Archive

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, ...

Converting media files is often one of the messiest chores that audio and video fans must tolerate, but WinFF is one of the simplest methods I have found to convert audio and video file formats to make them compatible on my growing collection of mobile media platforms. Unlike other excellent single-...

The latest version of Google's Android mobile operating system, Jelly Bean, is much harder to hack than its predecessors, according to research from Duo Security. Google beefed up security for Jelly Bean significantly, said Jon Oberheide, security researcher at Duo. The OS will come with an updated ...

The month of June has not been kind to Microsoft hardware partners. Last week, Redmond revealed that it's getting into the Windows tablet game with the introduction of the Surface, meaning it will compete for sales with its own allies. It followed that up with news about Windows Phone 8. The upcomin...

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...

Recent news that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to partner on the Nook e-reader line rather than keep fighting over intellectual property suggests the prospect of more settlement and fewer IP suits in the industry. However, the deal further obscures the blurry IP and patent landscape curren...

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 ...

Developers are losing interest in creating apps for Android because of the continued fragmentation of the operating system, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC between January and February. Its results show that interest in Android phone app development fell by nearly fiv...

Windows 8 is on its way. In fact, it's already here, in a manner of speaking. Microsoft recently released what it called a "consumer preview" version of the OS. When the final versions arrive, it will finally give Microsoft a leg up in the tablet market. That might take a bite out of the market sha...

The Linux Foundation has come a long way since initiated in 2007 as the fusion of the Open Source Development Lab and Free Standards Group. At its start, I wondered why there was no membership or representation from Canonical, which was the hottest thing in Linux at the time. Today, Canonical is a m...

Similar to Apple's iOS, Android is apparently vulnerable to apps secretly copying photos. Android developer Ralph Gootee created a test app that masquerades as a simple timer but steals the most recent image on the user's smartphone and posts it on a public photo-sharing site. Critics said the devel...

The Mozilla Foundation will begin accepting developer submissions for its own app market at the Mobile World Congress, which will be held in Barcelona next week. The Mozilla Marketplace will let devs distribute and monetize their apps. It will also be the sole repository for cross-platform apps and ...

Canonical expects to start rolling out the first phase of Ubuntu's new heads-up display in the April release of Ubuntu 12.04. But HUD will supplement Unity, Ubuntu's default desktop interface, rather than fully replace it. The move to radically change the desktop's default interface is being made ou...

The concept of mobile connectivity in today's multi-device world is changing. Connectivity means more than connecting our laptop computers to WiFi or 3G carrier networks wherever we go. Today people work on more than one computer. Increasingly, workers and consumers alike rely on a growing collectio...