Archive

With a ruling from United States District Judge William Alsup that application programming interfaces cannot be copyrighted, it appears Oracle's lost yet another battle against Google over Java. However, the war is not over. Oracle has indicated it will appeal, and the judge has indicated that Oracl...

I've been looking for an alternative to Google's Google Voice product that provides one number for all my phones -- mobiles and landline -- and includes online voicemail and discounted calling. Google Voice is a fine product, and I've had exemplary use out of it, but it has a couple of failings rela...

Few things scare me more than disk partitioning and GRUB configuration software. Both of those chores involve knowledge about hard drive operations and a good slice of luck. And both can render a computer unbootable with one slight user error. So discovering the latest version of Grub Customizer hel...

Most of HP's webOS team, including Matt McNulty, head of the project, is moving to Google according to a report by The Verge citing several unnamed sources. The departing team is said to be almost wholly responsible for Enyo's code. Enyo replaced Mojo as webOS's software development kit in 2011. It ...

I've got fond memories of physical keyboards embedded in smartphones. My Palm Treos -- I had three -- were superb at composing email and SMS text responses. I even made notes for a book I was writing on one Treo. I speculate that the hardware keyboard is the principal differentiator keeping BlackBer...

Whether you are writing code or creating editorial content, a noisy computing environment often can silence your productivity. The Pyroom Text Editor gives you a quiet environment where computing noise cannot distract you from your creativity. Computing noise -- that is, computing distractions from ...

China's antitrust authorities have approved Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, on the condition that the Android operating system remain open source and its code be made freely available to original equipment manufacturers. Android devices had nearly 74 percent of the Chinese market in Q4, 2011...

Have you ever found yourself scrolling endlessly around your phone's chronologically arranged photograph album -- called "Gallery" in Android -- looking for a photograph you've captured? If you can remember the specific place but not the date, then Scalado Album may be for you. I say "may be" becau...

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model. Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, OpenSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface leve...

The Internet is a hub for acquiring music, video and a just about any other form of content. Miro is one of the most capable player apps that I have seen for all of this media. Keeping up with the various forms of content the Web has to offer can be a daunting task. The process is similar to what...

Keep Everything. Share Anything. When a company like Google uses a tagline that includes the words "share anything" for a Dropbox-like cloud file storage system, my immediate reaction is "with whom?" Google, after-all, is a company that's made its money delivering ads based on what it learns about o...

The latest edition of Canonical's Ubuntu 12.04 desktop operating system shows considerable maturity. Precise Pangolin is built around the default Unity interface with an optional Heads Up Display designed to keep hands on the keys rather than constantly interrupting the work flow by grabbing the mou...

I have to confess to being a little unfair on the Shazam Encore app for its first LinuxInsider test. It is supposed to identify songs you're listening to, but I think I may have asked it the impossible. I had downloaded the app just before a planned lunch that included a sojourn to my neighborhood c...

Music lovers have numerous strong choices for organizing and playing their collections of songs on the Linux desktop. But music creators have far fewer professional-strength options among Linux applications. With Linux MultiMedia Studio, or LMMS, though, one option may be all you really need. LM...

Microsoft on Monday said it will pay $300 million to get a piece of Barnes & Noble's Nook tablet action for the Windows 8 platform. The two companies will partner in a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary which will push further into the education market. Barnes & Noble will initially create a ...