Software & Apps - Page 99

Today, Apple has released the latest version of its Mac OSX operating system in the form of Mountain Lion. This is the ninth major release of the OSX operating system. The latest operating system is available as an upgrade from the Mac App Store for just $19.99.

Madfinger Games has said they have been forced into relaunching their Android game at a lower price point due to piracy rates. Even though the app only cost $0.99, Madfinger Games has said that piracy rates were "unbelievably high" and that is why they have relaunched the game for the low price of free.

The game is available for Android users on the Google Play store for users who would like to download it. Of course users who purchased the app are not exactly happy that it is now free and as such have started posting angry one-star reviews. Madfinger Games has released a statement regarding the change, although it's doubtful to relieve much anger:

The release of Windows 8 is getting closer and closer every day and Microsoft keeps releasing more and more information about the upcoming operating system. The latest nugget of news is that the app store, aptly and unimaginatively named Windows Store, will enable and facilitate the ability to offer 7-day free trials.

This is a welcome addition. As most users of iOS know, there is no method for offering trials through the app store. While some developers have produced lite versions of their paid apps, significantly more have not. Furthermore, these lite versions aren't exactly the same as a full version trial. Developers also have to worry about putting safeguards in, which isn't the easiest task, especially with Apple's restrictions.

However, Microsoft has detailed how the Windows Store will offer APIs and facilitate the ability to offer 7-day free trials of paid apps. It turns out that a try-before-you-buy offer boosts sales to as high as five times. Microsoft is even going to offer analytics to show how many conversions are made from the trials.

Microsoft have just posted some newer system requirements for their upcoming productivity suite, Office 2013. It seems that the company are cutting support for older versions of Windows, with Windows Vista and XP both not being compatible with Office 2013.

Office 2013 will only be compatible with Windows 7, 8, 2008 R2 Server and 2012 Server. In one way, I can understand that they are cutting Windows XP's support, as the OS is both old, and about to get cut from updates on Microsoft's side, but Vista? Then again, Vista reached its end-of-life milestone in April, so its not that surprising to be honest.

Not only are there stricter OS requirements, but system requirements are a bit higher, too:

Google released Chrome for iOS just over a fortnight ago, and even though it's being held back by Apple's security protocols and can't use its own rendering engine, the browser has been among the most popular free downloads on Apple's App Store since release.

According to the latest data from online advertising network Chitika, Chrome for iOS has snagged a market share of 1.5-percent on its network. Safari is still the champion browser on iOS, but Chrome is seeing some great growth, considering its just over two weeks old.

Chitika has found that around 14.5-percent of iOS users surf the Internet on a browser that isn't Safari. It is worth noting that most of this traffic doesn't necessarily come from a third-party web browser, but from people who arrive on a given site through an app such as Facebook. Chitika's data is based on an analysis of "hundreds of millions of impressions" from Chitika's ad network in both the U.S. and Canada.

Apple released iOS 6 Beta 3 to developers today, with the next-gen mobile OS set to hit users' devices sometime "this fall", most likely with the new iPhone that is rumored to be announced on August 7.

iOS 6 Beta 3 is Build 10A5355d, which is released only three weeks after the previous dev version which was Build 10A5338d. Users are the ones that really add juice to this news, thanks to forum discussion and blogs. One of the additions to this new beta is a new section in the Settings app for Maps, which now allows users to change the volume of the navigation voice, set distances to display in miles or kilometers, set map labels to display either in the local language or always in English, and finally, to set map label sizes to either "normal" or "large".

Other changes found in iOS 6 Beta 3 include:

Windows Phone 8 seems to be adding a fair amount of notches to its belt, before its even released. Microsoft's Joe Belfiore talked about the mobile OS at the WP Summit a few weeks ago, but there are also leaks and more around, too.

Then, a rumor has been floating around that Windows Phone 8 is to support "USB Mass Storage", which is the ability to simply plug your phone into your computer and transfer files. But, WPCentral says that this is no rumor, and that it is 100-percent truth, as Microsoft talks about this with the site, and a few other news outlets, pre-Summit. Secondly, WPCentral says you can watch the video yourself with Joe Belfiore briefly discussing the feature at the 14-minute mark in the Summit video.

During a press conference today, Microsoft announced their latest version of Office. Everyone welcome Office 365, a cloud-based and collaboration-orientated Office, a big change for both Microsoft, and Office.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer deems Office 365 the company's "most ambitious release ever in our history". Office 365 has been designed from the ground up to work flawlessly and without limitations across Microsoft's portfolio of upcoming Windows 8 devices, and with some cool features such as being able to create, edit and publish Office content from anywhere, on the road, or at your desktop.

Office 365 has Skype fully integrated, and includes a new "People Card" feature which provides more than one way to get in touch with your contacts or view their integrated social feeds. Microsoft have also baked in SkyDrive, which itself has some great features in Office. Signing into Office 365 applications now gives you instant access to your settings across all Windows 8-based devices, as well as your custom dictionaries, recently used documents, templates, and more.

It looks as though Microsoft is going for a big change in regards to how they'll be selling their upcoming next-gen OS, Windows 8. Previously, Microsoft had sold Windows in full retail, on retail shelves, at retail stores. This was on top of the already-available OEM system builder and upgrade versions of Windows.

But, "Netcast" video show, Windows Weekly 269 carried an interview with Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite, as well as Mary Jo Foley of AllAboutMicrosoft.com, that things are about to change. They've said that Microsoft will completely drop the full retail version of Windows 8, as anyone who wants to buy Windows for a PC that's never had Windows on before, or a newly-built PC, will just purchase the OEM system builder version.

The Redmond-based company has re-thought how they sell the Windows OS when it comes to upgrade pricing and availability. Anyone with a copy of Windows XP or newer on their PC is eligible for pretty decent upgrade pricing to Windows 8 at $40. This is definitely the way Microsoft need to take it, and it really shows how much they've come 180-degrees on the previous years, and their rules. People who buy PCs with Windows 7 on them now, have an even better deal: an upgrade price of just $14.99, available until next year.

Apple's next-generation OS X Mountain Lion comes out later this month, with the OS hitting Golden Master status just 24 or so hours ago. This means the company has locked in which Macs will support the upcoming OS. Apple have listed which Macs will support Mountain Lion:

Ars Technica talks of the decision of why Apple dropped support for some of the early 64-bit Macs, that don't have support under Mountain Lion. They said:

Back in May, Google redesigned the Google+ experience for the iPhone, which added some new visual elements into the social networking app. But today, the company has released the Google+ app for the iPad, as well as introducing new features into both the iPhone and iPad apps.

Google designed the Google+ for iPad app with the iPad in mind, with your stream styles content based on popularity, type and orientation. The team has also added unique ways to interact with the app, such as:

Google have also now created the ability to create, and manage Events on Google+ directly from the iPhone app. You can post a comment, upload a photo or check out who's going. Your past event invitations are saved with all of the photos and posts shared by your friends, allowing you to relive that party anytime you wish.

It looks like Next Issue is about to become much bigger than they were yesterday, with the release of an app on iOS, with the iPad app hitting the App Store today. For those of you who aren't in the know with how Next Issue works, it wants to be the Netflix, or Spotify of the magazine world.

Next Issue offers monthly subscriptions for unlimited access to their library of 39 titles. This breaks down to around $10 per month for all the monthly and bi-weekly magazines, or alternatively, $15 for all of that, as well as access to tabloids and other weeklies. One note: the free app is the magazine reader, you'll need to download the apps through Next Issue's browser-based store.

What magazines do they have on offer? Well, most of the big players are on-board: Conde Nast, Time, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp. This means you'll have access to The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. Next Issue Media has also talked of wanting to double the catalog by the end of 2012, as well as grabbing deals with more publishers. I think I may just have to have one of those $15 per month subscriptions!

The Next Web is reporting from an e-mail they received explaining that Google says that extensions developers can now start monetizing via Google Adsense, where Google state:

Google seem to be giving developers the ability to put ads in extensions that feature more persistant visual elements, TNW have used an example by adding them to the TNW extension for Chrome:

NVIDIA have been pumping out some regular drivers, which is a nice change of pace for the company and today we have the release of the GeForce 304.79 beta drivers. These new drivers have a special inclusion in the form of the March-announced TXAA. TXAA is said to smooth more aliased edges than MSAA, all while significantly reducing temporal aliasing.

But, what titles support TXAA? Funcom MMORPG, The Secret World, does, which launched today in North American and Europe. NVIDIA has promised a future in-depth look at TXAA in The Secret World, but for now, they've offered a launch-day interview with Funcom's CTO and lead designer instead. TXAA is only supported by the GEFORCE GTX 600-series of GPUs, if you didn't know.

As with all the other driver releases, the new GeForce 304.79 beta brings with it new, or updated SLI profiles for The Secret World, End of Nations, Nexuiz, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Tornado Force and Tribes: Ascend. There are various bug fixes, such as fixing the compatibility issues that plagued the GTX 400 and GTX 500 series of GPUs in Civilization V, flickering or missing mouse cursor with hardware cursor enabled, PCs to reboot instead of shutting down, and a black screen after driver installation.

It appears that Mozilla, developer of the web browser Firefox and other things, is currently working on an "open mobile OS" that seems similar in many ways to Google's Chrome OS. The new OS will be based off of HTML 5 and open web standards and be designed to remove many of the barriers that currently make mobile website development difficult.

Mozilla has its sites set on emerging markets such as Brazil in 2013. The basic operations of the phone, calling, gaming and messaging, can be developed as HTML 5 applications. Mozilla is already seeing support from Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Telenor.

Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla:

Mozilla have just announced that they are renaming Boot to Gecko to Firefox OS, the company has talked of having support from multiple carriers worldwide, as well as a couple of device manufacturers. Firefox OS is a totally open source OS, and its interface is built from HTML5 and CSS web standards, making it very customizable.

A proof of concept was recently shown off running on Samsung's GALAXY S II, with the company pointing out its responsiveness to touch input, a 3D graphics demo, a full SMS client and on-screen keyboard, as well as a store for various web apps. The first Firefox OS-powered device will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and should launch sometime in early-2013 in Brazil through Telefonica's Vivo brand of entry-level handsets.

Manufacturing partners are looking to be TCL Communication Technology, and ZTE, with operators such as Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia and Telenor all jumping on the Firefox OS bandwagon. Mozilla ia hoping Firefox OS will change how developers have to re-write their apps to run on the various mobile operating systems, with apps that can run in a browser but still look, and feel like a native app with access to underlying phone capabilities like calling, messaging and games.

According to the latest data from analytics company, StatCounter, Windows 7 has gained more than half of the worldwide operating system market, for the first time ever. Windows 7 had officially surpassed Windows XP as the most popular OS choice globally back in October of 2011, but this is the first time that Windows 7 has passed the 50-percent mark.

StatCounter's data shows that Windows Vista still holds third place, just, with 8.32-percent market share, but Apple's Mac OS X has been making a sprint for third position, sitting at 7.05-percent at the end of June. If Apple continues with this slight jump, they should overtake Windows Vista as the third position by the end of the year.

But, as with all analytical data, there are other sides and companies working at it. Net Applications claims that Windows XP still holds 43.61-percent of the OS market, with their data showing that XP edges out Windows 7 ever so slightly, with Windows 7 sitting at 41.59-percent.

Microsoft have just announced some upgrade plans for their upcoming Windows 8 operating system, where the company will be selling Windows 8 Pro upgrades online for $39.99. If you prefer to make your Windows 8 upgrade purchase in-store, it'll set you back $69.99.

The offer is open to anyone running any version of Windows XP, Vista or 7, and lasts until January 31, 2013. The deal runs for the same amount of time that the $14.99 upgrade deal does, but this one applies to any version of Windows, not just those who have recently purchased a Windows-based PC in the run up to the Windows 8 launch.

Microsoft have also said that the offer will be open to 131 markets, and that it will release more details on the offer as the launch of the OS gets closer. The Verge reports that the upgrade process is quite simple, where it'll offer an upgrade assistant that will help users migrate files, settings, and apps from Windows 7, files and settings from Vista, and files only from XP. After the upgrade, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the "add features" option.

avast! anti-virus invited TweakTown, along with a few other journalists, out to Prague, Czech Republic to meet the staff and check out the headquarters of the world's largest free anti-virus software company. The headquarters is really nondescript as the avast! software team is actually quite tiny considering just how many users they have. The headquarters occupies six floors in a business office shared with other companies. From the outside, all that is visible is the avast! logo on the top.

We were led upstairs to the 8th floor. Into a meeting room we went where we were greeted with refreshments, the CEO of avast!, and Milos Korenko, the Marketing Director at avast!. CEO Vincent Steckler welcomed the 9 of us to Prague and avast!'s headquarters and gave us a brief presentation about the company and some interesting, and quite frankly surprising, statistics about the use of avast!

avast! has had 161 million active and protected computers in the last 30 days. While they have over 200 million registrations, they only count computers who receive updates in a 30 day period in order to be more accurate. Considering there are around 700 million consumer PCs worldwide, avast! protects a large portion of them. Furthermore, avast! basically spends nothing on advertising. The reason they don't is because they don't have the need. Two-thirds of new users come from word-of-mouth referrals.

If you're one of those lucky people with a Retina-powered Apple MacBook Pro, VLC 2.0.2 is now available providing an enhanced experience on Retina-powered displays.

Another good feature is that annoying font caching requirement has been eliminated in the update, meaning you won't need to wait for the cache to finish before a video starts, finally! "Video output improvements" are present for those on PowerPC Macs with ATI Radeon 7500/9200, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, or Intel GMA 950.

There are other improvements and fixes in VLC 2.0.2, but the Windows 64-bit package currently has no official ETA. There is an experimental Windows 64-bit VLC installer, but for those who like that "official" stamp placed on their software, you'll have to wait that little bit longer.