prompt you to record what you remember from your dreams in either audible or text forms. This information would be loaded into a private dream journal that will analyze and visualize your long-term dream patterns.

The end-user--or "Dreamer"--will have the option to keep their dreams private or share them with friends and family. Additionally, dreamers can push their dreams into the cloud to join an anonymous database that uses natural language processing algorithms and keyword recognition to help identify global dream patterns. While this technology is cool and definitely something we need to research, the last thing I would like to do when I wake up is record myself describing my dreams. Head over to the source below to find out more.

By the end of this month, Apple will have passed the 700 million iOS devices shipped milestone, but before then we should expect the release of iOS 7, the company's next-generation mobile OS.

iOS 7 looks gorgeous when compared to iOS 6, and finally brings it up to the multi-tasking, gorgeous UI that we've come to expect from the various Android 4.x iterations of Jelly Bean (4.1, 4.2, 4.3). It looks great, and has some new features, such as Siri being able to search Tweets, as well as Siri being capable of searching Wikipedia, inline web search and photo search.

We have textured ringtones, and improvements made to system sound alerts. Apple has made it easier to share on iOS 7, with a new "Share Sheet" which lets you push out to Twitter or e-mail, as well as the ability to use AirDrop to share with people close to you over "P2P Wi-Fi". iOS 7 also has iTunes Radio, which Apple describes as "the best way to experience new music."

IDF 2013 - Today LSI announced that they will be demonstrating the performance of its 12Gb/s MegaRAID controller at this year's Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco, California. The demo will be taking place at LSI's booth (#614) as well as on display at other locations during the event.

The demonstration setup consists of a LSI 12Gb/s MegaRAID controller with an Intel Xenon E5-2600 v2 based server, and eight 12Gb/s HGST SAS SSDs. LSI says that this system delivers a throughput increase of over 50-percent compared to a 6Gb/s SAS system. LSI design this system to maximize storage performance for I/O intensive applications such as web cloud data centers and virtualized server environments.

"As storage needs grow, 12Gb/s SAS provides the performance gains necessary to help end customers optimize bandwidth-intensive applications including those for cloud and big data," said Kelly Bryant, vice president of marketing, RAID Storage Division, LSI. "Working closely with the storage ecosystem including Intel and HGST, LSI is committed to providing customers with 12Gb/s SAS solutions with leading performance and interoperability."

Today, Futuremark announced the release of its 3DMark benchmarking application for iOS. The new app comes a few months after the release of 3DMark for Android and allows both mobile operating systems to run "unlimited" benchmark tests on any Android or iOS device and compare devices across operating systems.

Futuremark says that the new iOS addition of 3DMark includes everything you would need to accurately benchmark the performance of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Users can directly compare 3DMark scores to other devices running iOS, Android, Windows, and even Windows RT, once the RT version is released, of course. The company says that testers will now be ready to benchmark and compare any new devices that Apple may release tomorrow during its press conference.

Futuremark has added a new test to 3DMark specifically designed for making chip-to-chip comparisons across mobile devices and operating systems dubbed 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited. This new test can be added to the Android edition of the app by updating to the latest version. Additionally, Futuremark has built a mobile hardware database of all of these scores from the most popular smartphones and tablets that have been benchmarked using the 3DMark application. Check out the sources listed below for both download links as well as a link to the 3DMark mobile hardware database.

As a heavy Spotify user, it's going to be very hard to make me, and millions of other Spotify, Pandora, or other music streaming service users change, but Kim Dotcom hopes we will with his new music service, Baboom.

Baboom is still months away from a public release, but it's yet another service in the constantly growing line of services from Mega founder, Kim Dotcom. Baboom is currently being prepared for a public launch, which will launch at Baboom.com. Dotcom has said that he's secured several million dollars in funding for Baboom, and has 22 developers working on it.

Dotcom believes that Baboom will revolutionize the music industry, handing over the power to artists once again. Dotcom told TorrentFreak: "I am really excited about Baboom. I can't wait for artists to see what i have created for them. Their entire career can be managed on Baboom. Artists never had more freedom, transparency and control."

Ubisoft's upcoming open-world game, Watch Dogs, is looking more impressive by the day, especially with the ctOS Mobile app. The ctOS Mobile app will let you challenge your friends, or poke them if you dominate them in a game.

The news is coming from Anne Lewis, who is a communications associate for Ubisoft, who showed the application off by locating her friend on the app's map of Chicago, tapping on them and starting a challenge. One her friend accepting the challenge, he had to hit four checkpoints within a limited time period. Her job was to stop him from changing the game world from within the app.

She elaborated by saying: "By dragging the helicopter on the screen to hover over the console player's marker (which moved in real-time with his movements on the screen) I was able to see the various aspects of Chicago's infrastructure I could affect. As my opponent stole a car and headed toward an intersection I quickly hacked the traffic lights, sending cars careening into him. His luck held out and he was able to keep moving. If a player dies during the challenge it's not an automatic game over, but he'll have to start back at the beginning and none of the time is returned."

After an outcry in UK over rape and bomb threats sent to female journalists and a member of Parliament, Twitter has updated all of its platforms with a 'report abuse' button. The social networking/microblogging site is also adding more staff to help go through the flagged tweets from the rape and bomb threats.

This all began with UK activist Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully lobbied to have novelist Jane Austen featured on a UK banknote. People seemed to be completely outraged at this, after which she was slammed with multiple rape threats over Twitter.

It culminated in one of her followers opening up a Change.org petition pressing Twitter to make it easier to report abuse. Before Twitter implemented this change, users needed to search the site in order to find out how to report abusive messages. The Change.org petition was a huge success, taking in over 139,000 signatures.

In what can only be described as a win for humanity, the New Zealand government today passed a new Patents Bill that effectively makes patenting software illegal. In what many are calling a major victory for innovation, the bill was passed earlier this week after more than five years of debate and intensive lobbying for multinational software vendors.

New Zealand's Minister of commerce Craig Foss openly welcomed the updated Patents Bill and said that it marked a "significant step towards driving innovation in New Zealand." He went on to say: "By clarifying the definition of what can be patented, we are giving New Zealand businesses more flexibility to adapt and improve existing inventions, while continuing to protect genuine innovations,"

The bill passed by a unanimous vote and was praised by the Institute of IT Professionals. Its chief executive, Paul Matthews, had the following to say: "The patents system doesn't work for software because it is almost impossible for genuine technology companies to create new software without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents that exist, often for very obvious work... Today's historic legislation will support our innovative technology industry, and sends a clear message to the rest of the world that New Zealand won't tolerate the vexatious practice of 'patent trolls'"

Everyone loves a good tech rumor, right? More so, everyone loves a good tech rumor regarding future releases of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Today, website WinBeta has managed to beat all the odds and gain insider information on what we might expect to see in Windows 9 as well as Windows 10. Of course, with Windows 8.1 not even officially released to the public, it would be best to take everything you're about to read with a very fine grain of salt.

The leaks come from a source simply named "WZOR" that the website claims has been correct on countless Microsoft leaks in the past. The mysterious--and apparently infamous--WZOR states that Windows 9 will be more closely related to Windows 7 than it will to Windows 8, but no explicit details were given. He says that Windows 9 will continue the Aero-based desktop OS that so many of us techies missed gratefully.

"According to WZOR, Windows 9 will be similar to the desktop OS we know today. He claims that Microsoft is planning to bring the old Aero interface back, but not as we all know it. That's all he teases regarding the Aero interface, but he also claims that Windows 9 will make an appearance in a years time, much sooner than expected," reads the WinBeta article.

We've known that BlackBerry Messenger is making its way to Android for quite some time now, and while we had hoped for an OS-wide launch sometime in July, it appears that the first Android devices to get BBM will be of Samsung origin. Earlier today, website CrackBerry spotted a teaser ad that was posted on both YouTube and Samsung's Ghana Facebook page.

Unfortunately, the YouTube video has since been removed, but the Facebook posting is still up at the time of this writing. It makes sense that the company's Ghana page would be the first to post as BlackBerry Messenger is a major form of communication in many African countries.

So what does this mean? I think we may see the app officially announced by Samsung or BlackBerry at the IDC trade show in Berlin, Germany, next week, and with a working port for Android-based Samsung devices now in existence, it is only a matter of time before BlackBerry Messenger is in the Google Play Store for all Android devices. That is, unless BlackBerry did something stupid like sign an exclusivity deal with Samsung, but then again this is BlackBerry were talking about and weirder things have happened in the past.

As an ex-professional photographer, one of the most annoying things about 90 percent of the photos posted online is the fact that they are never straight. No one seems to care about holding their smartphone in a nice in level orientation. Today, it appears that the developers over at Instagram felt the same way and decided to fix this crooked issue.

The latest version of Instagram for iOS features built-in image straightening and the best thing about it is that it can be setup to happen automatically. The developers figured out that they can collect data from the phone's accelerometer and gyrometer sensors to figure out at what orientation and the angle the smartphone was being held at at the time the image was captured and then use that data to automatically straighten the image. Below is an excerpt from a post written by Alex Restrepo on Instagram's Blog.

Apple is poised to press the all-systems-go button for iTunes Radio, but Pandora is striking its hammer now, with company CFO Mike Herring announcing during Pandora's earnings call yesterday that the company will remove its 40-hour listening limit on mobile devices.

Last we heard they had started a 40-hour listening limit per month because of an increase in royalty rates, but now mobile users can enjoy the same unlimited music streaming goodness that desktop users can enjoy, without the $36 per year charge. Just what accounting magic did Pandora perform to provide mobile listeners with unlimited music, for free? Herring explains:

Earlier today, avast! Software announced the release of its new premium mobile security platform called avast! Mobile Premium. The company says that this premier version of its award-winning mobile security app for Android smartphones and tablets offers customers new superior anti-theft and backup technologies. The company claims that the new software will help owners recover lost or stolen phones by using a new technology called "Geofencing."

Geofencing creates a virtual perimeter around the device and sounds a loud alarm if someone attempts to take the device beyond a user set distance. This new anti-theft feature, when combined with avast's mobile backup, ensures that in the event that a phone is stolen, both the hardware and data are easily recoverable. The backup technology allows you to backup important documents such as photos, contacts, and even financial information.

"More than half the people in the US own a smartphone and consumers are growing more concerned by the day about the security of the information on their mobile devices," said Vincent Steckler, Chief Executive Officer at AVAST. "avast! Mobile Premium easily fills the rapidly growing need for on-the-go security and protection." Check out the full release at Source #1 below. You can pick up the avast! Mobile Premium app from the Google Play Store at Source #2.

A catchy name is everything in the mobile app world. After all, there were hundreds of photo filter apps like Instagram; they did the same thing but never caught on. As a result of its popularity, Instagram has seen parts of its name used in dozens of third-party applications that in some form or another tie into the Instagram Service, and this unauthorized use of its name has the Facebook-owned company in an uproar.

According to a report released today by TechCrunch, Instagram has began sending cease-and-desist emails to companies that feature the "Insta" or "gram" wording in their applications. The first to receive the hit is the app Luxogram, an application that allows you to use Instagram via a web browser. In an email sent to the Luxogram team, Instagram had the following to say:

Today, Google rolled out a major update to its Google+ application for Android. Some of the updated features include the ability to easily switch between multiple Google+ accounts with just a couple of taps from your fingers. This is similar to how account switching works in Gmail for Android. Google has also built in Google Apps for Business, which will allow users to share content if their apps administrator has enable Google+.

Google Drive photos and videos are now also accessible from within the Google+ app and will allow users the option to view and/or share them straight from Google+. The company says that Drive photos in particular will get enhanced and Awesome'd automatically now. Additionally, Google has improved location sharing by adding even more controls that allow you to share your pinpoint or city-level location with others on a circle-by-circle basis.

Finally, Google announced that Messenger is going away for good and that Hangouts will now become the de facto Google messaging service. At first, you will see messenger disappear on Android, with iOS soon following. Beginning later today, Google will allow all users to download the entirety of their messenger conversations--including text and photos--from Google Takeout. The refresh also includes other updates like pull-to-refresh and several other UI and backend enhancements. Google said that they will leave it up to us to figure out what those are.

Ah, Facebook, you just never stop, do you? The social network's latest addition to its mobile platform includes a slew of new features that will help make your life just that much more convenient.

Facebook users will soon be able to reserve a table at their favorite restaurant (of course, this depends on the city/restaurant/country) through Facebook Pages, find a movie showing time through Pages, and enjoy full hashtag support. Facebook has partnered up with real-time reservation service OpenTable, which works in over 20,000 restaurants.

Normally, a would-be restaurant customer would use the OpenTable app or reserve their table through OpenTable's website, but now Facebook users can do it all within the participating restaurants' Facebook page.

Google have been hiding Android 5.0 "Key Lime Pie" behind some very sealed doors, but it looks like the first sliver of information has leaked out on Google's next-gen mobile OS.

Members of the Chromium Project are used to seeing countless Android builds, but the latest one is from a Chromium user who spotted a posting of bug 267659, who reported an issue with Cloud Print by listing out his devices. The Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 were both listed, running Android built KRS36B. These few digits and letters are very significant, to those who know what to look for.

The most important part? The "K" in KRS36B, which stands for "Key" in Key Lime Pie. All previous releases for Jelly Bean start with "J", and it continues backwards with "I" for Ice Cream Sandwich, "G" for Gingerbread, and so on. The most recent build pushed out to the original Nexus devices was JWR66V, so we have "J" for Jelly Bean, obviously.

Samsung has been working on Tizen for a while now, but in case you didn't know what Tizen was, you might want to do some light reading. Tizen is Samsung's mobile OS, that will see a bright future for the South Korean giant in the years to come.

But now there's some new information on just how much faith Samsung have in Tizen, with co-CEO, J.K. Shin, who runs Samsung's IT and Mobile Communications Division saying that Tizen is more than a small project for the company, and it isn't just a "simple alternative for Android." Shin sees a future of Tizen powering more than smartphones, a future where the mobile OS would move into vehicles and other industries.

Shin continues: "There are many convergences not only among IT gadgets, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and cameras, but also among different industries like cars, bio, or banks. Cross-convergence is the one [area] Samsung can do best since we do have various parts and finished products."

According to AMD's Vice President of Channel Sales, Roy Taylor, NVIDIA's CUDA and PhysX platforms are an utter failure. How does he get to that conclusion? Because the industry doesn't like proprietary standards.

Taylor continued: "NVIDIA should be congratulated for its invention. As a trend, GPGPU is absolutely fantastic and fabulous. But that was then, this is now. Now, collectively our industry doesn't want a proprietary standard. That's why people are migrating to OpenCL." The AMD VP says that Intel will continue adding more GPU to their die.

Taylor said that with Intel's Sandy Bridge platform, 17% of the die was GPU. Ivy Bridge notched that up to 27%, and Haswell sees 32% of its die reserved for GPU silicon. He thinks that Intel will eventually use the term APU, but not for a little while yet. He adds: "We think the reason they're doing that is because of GPGPU. It's not because of games. I think they see that HSA is an absolutely unstoppable force. I just don't know why they don't call [Haswell] an APU... it seems just like pride. If you remember [ATI] tried to join the coin term VPU... 'No, no, no, it's a VPU not a GPU,' they would say. GPU just became widely adopted they just quietly adopted it, and I believe Intel will do the same. Look [Intel] it's an APU, why are you protesting?"

This morning, Nokia Asha owners have one more reason to use the phone today. Nokia has announced that the popular professional networking site LinkedIn has just released an app for the full-touch versions of its Asha smartphones, making it even easier to stay in touch with colleagues and coworkers.

"LinkedIn for Nokia Asha essentially brings the most popular features of LinkedIn to an app built specifically for Asha touch devices," said LinkedIn's Giovanni Iachello, responsible for international product management. It's made up of four main features: