Latest Technology News

Moonchild Productions has released Pale Moon 20.0.1 and Pale Moon x64 20.0.1 for Windows. Also available in portable 32-bit and portable 64-bit forms, the Firefox variant had only just been updated to version 20.

Version 20.0.1 includes all the best bits of Firefox 20, including the new panel-based download manager, per-window private browsing support and ability to close individual non-responsive plug-ins to protect the current browser session.

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Microsoft announced GeoFlow at the SharePoint conference in November 2012 and today rolled out a public preview of the 3-D mashup that combines the Office spreadsheet app Excel with Bing maps to allow you to plot geographic and temporal data visually.

Microsoft Research claims that GeoFlow "enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data". The app evolved out of the WorldWide Telescope project. "We built a gigantic virtual telescope, but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else", Microsoft Research principal researcher Curtis Wong explains.

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Keyboard task switching under Windows normally means repeatedly pressing Alt+Tab or Win+Tab, cycling through your running applications until you find what you need. But this is a more direct way. If you see you required program is, say, the 7th button on the taskbar, then pressing Win+7 will launch it directly.

When your taskbar is cluttered then of course it may take a moment to figure out exactly which number any particular button might be. But that’s where the free 7+ Taskbar Numberer comes in. The program can add number overlays to each of your taskbar buttons, helping you identify them at a glance.

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Ever since viruses started to hit the headlines back in the 1980s, security for PCs has been big business. Products like Norton and McAfee have grown to household name status, and made their original developers very rich men on the back of it.

This is mainly because Windows wasn’t built with security in mind and was adopted in such huge numbers that it made a tempting target. Until recently that is. With Security Essentials built into Windows 8 and active by default, and available free for users of older systems, the boys at Redmond have suddenly started to take security seriously.

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Well, well, perhaps Windows 8 isn't cause for all the PC market's woes, as IDC strongly stated yesterday. Gartner's first-quarter assessment is grim but no reaper. The analyst firm lays blame partly on consumers unwillingness to pay more for touchscreen models and asserts that the business market actually grows. Also, the firms released contradictory data, with Apple showing glaring and shocking differences.

Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner principal analyst, doesn't blame Windows 8: "Consumers are migrating content consumption from PCs to other connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones". The first factor pulling down PC shipments, which by Gartner estimates fell 11.2 percent globally during Q1, is tablet competition, then. Not Windows 8.

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Yesterday Dropbox for business received a big update with single sign-on. Now, today, the company rolls out new features for the consumer version of its cloud storage service. New updates have been added to the PC, Mac, Linux, web and Android apps, but those on iOS will have to wait.

All versions receive support for six additional languages -- Russian, Polish, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Reginald Harris of Dropbox claims the company has translated 553,800 words in 43,662 lines of code to make this possible. Harris states this enables "sharing your most important stuff with friends and family -- no matter where in the world they are or what language they speak".

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Nokia has released new software updates for three Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 920, Lumia 820 and Lumia 620. This comes four weeks after the Finnish smartphone maker announced the new firmwares and detailed the included changes.

The software updates will roll out in stages over "the coming weeks" and feature different improvements and bug fixes depending on the device. The Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 get the "1232.5957.1308.00xx" firmware while the Lumia 620 gets the "1030.6407.1308.00xx" update.

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Google’s digital maps are some of the very best in the world, and getting better all the time thanks to contributions and improvements from an army of users who submit additional details such as roads, rivers, railways and building outlines using Google Map Maker.

Map Maker was initially only available to users in more poorly mapped countries (such as Vietnam, Jamaica, Iceland, Cyprus, and Pakistan), but after successfully introducing it into territories like the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and France, Google has finally made the tools available to residents in the UK.

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Be prepared to invest in some larger pants. Samsung announced two new smartphones today, part of the company's Android lineup. Both devices bear the Galaxy Mega moniker, but one comes with a fairly generous 6.3-inch display while the other features a smaller 5.8-inch screen.

There are other differences as well. The Galaxy Mega 6.3 (yes, that's its real name) comes with a 6.3-inch TFT display with a resolution of 720 by 1280, while the Galaxy Mega 5.8 sports a 5.8-inch TFT screen with a resolution of 540 by 960. Also, the former is powered by a 1.7 GHz dual-core "AP" processor while the latter is powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core "AP" processor.

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Enabling two-factor authentication for a Google account is an effective security measure against unauthorized access. It adds an extra layer of protection by requiring users to enter an application-specific password or security code in order to gain access to various Google services. For this second part the company says users will need an Android, BlackBerry or iOS handset. But what about generating security codes on Windows Phone? Surely, there has to be a way.

And there is. Microsoft has released an app called Authenticator which allows Windows Phone users to generate security codes for two-factor authentication. And, because it "implements industry-standard security code generation", the app supports Microsoft as well as Google accounts. The only question is: How to set it up for the latter?

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In some alternate universe, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer slaps former Windows & Windows Live president Steven Sinofsky on the back for a job well done. The company's newest operating system is such a huge success that sagging PC shipments soared to record numbers. Our reality is something shockingly different. First-quarter declines are the worst since IDC started tabulating numbers in 1994 and surpass the worst estimates. You know things are really bad when even perennial gainer Apple sees a huge year-of-year fall off.

"At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market", Bob O'Donnell, IDC vice president, says. Holy Moley, Windows 8 slowed the market? You want to know why Ballmer booted Sinfosky out the door? O'Donnell offers chilling indictment.

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When you pick up your iPad, it’s usually with a purpose in mind. You might want to see how many new emails you have, you need to check RSS feeds, or you want to have a scan through Twitter. Each of these activities requires an individual app, and that means that you need to hunt down the relevant shortcut on the home screen. But Status Board could change all that, by displaying the data you need to see in a handy dashboard that gives you a great overview of your data.

This is a handsome app that almost feels as though it would be more at home on an Android tablet -- it could be adapted into a perfect alternative launcher -- but at the moment is only available for iPad users. There is a slightly retro feel to the app, which enables you to configure a series of customizable panels to display a selection of data.

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Second in a series. Out of fairness, I follow up my long analysis "The enterprise will never embrace Apple" with some advice for the company. There's room in the enterprise if only Apple made more effect. None of these suggestions is outside the reach of CEO Tim Cook and the core leadership.

Perhaps Apple stays out of the enterprise game because the top brass knows that they have little expertise in the general directions that big business is heading. Their lack of desire (or capability) for true Active Directory integration, for example, is already public knowledge. When it comes to virtualization and the move to virtual desktops, Apple has no public strategy for allowing (or supporting) such an infrastructure on OS X devices, at least first party. To put it plainly, Apple's overall game plan for cozying up to the wants of enterprise is nearly nonexistent.

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First in a series. If there is one company that clearly doesn't care about the corporate world, it is Apple. As iOS continues to forge flagship status as Apple's core offering, OS X gets second-class-citizen treatment in every possible way from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. While the enterprise reluctantly builds out BYOD (bring your own device) initiatives to support usage of Apple devices at the workplace, this is a far stretch from openly embracing iOS or OS X as viable corporate platforms. Apple's presence in the boardroom is due to bottom-up organic acceptance as opposed to top-down purposeful planning.

By even conservative estimates, the enterprise IT market is massive, and growing steadily as the recession continues to recede. IDC recently pinned US corporate IT spending for 2013 at $474 billion, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. And globally, Gartner says that this figure is closer to $2.679 trillion, which represents a 2.5 percent year over year bump. Yet while Apple's sales in phones and tablets continues to stay consistently solid, the  company's attitude towards enterprise hasn't changed one bit. For lack of a better description, top Apple executives just "don't care".

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Dropbox adds features gangbusters in an effort to compete with rivals like SkyDrive, which is now built into Office 2013 and will get deeper Windows integration when "Blue" is released. Now Dropbox for business has announced it will be adding single sign-on, or SSO, a feature the company claims is near the top of the request list from business users.

Dropbox's Anand Subramani claims the company is working with Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified to make this new feature a reality. If a company has already built its own SAML-based federated authentication process then it will work with Dropbox also. Once logged in to your system, there’s no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. Subramani also promises that "using the industry-standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), this implementation of single sign-on integrates easily with any large identity provider your company may use as long as it also supports SAML".

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