Software & Apps - Page 91

There's so many games coming out in these coming weeks, including the just-released Crysis 3. NVIDIA are now out of the gate with new beta drivers, the GeForce 314.14 beta drivers. The new beta drivers include improved performance and compatibility for multiple titles.

This includes Tomb Raider, which is out any minute, SimCity due a few minutes later, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (March 12) and Resident Evil 6 (March 22). If you want to hit up Hawken with hardware-accelerated PhysX effects when it drops later this week, you'll need these new beta drivers. NVIDIA have also said there are multiple performance increases for those of you running GeForce GTX 680 GPUs, and again when they're in SLI - more numbers here:

GeForce GTX 680:

avast! antivirus has announced that the latest version of their award-winning antivirus software is now available. Version 8 brings with it numerous new technologies to improve virus detection as well as detection speed. "As an antivirus should remain focused on the virus spreads," said the CEO of AVAST Vince Steckler. "And we have managed to achieve this by leveraging our unique advantage: A strong base of 177 million users worldwide."

Numerous new features aid in the rapid detection of malware:

You can download the latest version of avast! antivirus free version from avast!'s website.

Futuremark has announced an update to their 3DMark 11 benchmark that makes the software completely compatible with the Windows 8 operating system. Futuremark says that scores from the new version are completely compatible and comparable to those that were generated by version 1.0.3.

The update comes with the following improvements:

The Futuremark team has also fixed several bugs that were present in the previous version. The new version of 3DMark 11 can be downloaded from Futuremark or will be automatically updated when Steam is next started.

Apple's iTunes U first launched in 2007, offering thousands of online education courses from over 1,200 universities and colleges. In 2012 it finally received its first dedicated app for iOS devices, and now in 2013, iTunes U has hit another major milestone.

Today Apple has announced that iTunes U has surpassed one billion content downloads. 60 percent of those downloads originate from outside of the US despite American universities like Ohio State subscribing to the service with its 100,000 enrolled students.

In an interview, Ohio State University's Dr. Matthew "Dr. Fus" Stoltzfus said:

With the news that Pandora will be limiting free users to 40 hours of music, apps like TuneIn Radio are beginning to look a lot more appealing to consumers who want a free streaming model. The popular live radio app has just released a new "Trending" feature.

For those of you who are not in the know, TuneIn corrals over 70,000 live radio stations from around the world, and serves them up on your iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The new TuneIn Live feature is being billed as a "universal programming guide" and allows users to easily find what's currently trending on-air, as well as what programs and stations are hot at the moment.

In addition to the new TuneIn live feature, the company has also integrated Google+ into the mix and can now use the social networking site to send your personal notifications of when your favorite shows are live on air.

If you're a heavy user of Pandora, you won't like this news - the company has announced they're putting a limit on how much music you can listen to through their free app. There's now a 40-hour limit, which was pushed in thanks to the rise in royalty rates that Pandora must pay record companies.

If you'd like to listen to more than 40 hours of music per month, you can choose to subscribe to the Pandora One service. This service gives users unlimited listening, on top of a lack of advertisements. You can either choose this, or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as you'd like for the rest of the month. Desktop users still have the ability to listen to unlimited music.

Piracy is a big deal pretty much everywhere at this point with everything from Wii games, to smartphone apps being installed without a purchase made. Some companies simply deal with this by threatening legal action or actually filing suit. Tweetbot has came up with a unique method to combat people pirating their relatively cheap app.

Tweetbot is considered by many to be the best iOS Twitter app and, as such, it is pirated a lot. The company has decided to combat this issue by coding recent versions of the app to post an embarrassing tweet to the user's account if their copy of the app has been pirated.

As you can see in the above image, the tweet reads "I've been demoing a pirated copy of @tweetbot and really like it so I'm going to buy a copy." A quick twitter search brought me pages upon pages of users who have this tweet posted to their account. Normally I do not agree with most companies methods of dealing with pirates, but this one is about as funny as it gets.

Over the years we have seen some weird apps pop up in both the Apple App store as well as the Google Play Store, but this one may take the cake. Myshkin Ingawale, a graduate of MIT, has created an app that will analyze your urine and spits out a breakdown of several key parameters that allude to your state of health.

I know what you are thinking and there is no reason to worry. The app works by taking an image of a test strip that was dunked into a cup on urine. Dubbed Uchek It works by taking photos at set intervals and analyzing the color changes on the test strip. By doing this it is able to measure the levels of glucose, bilirubin, proteins, specific gravity, ketones, leukocytes, nitrites, urobilinogen and hematuria present in the urine.

Ingawale says that the app replaces much larger and more expensive machines which can cost between $1K and $10k. Those machines use proprietary test strips that can cost upwards of $100. For $20 Ingawale gives you a packet of test strips, and the app is only a $0.99 purchase in the Apple App Store. An Android version of the app is currently in development with the release date currently unspecified.

Google have just pushed out Chrome 26 in beta form, which includes improved spell checking abilities with updated dictionaries and added support for Korean, Tamil and Albanian. You can also sync custom dictionaries across multiple devices.

Added dictionaries aren't the only things Chrome 26 receives, support for grammar, homonym and context-sensitive checking, which is the same technology we see baked into Google search and Docs. The improved engine will correct proper nouns, such as the misspelling of Stephen Spielberg - whereas "Steven" is the correct way of spelling his name. This feature is currently locked to English users who have to enable the "Ask Google for suggestions" spell check option.

Other changes include:

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) has been available for Windows 8 since the OS launch, but Windows 7 users were stuck with IE9 until now. This morning Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, which brings forth greater support for HTML5, improved speed and better privacy protection for users.

IE10 is said to be about 20% faster than its predecessor IE9, and utilizes DirectX 11 for the browser's graphics hardware acceleration speed-ups. HTML5 support is improved by more than 60% bringing forth a wealth of new feature rich web elements that developers will be sure to take advantage of.

Another feature worth noting is that Do Not Track is enabled by default. This feature blocks certain sites from tracking your browsing habits, such as Google who uses your browsing history to serve up targeted ads. Users must be running Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installed in order to install Internet Explorer 10. You can download IE10 from the source link below.

You may not have heard about Windows Blue, neither had I until this morning. It appears to be the next generation Windows operating system from Microsoft. Unlike the 10+ year reign of Windows XP or the three years Windows 7 saw, Blue will begin a new era for the OS giant.

If what we are seeing is true, Windows Blue will follow an annual update model, which would actually bring development cost down for Microsoft. Blue will roll out across both Windows Phones and PC's sometime in mid-2013, a mere 6-7 months after the release of Windows 8. Blue was confirmed in a series of job postings which were uncovered by The Verge, who managed to get a snippet of one of the listings.

For the interested software developer, or for those who want to experience a bit of nostalgia, Adobe has released a free and legal copy of the source code of Photoshop version 1.0. The code has been released in conjunction with the Computer History Museum who has detailed the software on their website.

The source code consists of about 128,000 lines and is mostly undocumented. Version 1.0 of the software was created by one sole engineer, Thomas Knoll. Version 2 had just two engineers. Around 75 percent of the code is written in Pascal and about 15 percent is in 68000 assembler language.

The code is free for non-commercial use and can be downloaded from the Computer History Museum. Nearly everything is included, save for the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple.

Apple has several problems on-hand with the latest iOS 6.1 operating system. At least one of the most pressing issues was fixed with an iOS 6.1.1 update that was pushed out to iPhone 4S devices earlier this week. However, more problems remain and some new ones have popped up, some more pressing than others.

The major issue that has been discovered is the ability to bypass the lock screen's passcode easily and without any special tools. A bug like this could prove problematic for a company who usually prides itself on security. Security issues also result in enterprise customers being more wary of a product.

German blog iFun, who accurately predicted the release of iOS 6.1.1, is predicting that iOS 6.1.2 will be pushed out "early next week." This means users should only have to wait a few more days before security is returned to the device. The update will also hopefully bring with it a fix to the Exchange problems that are present in iOS 6.1.

I don't know why someone would be running Windows 7 without Service Pack 1, but if you're one of those users, you might want to upgrade soon. Why? Because the end-of-support date for Windows 7 without Service Pack 1 installed is getting close.

On April 9, Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturing), without Service Pack 1 installed, will no longer be supported. The news is coming from a post on the Microsoft Springboard Series blog. Support for specific Windows releases ends 24 months after the release of a Service Pack - and you guessed it - Windows 7 SP1 was released in February 2011, two years ago now.

Windows 7 SP1 mainstream (free) support continues until January 13, 2015 and extended (paid) support continues all the way up until January 14, 2020 for Windows 7 SP1. The Springboard blog includes the above chart which explains the differences between Mainstream and Extended support.

Unigine Corp. have just released the latest revision to their GPU benchmark, Heaven Benchmark 4.0. Heaven 4.0 is perfect for stability testing on your system, mainly for your GPU.

Heaven 4.0 has full support for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0, works across multiple platforms - Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and includes countless settings for you to tinker with. Best of all, it has support for multi-monitor setups as well as different stereo 3D models. What's new in Heaven 4.0? Here's a list of what to expect:

You can download Heaven Benchmark 4.0 here.

BlueStacks is at it again, this time updating their application to work with Microsoft's Surface Pro, as well as Windows 8, providing the ability to run Android apps on the tablet and OS, respectively.

The latest version of their app fully supports Windows 8, right down to the charms bar and rotation support, as well as being optimized for the Surface Pro. Best of all, BlueStacks' app is free, giving you the ability to run Android apps on Windows 8 devices, or if you were lucky enough to score one of Microsoft's Surface Pro tablets in the last couple of days.

You can download the BlueStacks app right here.

Plex is undisputedly one of the easiest to use media server apps available that is truly cross platform for all operating systems. Today users of Plex Media Server and its Android app will be able to upgrade to a completely overhauled UI and feature set.

Today a blog post by the Plex team has given us details on the new version. One minor hit, is the deletion of incompatibility for devices running Android 3.2 or earlier. Android users can expect to see a completely yet vaguely familiar UI along with some performance increases.

The new Android app also supports media server functionality, something that has been limited to Windows, OSX, Linux and NAS devices before now. This opens up a lot of opportunity to owners of Android set top boxes like the Pivos Xios DS, and even tablet owners who wish to stream their purchased movies to their TV's without the use of an HDMI cable.

A German blog is reporting that Apple is rushing out the iOS 6.1.1 update to address issues with 3G connectivity and other bugs. iOS 6.1 has seemingly come with its fair share of issues, including a 3G data issue that has prompted carriers in Europe to suggest users not upgrade until it is fixed.

Other issues include people reporting a decrease in battery life. A beta version of iOS 6.1.1 has already been pushed out to carriers and developers to test and it looks like Apple is working diligently to push out this 23MB update in a final version. The reason for this is that major companies are encouraging users not to upgrade and this makes Apple look bad.

Yahoo has had to disable the ability to manage meetings in iOS due to a possible Exchange bug present in iOS 6.1. It's also possible that Apple will push out a fix to the vulnerabilities used by the Evasi0n jailbreak tool, though they could be so focused on fixing bugs that they don't find time to patch the vulnerability.

Twitter launched the video sharing service Vine to share short six-second videos that were akin in many ways to a tweet. Well, the truth has come out and those six-second Vine videos are actually six and a half seconds long. Not that that extra half a second makes much of a difference. In fact, it really just raises a bunch of questions.

For instance, who cares about this minor detail? I'm sure there are some among you that will care to know this tiny detail. However, the more important detail is did Twitter really think the videos were six seconds long? During development, the Vine team tested lengths ranging from four to ten seconds and eventually settled on "six."

As you now know, the number is actually six and a half. The question is whether or not they meant for the videos to be that length. If so, why did they settle on that number? If not, what technical bug causes the length to be increased by half a second? We'd love to hear your (not too) crazy conspiracy theories in the comments.

Facebook is reportedly developing an application that would track users, according to sources familiar with the company. Bloomberg is reporting that Facebook is working on an app that would help friends discover nearby friends by constantly tracking users' locations, even when the app isn't open.

This presents potential privacy risks, as well as possible data mines for federal and state officials. None of the plans have been confirmed by Facebook. When asked, a Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the report. This new app could be part of Zuckerberg's call to focus on mobile:

"A lot of what we had to do last year was simply to improve our mobile development process," Zuckerberg said. "The next thing we're going to do is get really good at building new mobile-first experiences."