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Microsoft branches out, expands Windows Phone developer network

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 9:24pm CEST par Alan Buckingham

Windows Phone remains well behind its biggest competition, iPhone and Android. But Microsoft is continuously looking for ways of changing the mobile landscape. A recent ad for the platform went viral and the company's app store continues to grow, along with new devices being released.

In fact, Microsoft's Todd Brix claims the company is "seeing strong results for the ecosystem since the launch of Windows Phone 8 with more than a 100% increase in app downloads and nearly 140% increase in paid app revenue".

Now Microsoft attempts to woo developers with new enticements. First it points out that the Nokia’s Lumia 720, along with the 520 and 521 phones, are shipping around the world, giving potential Windows Phone customers additional choices for form factor, capabilities and pricing.

The company also recruits developers in six new markets -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Montenegro, Serbia, Timor-Leste and Ukraine. Those looking to develop for those markets will be able to submit both free and paid apps to the Windows Phone Store and reach customers across all of the 191 markets. The company even announces a simpler and more streamlined app submission process.

Brix even touts that "We have added 15 new mobile operator billing partners since August 2012, bringing the total number of supported partners to 25 in 19 markets, surpassing Google Play".

While Windows Phone handsets continue to be top-rated devices on Amazon, Microsoft still struggles to find its place in the market. Perhaps these continued efforts can pay off in the long run. The competition is certainly a good thing for consumers.
Declare DRM freedom!

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 9:16pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

Oct. 10, 2007 is the day I threw off the chains locking my music. I purged the last DRM-protected file from my personal catalog -- and not by stealing. I purchased every track, and getting them Digital Rights Management-free wasn't easy six years ago. The base collection started from CDs. The problem: Songs purchased from iTunes, starting in April 2003. Later, Apple offered facility to remove copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, I repurchased some tunes, or just did without them.

But chains remain. Every video purchased or rented for download is DRM-protected. Far worse are ebooks. There, the unsung hero -- your advocate and champion -- is JK Rowling. In late April 2012, she released the entire Harry Potter series as ebooks, DRM-free, baby. Rowling is more than a hugely successful writer; she stands up for readers, too.

HTML5 Ruin

You can take a stand also. May 3rd is "International Day Against DRM". That's right, today. There is good reason now, as rights protection is headed to HTML5, and it's helluva controversy, too.

"There is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards", Electronic Frontier Foundation's Peter Eckersley and Seth Schoen explain. "The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped".

GNU Project founder Richard Stallman calls DRM "Digital Restrictions Management". In a post on the GNU website, he asserts:

Allowing a few businesses to organize a scheme to deny our freedoms for their profit is a failure of government, but so far most of the world's governments, led by the U.S., have acted as paid accomplices rather than policemen for these schemes. The copyright industry has promulgated its peculiar ideas of right and wrong so vigorously that some readers may find it hard to entertain the idea that individual freedom can trump their profits.

Price-Fixers

He's spot on. Publishers demand onerous digital rights mechanisms that defy fair use-laws that prevent people from sharing content they purchase for personal use. Take ebooks, for example. If I buy hardcover or paperback, I can share with family, or even friends. But not ebooks. DRM restricts usage to a single user account. If my daughter at college wants to read the same book, she must buy another copy.

Isn't that a form of price fixing, a practice that U.S. antitrust law prohibits, since DRM compels even members of the same household to buy more than one copy of a title when using separate accounts on different devices. Buyers can read Kindle books on any device running Amazon's software, for example, but rights restrictions limit or prevent sharing the titles with, say, family members on their separate accounts.

In a competitive market, particularly a growth one, competition should loosen rights. That's what happened with digital music, where DRM ruled early on but today is all but gone. Consumers benefit from the ability to share music within a household. Ebook publishers generally grant no such rights. Same applies to Hollywood-produced movies and TV shows.

U.S. antitrust and trade laws are supposed to protect consumers from harm. What's not harmful or anti-competitive about onerous DRM? If rights restrictions come to HTML5, music freedom could give way to chains. Again.

Stop EME

The Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign asserts:

EME would be an irreversible step backward for freedom on the Web. It would endorse and enable business models that unethically restrict users, and it would make subjugation to particular media companies a precondition for full Web citizenship. Just as Flash and Silverlight are finally dying off, we should not replace them with the media giants' latest control fantasy.

Furthermore, EME contradicts the W3C's core values. It would hamper interoperability by encouraging the proliferation of DRM plugins. It would fly in the face of the W3C's principle of keeping the Web royalty-free -- this is simply a back door for media companies to require proprietary player software. It is willful ignorance to pretend otherwise just because the proposal does not mention particular technologies or DRM schemes by name.

I agree. If you do, too, sign FSF's petition "We don't want the Hollyweb", opposing EME.

Photo Credit: Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock
History repeats, as Android does to iPad what it did to iPhone

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 8:01pm CEST par Sameer Singh

This week IDC released tablet market estimates and the figures are quite a bit off from my original Q1 estimate, but eerily similar to my revised estimate based on NPD's figures. Android tablets are poised to permanently steal the tablet market crown from the iPad, while Windows tablets continue to struggle. Let's take a deeper look at the figures.

Android now leads the tablet market, with a share of 56.5 percent, while the iPad's share falls below 40 percent. Windows tablets are still struggling, with a share below 4 percent and with struggling shipment figures, sell-through is always questionable.

As the first chart below shows, Android tablets made convincing gains over iPad in the last couple of quarters. This growth is really impressive considering the fact that it occurred in the midst of Apple's hyped iPad Mini launch. This leadership shift is not unlike the one we saw in the smartphone market, which occurred around the timeframe of Apple's iPhone 4 launch.

Apart from the leadership change, the most important takeaway from the chart is that Android tablets did not see a sequential decline in Q1. I had earlier stated that seasonality in tablet demand (especially for Android tablets) would reduce as emerging-market demand grows.

Based on the figures, I would say that demand for tablets in emerging markets has seen an explosion. This is very good news for low-cost tablet vendors, but not necessarily good news for Apple, Microsoft and the PC industry.

As I had previously showed, the growth of Android tablets in Q4 2012 was far more broad-based than in Q4 2011. Among leading Android OEMs, Samsung sees strong sequential gains, Asus maintains its position and Amazon's tablet shipments take a sharp seasonal fall (sharper than I expected).

But the big story here is the performance of "Other Android Tablets". These mid-range to low-end tablet vendors are mostly regional players, but will make more of a mark as we move forward. The Android platform enables these vendors to come out with products "good enough" for the masses at very low price points.

This will be a major factor in slowing shipments of PCs and Windows 8/RT tablets over the next few years.

Looking at the chart above, iPad shipments normally see strong growth in calendar Q2. However, this is always driven by a new product launch. CEO Tim Cook's comments during Apple's earnings call suggest that any new products will only launch in the fall, making Q4 the first full quarter after a new iPad/iPad Mini launch. This means that iPad shipments should see another sequential decline in Q2 (to ~17-18 million).

This dynamic, combined with exploding emerging-market demand for Android tablets, is likely to push Android's market share above 60 percent (with shipments above 30 million). This would essentially be a repeat of the iPhone vs. Android battle we saw in the smartphone market, over the past couple of years.

Reprinted with permission from Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh is an M&A professional and business strategy consultant focusing on the mobile technology sector. He is founder and editor of Tech-Thoughts.
Adobe plans to fix Reader flaw, just not now

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 7:23pm CEST par Alan Buckingham

When you produce two wildly popular platforms like Flash and Reader then you can expect to be targeted by those who wish to exploit them for gain. Such is the case for Adobe, the developer behind both applications. The company is a constant target for security exploits and malware, with the vast majority of "update Flash" pop-ups on the web being fakes that lead unsuspecting customers to a bad end.

The most recent is a flaw in Reader, discovered by McAfee researcher Haifei Li. To be fair to Adobe, this one is much less of a problem than some previously discovered. Li writes that "we successfully identified that the [PDF] samples are exploiting an unpatched security issue in every version of Adobe Reader including the latest 'sandboxed' Reader XI (11.0.2)".

In concept, when a specific PDF JavaScript API is called with the first parameter set as a UNC-located resource, Adobe Reader can access that UNC resource. However, this action is normally blocked and creates a warning dialogue which is asks for permission. No problem. However, as Li explains, "the danger is that if the second parameter is provided with a special value, it changes the API’s behavior. In this situation, if the UNC resource exists, we see the warning dialog. However, if the UNC resource does not exist, the warning dialog will not appear even though the TCP traffic has already gone".

McAfee, while saying that it does not consider this to be a major issue, does consider it a security vulnerability. The company has detected some PDF samples in the wild that are exploiting this issue. "Our investigation shows that the samples were made and delivered by an 'email tracking service' provider", Li writes.

And what about the Adobe response? The company briefly acknowledges this latest flaw, telling us "Adobe is aware of reports of a low severity information leakage issue described in a recent advisory. A user’s IP address and timestamp could be exposed when opening a specially crafted PDF. This issue will be resolved in the next scheduled releases (May 14) of Adobe Reader and Acrobat".

The problem is, indeed, not a major threat, but the word is now out there, which can potentially compound the problem. Common sense should tell customers to not click on email attachments from unknown sources, or even from friends, if the file in unexpected. A better solution is to use a different PDF app -- both Foxit and Nitro are free, and much less targeted.

Photo Credit: Cartoonresource/Shutterstock
Best Windows 8 apps this week

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 4:51pm CEST par Martin Brinkmann

Twenty-seventh in a series. Growth remained stable but below the 2,000 new apps mark this week. The overall app count is now at 46,143 in the U.S. Windows Store, an increase by 1,788 apps in total. The store features 36,164 free apps, an increase of 1,362 apps, and 9,979 paid applications, which increased by 426 apps this week.

Several core apps were updated this week. The OneNote application for Windows 8 received an update that adds finger drawing support to it. To use the new feature, tap on the screen and select draw from the radial menu that opens up when you do.

The Weather application received an update as well, bringing interactive and dynamically moving weather maps for your region or city to it.

Users of the Xbox Games app may have spotted new features such as sending messages to friends, browsing game screenshots or the new home panel that were added to the app after a recent update.

Skype for Windows 8 last but not least received the video messaging preview feature that Microsoft made available in the Skype beta version for Windows earlier this week. It enables you to record a video message for your contacts even if they are not online at the time of doing so.

App of the week

Magic Puzzles

If you like puzzles this game Magic Puzzles is for you. It offers multiple sets of puzzles for you to solve, with each available with piece sizes from 35 to 600. You can play 15 puzzles sorted into the three categories animals, nature and architecture free of charge, and purchase additional puzzles for $1.49 each.

Some puzzles are available for free in the store as well so that you may want to visit the store to download those to your system.

The puzzles are not too difficult, and the main reason for that is that the pieces are already aligned properly. While you will still spend some time solving a 600-piece puzzle, it is easier than puzzling on your desk as you need to find the right alignment for each puzzle piece as well.

You can drag and drop puzzle pieces from the right sidebar to the main area. The game provides you with another aid in form of an edges button. If you click on it, only edge pieces are displayed so that you can create the outer border fairly easily.

The program saves your progress so that you can stop and continue to play it without losing what you have achieved so far.

Other apps

Metrotube

This looks like any other YouTube application for Windows 8 on first glance. It is a port of the Windows Phone app of the same name, which is one of the highest-rated video apps for the mobile phone operating system.

You can use the application anonymously or sign in to YouTube to access account-related information including your subscriptions, watch later feeds and favorites. Videos are displayed on individual pages where you can read the publisher's description and user comments, and find related videos listed as well.

The video itself plays in a small frame on the screen by default which you can switch to fullscreen mode if you prefer it. All videos are streamed in HQ, HD or Full HD quality with HQ being selected by default. You can change the quality for each video individually, or open the apps' options to select a different preferred streaming quality instead.

Photo Transfer App

The application lets you transfer photos and videos between iPad, iPhone, Android and desktop computers over WiFi connections. Here is how it works: you need to install the (paid) Photo Transfer App for iOS or Android and the Photo Transfer App for Windows 8.

Once done, run both apps and they should discover each other automatically. From here it is a matter of tapping on the right button to transfer photos from your computer to the connected mobile device, or from the mobile device to your computer.

Photos can be transferred in full resolution, and metadata is preserved during the process.

Nite Buddy

This ad-free alarm clock app for Windows 8 not only keep track of the alarms that you set, but provides you with local information that you may find useful.

Information includes a selection of news headlines as well as local traffic reports if you allow it to use your location information for that. Note that while weather information and traffic information are local, news are not. Traffic information can only be displayed if available for your location. You can add a destination location in the settings which can be useful if you always commute to the same destination.

Unification

Unification is a notification center for all your devices powered by Windows. The application supports Windows Phone 7 and 8, Windows 8, and Windows Desktop. It enables you to view and manage notifications across Windows-based devices, so that you can check notifications that you have received on your phone on Windows 8, among other things.

You do need at least two supported devices to make use of it though. So, it you are running Windows 8 and Windows Phone, this app may be worth a shot.

Baseball Pro

If you are into baseball you may find the app useful. It offers live scores and stats about games that are underway, a news section, standings, and detailed information about each team of the MLB.

Here you can find out about a team's next game, season stats, its roster, team news and access comments left by other users of the application.

FotMob

The football (soccer not hand-egg) application informs you about upcoming matches in all major and minor leagues worldwide. It displays information about yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's games, as well as ongoing matches. The matches of each league are displayed here for you to browse.

What may be more interesting than that are the live scores that the app provides you with. Even better, it features live audio coverage in more than 10 different languages for select matches next o detailed match statistics and related information.

Race and Battle

This game reminds me a bit of Micro Machines even though it is more basic. It is a racing game in which you need to make sure that your car is the first to make it to the finish line after a certain amount of rounds.

You use the A and D keys to change the lane on the road, S to drop a mine behind you and W to fire a seeking missile into the air that may hit your opponents to slow them down in the process.

The game is fun to play for a short while, but lacks diversity. Especially the fact that you can't steer your vehicle - other than moving it from one lane to another, and that you only race against a single opponent need to be mentioned in this regard.

Fame

Guess the famous person behind the photo that is displayed by the app. It features more than 100 levels of guessing and plays in the following way. You get 15 reveals in each level that you can make use of to remove some of the blocks that hide the celebrities face.

Letters are displayed at the bottom of the screen that you need to use to enter the answer on the screen.
Apple closes in on 50 billion app downloads, offers $10,000 to the person who hits it

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 3:41pm CEST par Alan Buckingham

Android may rule the roost when it comes to the mobile market these days, but Apple is certainly not faring poorly with its iPhone offering. Whenever its App Store hits a new milestone the company always makes a big production of it, for both celebration, as well as publicity.

In January of 2011 the Store hit 10 billion app downloads, a milestone that took nearly three years to achieve. However, adoption increased and, in little more than a year (March of 2012), 25 billion apps downloaded was the new cause for celebration. Now, again in just over a year, that number has been doubled.

Apple is currently awaiting the download counter to turn over the 50 billion mark, and to commemorate this event, the company is offering a prize of $10,000 U.S. (in gift card form) to the lucky person who grabs that app. Regardless of what that app is, it will certainly become someone's new favorite. This time around the giveaway does not stop there either -- the next 50 app installations to follow will also be rewarded. Each will receive a $500 gift card.

The counter was approaching 49,252,000,000 as of this writing, and the rate is increasing. The big event seems destined to take place within the next 24 hours. So, if you were thinking of grabbing some new apps, this would be a wise time to do so.

Photo Credits: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock
Did you wink at me or are you taking a photo?

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 3:31pm CEST par Ian Barker

As if the Google Gaze wasn’t enough to get you strange looks in the street, now there’s a new app for Google Glass users that lets you take a photo simply by winking.

The Winky app was revealed yesterday by developer Mike DiGiovanni on his Google+ page he says:

You might not think it's hard to say "Ok, Glass Take a Picture" or even just tap a button. But it's a context switch that takes you out of the moment, even if just for a second. Winking lets you lifelog with little to no effort. I've taken more pictures today than I have the past 5 days thanks to this.

Currently Winky is only available as Android source code so it needs to be compiled before it can be used but since most Glass users are currently developers and other techy types that shouldn’t be a problem.

So, next time somebody winks at you it’s important to check if they’re wearing a Google headset in order to avoid embarrassment. Aside from the fact that technology seems to be turning us all into twitching loons, there would appear to be endless potential for misunderstandings here, "Honestly, officer I was only taking a photograph".

Photo Credit: Vadim Ivanov/Shutterstock
Avast! adds VPN protection, improves stability and performance

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 2:41pm CEST par Nick Peers

Avast Software has released avast! Free Antivirus 8.0.1488 and avast! Internet Security 8.0.1488 for PCs running Windows XP or later. Version 8.0.1488 is the first notable update since version 8 was released at the end of February.

Version 8.0.1488 adds one major new feature to the security tool’s roster: a SecureLine component, which provides protection for users browsing over Wi-Fi via VPN. The feature isn’t provided free, but comes with a free 24-hour trial that can be activated at any time. Thereafter, access costs from $7.99 a month.

VPN is used to encrypt data prior to it being transmitted over the internet -- although primarily used by businesses, it’s also increasingly used by security conscious users who wish to use "open" Wi-Fi networks -- often public -- where data can be easily intercepted by other network users. VPNs also allow users to surf anonymously and fake their location to bypass web services limited to specific geographic locations.

The new SecureLine feature is installed by default with the main avast! Package, but isn’t switched on. Once installed, users should double-click the avast! Notification area icon and choose SecureLine under the Security tab. From here, clicking the Activate link opens a window where users can start the free 24-hour trial or purchase a SecureLine license for $7.99 a month or $59.99 for a full year.

After activating, users can manually connect to the VPN at any time, choosing the location closest to them or picking an alternative location -- at time of writing, nine locations are provided: Dallas, Miami, New York and Seattle in the US, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Prague in Europe, and Singapore. Users can also instruct SecureLine to automatically start whenever users attempt to connect to an insecure Wi-Fi network.

Version 8.0.1488 also comes with the promised of improved compatibility with Screen readers, and improvements to the Software Updater component. It also fixes several unspecified user-interface glitches and comes with the usual promise of improved stability and performance.

avast! Free Antivirus 8.0.1488 is available now as a freeware download for PCs running Windows 2000 or later. Users can upgrade to the Pro version with additional sandboxing and online shopping protection for as little as $19.99 for a one-user, one-year license through the Downloadcrew Software Store, a saving of 50 per cent on the MSRP -- a two-year, single-PC license is also available. Three-PC licenses for one year and two years are also available.

avast! Internet Security 8.0.1488 is also available as a free trial download for PCs running Windows 2000 or later. This version adds firewall and anti-spam protection to the features found in avast! Pro Antivirus, and a one-year, single-license version costs just $29.99 at the Downloadcrew Software Store, a saving of 40 per cent on the MSRP. A three-PC license is also available for $41.99, again saving 40 per cent off the MSRP.
PostImage lets you take, edit and share screengrabs with ease

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 11:34am CEST par Mike Williams

While the ability to capture and share an image of your screen is extremely useful, it’s not exactly an area where Windows has excelled. Under DOS pressing PrtSc sent an image of your screen to the printer; under Windows 3.x the grab was copied to the clipboard; after more than 20 years, Windows 8 added the ability to save an image by pressing Win+PrtSc; and that’s about it.

If you’d like something a little more capable, then, it’s probably best to forget Microsoft and look for a third-party solution. And if you’re particularly interested in sharing screengrabs then PostImage could make an excellent choice.

After a simple and adware-free installation, PostImage runs in the background, consuming a reasonable 10MB RAM. Press PrtSc at any point and you’re able to choose a rectangular area of the screen which you’d like to capture, or you can press Alt+PrtSc to capture the currently active window.

While this sounds fairly standard, the area capture is at least very well implemented. Once you’ve defined a rectangle, PostImage displays its dimensions in pixels, for instance. And you can freely resize and reposition this until it matches whatever you need.

After grabbing something, you’re able to work on it with the PostImage editor. The program can crop or rotate the image; annotate it with shapes, arrows or captions, or add a shadow, outline, even a watermark (text or image-based).

When you’re finished (or if you don’t need to edit the screengrab at all), PostImage provides many different ways to share it with others. You can upload it to the PostImage server (postimg.org) and receive a direct link. There are options to share the link via Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, while an Email tool opens your default New Message dialog, with the image link already inserted.

And there are a few other options, too, ranging from the simple (Save, Print) to the more surprising, in particular a tool which uses Google to find images which resemble your capture. We grabbed our Start menu on a Windows 7 test PC, for instance, and PostImage opened a web page with the search results for "Windows 7 start menu", and links to similar images.

PostImage clearly isn’t going to appeal to everyone. The program doesn’t have the extended capture types you’ll sometimes see elsewhere (freehand, say). You can’t configure the hotkey. And the program is short on automation options. You might want to always save an image, maybe print or upload it, but there’s no way to set a default action -- you must select it manually, each and every time.

If you just need a more convenient way to take and share simple grabs of your desktop, though, PostImage works very well. It’s free, compact and easy to use, with a capable editor and plenty of image sharing options. So even if you need a little more power, this is a program to watch: it’s not even at version 1.0 yet, and we’ve no doubt that there’s plenty more to come.

Photo Credit: Iaroslav Neliubov/Shutterstock
Sorry Microsoft, I’m switching back to Google (but not entirely)

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 11:08am CEST par Wayne Williams

Fifth in a series. Nearly two months ago I gave up Google and switched to Microsoft. Although I tried not to have any preconceptions, I’ll be honest and say I thought (based on past experience), I’d be swapping a set of mostly superb products and services for a collection of inferior alternatives and hate every moment I was away from Google.

That turned out not to be the case. Now my experiment is over, I find myself impressed with some elements of Microsoft’s offerings, but frustrated with others. So here’s a summary of my overall experience.

Configuring everything took a little while, and there were hiccups along the way, but that’s to be expected -- I’ve been using Google’s services for years and while Microsoft’s versions are understandably similar, they aren’t (for the most part) exact clones.

I’ve covered my experience with Bing previously, and while I like Microsoft’s search site, it’s too much of a compromise for me to use permanently. In order to get the most from it I need to change my country from the UK (where I live) to the US (where I don’t). I don’t understand why Microsoft has decided to create a pretty decent search site with lots of cool features, and then only made a fraction of those features available outside of America. I assume it’s a money thing -- the company wants to put all of the available resources into its largest market -- but even so it’s frustrating.

So as much as I like Bing, I have no real choice but to switch back to Google. For now at least.

I say "for now" because that could well change in the future. I recently chatted with Bill Hankes, Director of Bing Public Relations at Microsoft (you’ll be able to read the full interview on Monday) and he told me that Bing is looking to expand its offerings globally and will announce more details when available. Which all sounds very positive.

Goodbye Gmail

I’ve written about my experience with Outlook.com, and I’m still enjoying using the service, so I’m going to stick with it for now. But I’ll be honest, there are some things about it that frustrate me.

While I still get the occasional piece of spam in my inbox, far worse is when clearly genuine mail -- filtered by Gmail beforehand -- gets junked. SmartScreen still seems pretty dumb at times, but it has gotten better over the two months I’ve been using it and I’m confident it will eventually get as good as Google’s spam detection. Or nearly as good anyway.

Even though I’m not a massive Skype user, the integration of the chat service into Outlook.com gives me a further incentive to stay. (As an aside, I find it interesting that while most of Bing’s best features are currently American-only, Skype for Outlook.com was rolled out in the UK first).

IE10 -- Better Than Expected

Internet Explorer has a reputation for being the best browser… for downloading other browsers with. That’s unfair. Once you’ve configured it how you like it, it’s actually not a bad program. There are some elements I really like, such as the tab implementation, and security and privacy tools. Its HTML5 and CSS3 support is very good, and the browser is obviously integral into Windows 8. But IE is simply not for me. Although I appreciate the ability to pin sites to the Windows 8 Start screen, I can’t use the Modern UI version because that’s not how I work. I’ve currently got 15 browser tabs open at the moment, and that’s very light for me. I usually have a crazy amount of tabs on the go.

Although I had no real problems with using the desktop version of IE on a daily basis, the truth is I miss the extensions I take for granted on Chrome so I’m switching back to Google’s browser.

Summing Up

My experience over these past months has taught me that Microsoft’s services aren’t bad. In fact they are mostly pretty good, and you could easily switch to using them full time if you’re prepared to overlook a few problems here and there. My swap was never about boycotting Google as part of some grand gesture, so I have no problem with going back to using its browser and search services once more.

Although Google’s recent actions, like closing Reader and making all roads lead to Google+, are irritating as hell, the search giant gets away with it because it produces mostly excellent products and services for free.

I’d certainly understand if any readers did decide that enough was enough and choose to make the break away from Google. To those people I’d say the transition is easier than you might think. Outlook.com and Bing are good straight trades and Internet Explorer is a decent browser -- provided you use Windows 8 and don’t require any extensions that aren’t available (although you could just use Firefox).

The interesting thing for me now will be whether, once I’ve gone back to Google, I start missing Microsoft…

Photo Credit: Pixotico /Shutterstock
Dutch cyber cops could be licensed to hack

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 11:01am CEST par Ian Barker

The Dutch government has revealed plans to give the police extra powers to fight cybercrime. Under the proposed new law officers would be given the right to hack into computers, read emails, install spyware and delete files. They could also be authorised to tap VoIP calls and break into servers located outside the country if they were being used to host DDoS attacks.

The country’s Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten says that the powers would be used under strict control and that the approval of a judge would be needed before the police could carry out these actions.

Terrorism and child pornography are areas of special concern in the bill but it would also introduce penalties for the publication of stolen data. In addition the bill would make it a crime for a suspect to refuse to decipher encrypted files or hand over passwords during an investigation by police.

Digital rights group Bits of Freedom is opposed to the new law saying that it sets a bad precedent and that its preparation has been rushed.

The bill is set to undergo revisions before being put to parliament at the end of the year. If it’s passed then no doubt other governments will be looking at how they too can kick down the doors of suspects’ computers.

Photo Credit: Ivonne Wierink/Shutterstock
The sneaky thing about Google Glass

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 9:46am CEST par Robert X. Cringely

Remember when Bluetooth phone headsets came along and suddenly there were all these people loudly talking to themselves in public? Schizoid behavior became, if not cool, at least somewhat tolerable. Well expect the same experience now that Google Glass is hitting the street, because contrary to nearly any picture you can find of the thing, when you actually use it most of your time is spent looking up and to the right, where the data is. I call it the Google Gaze.

Only time will tell how traffic courts will come to view Google Glass, but having finally tried one I suspect it may end up on that list of things we’re supposed to drive without.

Another suspicion I have on the basis of five minutes wearing the device is that it will be a huge success for Google. That doesn’t mean Google will sell millions, because I don’t think that’s the idea. I expect we’ll see compatible devices shortly from nearly all Android vendors and the real market impact will be from units across a broad range of brands at a wide range of prices.

And that’s fine with Google, because their plan, I’m sure, is to make money on the data, not the device.

I didn’t think much of the gadget until I tried it and then I instantly realized that it would create a whole new class of apps that I’d call sneaky. A sneaky app is one that quietly provides contextual information the way I imagine a brilliant assistant (if I ever had one) would slip me a note with some key piece of data concerning my meeting, talk, class, phone call, negotiation, argument, etc., just at the moment I most need it.

Google Glass and a bunch of sneaky apps will change my mandate from being prepared to being ready, because you can’t prepare for everything but if you can react quickly enough you can be ready for anything.

But there’s still that mindless stare up and to the right, a telltale giveaway that sneaky things are afoot.

Reprinted with permission
Podio introduces real-time chat, facelift in newest update

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 8:36am CEST par Derrick Wlodarz

Cloud workspace platform Podio introduced another round of fresh updates on Thursday, bringing exciting new functionality to the quickly evolving SaaS offering. Hot on the heels of a major UI facelift that was released back in late April, the newest refresh brings much requested real-time chat capability with online members of your various workspaces. For my company that uses Podio on a daily basis, these additions are definitely appreciated.

For those unfamiliar with the service, I provided a mostly positive in-depth review back in December of last year. For those who have never given Podio a spin, placing a label on what it "is" definitely takes a little effort since it is almost anything you want it to be. The product fills the gap of online task, project, and customer management that is much cheaper and flexible than any other mainstream CRM offering. It also correctly introduces the aspect of "professional social", something which Yammer forces down your throat -- but Podio makes feel like a natural fit.

Design Tweaks bring Subtle, Meaningful Changes to Podio

Podio has always had a fairly fluid online interface, but it was bugged by one large problem: the Workspace menu on the left-hand side took up nearly a quarter of the entire screen. While it may be useful to have a visual reference as to what workspace you are in at any given time, your intuition takes over after a certain point.

So Podio took the liberty to get rid of this throbbing nuisance and introduced a sliding, animated left-hand drop menu. This was a much needed change to the overall design of Podio, since working within workspaces requires more screen real estate, especially when you start working with very complex, data driven apps. Getting back a full quarter of screen real estate is the equivalent of buying a larger monitor just to see the same amount of information at once.

The Podio team also introduced some smaller, but also noticeable, UI tweaks to a few other aspects of the main screen. For one, the top blue nav bar is now host to an inbox shortcut (also called notifications) towards the right hand side of the screen instead of where it used to sit oddly towards the center. Much of this was changed intuitively to likely coincide with the introduction of the new Chat feature, which hugs the right hand side of the screen starting Thursday.

Search has also gotten some nice boosts, including some smart predictive search technology (straight out of Google's playbook) that also presents results in real time without the need to go to different screens. For multitasking hogs like me, this is a small but timesaving UI improvement.

If Social is Where it's at, then Live Chat is King

By far easily the biggest new feature added to Podio in the last six months has to be the introduction of live chat turned on yesterday. For someone that is dug into a few different Gmail chat windows each day for work purposes, this is exciting to try out. As my team continues to spend more time organizing projects and customer workflow in Podio, the fact that we can establish chats not only with eachother, but with invited customers, is a monumental change for the way we do daily business.

The new chat feature is not only 1-on-1, but you can have team chats with colleagues, or better yet -- full blown project team chats with customers and people from your company at the same time. If the users are a part of your workspaces, then you can use Podio as a full blown integrated chat platform built around the way you do work in the cloud. This is where Yammer falls short against Podio: in bringing external colleagues or customers into the conversation.

Chat brings with it some finer points as well. Conversations can continue onward even after you finish your most immediate chat, because Podio treats them as free-flowing ongoing thread instead of a separated, disparate phone call. And Podio's extremely powerful search capability is present even for chats, so you can look back and find nuggets of information from previous chats as easily as if they happened yesterday.

You can watch a short informative intro on Podio chat on YouTube.

Coming this Summer: Integrated Audio/Video Chat

If real time text chat doesn't suit your fancy, Podio is working away on introducing full blown audio and video chat within the product that should break down the communication barriers even further. Not much is yet known about the extent of the capabilities of these new rich multimedia features, but judging from first screenshots, the changes are going to turn Podio into a full fledged presence heavy online workspace platform.

Could Google Hangouts or even Lync be getting a run for their money from Podio? It's too early to say, but I like what I am seeing. As a dedicated Podio customer building out most of my business processes on the platform, it's reassuring to see that newfound owner Citrix did not give the Podio team the forgotten child treatment. As soon as Podio rolls out its planned rich multimedia functionality, I hope to present a revised review of the product focusing squarely on real time collaboration capabilities -- something which I don't think has been this drastically changed since the rise of Google Docs.

Podio is a SaaS powered workspace platform that runs 100% in the cloud, and is completely free for companies or organizations up to five people in size. External colleagues or customers you invite to join your workspaces are also completely free. For organizations over five people, the cost is only $9 USD/person. Pricing includes full access to the platform for internal workspaces and comes with access to the Android and iOS apps for mobile access. You can learn more over at Podio's website.

Derrick Wlodarz is an IT Specialist that owns Park Ridge, IL (USA) based technology consulting & service company FireLogic, with over 8+ years of IT experience in the private and public sectors. He holds numerous technical credentials from Microsoft, Google, and CompTIA and specializes in consulting customers on growing hot technologies such as Office 365, Google Apps, cloud hosted VoIP, among others. Derrick is an active member of CompTIA's Subject Matter Expert Technical Advisory Council that shapes the future of CompTIA exams across the world. You can reach him at derrick at wlodarz dot net.
Even as alpha build, GTKRawGallery impresses

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 7:37am CEST par Mike Williams

Most digital cameras will by default save photos as JPEG files, and it’s easy to see why: they’re small, can be saved and reloaded quickly, and are supported by just about every graphics package available.

Switching to your camera’s RAW format (if it has one) can be worthwhile, though: you’ll get minimally processed images containing all the data from your camera sensor, giving you much more precise control over how the final photo will look. RAW images are also huge, and can’t be opened by nearly as many tools, but there are still some great free options available -- and even though it’s only in alpha, the open sourceGTKRawGallery is already a promising contender.

The program opens with a fairly conventional photo manager. A thumbnail browser helps you navigate your image library. You can organise your photos into custom libraries. There’s a basic search tool, a tag editor (EXIF, IPTC and XMP), batch file renamer and more. And this isn’t just for RAW files -- the program can work with all the more standard formats, too.

Double-clicking an image opens it in a new window for processing. This doesn’t work so well for viewing, as its toolbar is way too small, and there seems to be a distinct lack of keyboard and mouse shortcuts (don’t expect to use the “+” and “-” keys or the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, for instance – you have to use the toolbar buttons). But if you just want to get on with processing your photo then the news is better, with GTKRawGallery organising a host of functions into eight tabs: “Exif”, “Keywords”, “Dcraw”, “Enhance”, “Transform”, “Effects”, “History” and “Metadata”.

Experienced photographers might start with the Dcraw panel, where they’ll find tweaks for white balance, gamma, black point, saturation, brightness and more. There are denoise and media filters, along with a chromatic aberration tool and color management options. You can save your preferred settings as presets, too, making it easier to reapply them consistently on future images.

Clicking the Enhance tab reveals plenty of additional options, including controls for temperature, levels, curves, highlights, shadows, exposure and more.

But if this is all just a little too complicated, the Transform tab has more straightforward tools: flip, rotate, resize and crop, red eye removal and so on.

A fairly standard (although well implemented) list of effects ranges from the practical (sharpen, unsharp mask, reduce noise) to the more artistic (oil paint, charcoal, sketch). All of these can be configured in various ways to customise the results.

And when you’re happy, any selected images can be burned to disc, emailed, or uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or Facebook.

GTKRawGallery has some issues. The interface doesn’t always work as you might expect, for instance, and its performance isn’t always the best. That’s no surprise for an alpha, though, and the program already has some very impressive features and functionality. If you’re looking for a powerful and free photo processing tool then this is one project you’ll want to watch.

Photo Credit: NLshop/Shutterstock
Gmail gets better Google Calendar integration

Publié: mai 3, 2013, 6:11am CEST par Alan Buckingham

If Google does not already rule your internet world, then it is still aiming to do so. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs -- the company aims to offer you everything. Now it looks at integrating more of these features to make things a bit easier for customers, adding better Calendar options right into the email app.

"If you do a lot of scheduling over email, it's now a little bit easier to create events directly from your Gmail. Now available: dates and times within emails are lightly underlined: click them to schedule that conference call or lunch date without ever leaving Gmail" says Google product manager Boris Khvostichenko.

Dates in email will now feature an underline -- click on it to preview your schedule for the day as well as change the title, date or time of the event. Users can then click a new "Add to Calendar" feature to integrate the appointment or meeting right into their schedule. The company points out that customers can add the event to his or her calendar, and for added convenience, the calendar event will include a link back to the original message in Gmail.

This new feature will roll out over the next week to customers of the English language. Google will then begin adding other languages as well, and promises that those will follow this release closely.

Photo Credit: xc/Shutterstock