Software – Page 4

Attend SXSW virtually

March 9, 2010 Doug Groves festival, SXSW, torrent1 Comment

Every spring, the SXSW music festival invades Austin Texas. In the early days, it was purely a musical affair, but since then has also grown to include both film and interactive festivals that run more or less concurrently. Twitter, for example, launched at SXSE interactive in 2007. As part of it’s musical side, artists both new and established have made MP3s available free to download from the SXSE website. In more recent years those files have been compiled by the public into a huge repository of RIAA safe torrent files….

Photoshop turns 20

March 7, 2010March 7, 2010 Doug Groves Adobe, Photoshop1 Comment

Adobe’s Photoshop, which has become the industry’s leading image manipulation tool, recently turned 20, and Adobe has posted the above documentary on their site that’s somewhat interesting. It’s also just a smidge hyperbolic, as I can think of a lot of other events that did more to “spawn… a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime”.

Google’s Buzz rolling out.

February 9, 2010 Doug Groves 5 Comments

Are you a lonely soul, wandering the streets, not knowing what to do? Or more accurately, are you a stalker wanting the mobile net making your life easier? heck, maybe you want to be a ‘stalkee’. If any of these apply, you have to absolutely, right this minute, check out the hot new Google social networking tool Buzz. They’re still rolling it out, so it’ll give you plenty of time to go pick up a trenchcoat and some dark sunglasses. Okay, so it’s not THAT creepy. Maybe it’s the mellow…

Rightware unveils Kanzi 3D developers tool

February 2, 2010February 2, 2010 Doug Groves 3D, development tool, Kanzi, Mobile5 Comments

Late last year, upstart Rightware acquired futuremark’s Mobile and Embedded Business Unit, and out of that comes the Kanzi development platform. Aimed at providing a complete pipeline from 3D content creation to deployment to mobile and embedded devices that support OpenGL ES 2.x and 1.x, it looks to be very scalable. What also makes it very interesting is that the 3D format they support, COLLADA, is supported by just about every 3D animation and modeling application out there. Rightwave will unveil more about Kanzi during Mobile World Congress starting February…

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 available now

January 22, 2010January 22, 2010 Doug Groves download, Firefox, Mozilla, update1 Comment

If you use Firefox, and haven’t yet got the update notification, verison 3.6 of the Mozilla Foundation’s popular web browser has been unleashed for Windows, Mac and Linux users. Although freshly minted, in my limited testing it does seem snappier than earlier versions, though with my standard 15 tabs open, memory usage hardly seems addressed. From the Firefox blog: Below are some of the coolest features of Firefox 3.6: Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart…

Boxee Beta now public

January 8, 2010January 15, 2010 Doug Groves Boxee, Boxee Box, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Windows Media Center5 Comments

As we’ve mentioned before, Boxee threw it’s hat into the settop box ring, and from the looks of what they’ve got on tap, it’s one of the better options. The announced Boxee Box hardware (made by DLink) will have HDMI out, and support 1080p video to your television, using the horsepower of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset, and support a myriad of file formats, networked content and streams from online sources. The cut off cube look is just begging for a “Weighted Companion Cube” mod, and is actually small enough that…

Bumptop appears on new HP TouchSmart convertible

January 6, 2010 Doug Groves bumptop, convertible, HP, tablet1 Comment

The Consumer Electronics Show is gearing up in Las Vegas, and with it comes literally thousands of new product announcements. There’s nothing better in January than looking at the geek toys you’ll be wanting NEXT Christmas. One of the announcements that caught my eye is HP’s TouchSmart tm2. The specs themselves are pretty solid. Windows 7 with a Core 2 Duo, ATI graphics in a fairly thin (but not truly slim) 12.1″ touchscreen which works with both fingers and stylus, and an expected 9 hours of battery life all for…

Boxee Beta and Box unveiled

December 9, 2009December 9, 2009 Doug Groves beta, Boxee, Boxee Box, D-Link, Linux, Mac, Media Center, Windows5 Comments

I’m a huge fan of Boxee which is, outside of Windows Media Center, my favourite way to access media on my TV. Boxee, a social networking aware media center, has been in alpha for a long time, and Monday night’s beta announcement marked the next step for the company that wants to be your media portal to the world. With the announcement of the beta program (chock full of screenshots), Boxee has been given a new look along with new functionality. The menu system appears to have more polish, making…

Top publishers aim at digital distribution

December 8, 2009December 10, 2009 Doug Groves AP, Associated Press, Conde Nast, eBook, eReader, Hearst, magazine publishers, magazines, NewsCorp, publishers, publishing, Time Inc3 Comments

Imagine reading a headline like “5 top publishers plan rival to Kindle format” from the Associated Press, and it started off like this… Five of the nation’s largest publishers of newspapers and magazines plan to challenge Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle electronic-book reader with their own digital format that would display in color and work on a variety of devices. You’d think that big name ‘old media’ was about to play hardball, especially if you kept reading it. The article continues to make confusing references to a ‘Kindle challenger’. This lead me…

Internet Explorer 9 getting HTML 5 support and GPU acceleration

November 20, 2009 Doug Groves IE 9, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Windows0 comment

Internet Explorer may be the most popular browser in the world, but that’s only due to its inclusion with Windows itself. Mozilla’s Firefox has been steadily clawing at IE’s market share for a couple of years now, and Google’s been pushing Chrome, though with less success, so far. Microsoft tried to change that with IE 8, which actually has a very nice interface, but still presents rendering issues in a number of sites, rgbfilter.com included. This is supposedly going to change with IE 9, with more standards compliance in general,…

Google Chrome OS reveal party

November 19, 2009November 19, 2009 Doug Groves 1 Comment

It’s been a while since Google first announced its foray into the desktop OS market, but today is the launch party, and the open source project is free to download. If the above video, in all its treacly glory, isn’t enough of an indication, Chrome OS may already be obsolete. The new OS is a lightweight Linux based operating system targeting low end computer systems such as netbooks running both X86 desktop and ARM based mobile CPUs. It’s designed from the ground up to run inside the Chrome browser, right…

Flash 10.1 pre-release available

November 17, 2009November 17, 2009 Doug Groves Adobe, Flash, ION, Nvidia5 Comments

The long awaited version of Adobe’s Flash with support for video card (GPU) acceleration is now available for the PC in pre-release form. The new version offloads much of the video processing to the GPU, allowing for what is said to be much better playback performance. This is especially good news for those looking to add inexpensive ION based PCs to their home theatre setup, or want better Flash performance on their netbooks, as Flash based video is just about the only format that has playback issues in high definition. …