Wayne Williams

The BBC News app for iOS is pretty good but it’s always been rather buggy. The BBC debuted version 2.0 of the app late last night, and as well as bug fixes and improved response times, there have been a few other welcome changes.

Among the tweaks, the app now lets users copy story links to the clipboard, Twitter and Facebook integration has been improved, so it’s easier to share stories of interest, and pulling down on the screen refreshes the content.

If I was casting a film about Steve Jobs’s life, a comic actor probably wouldn’t be my first choice for the title role. But clearly I know nothing about such things. Because first we had Two and a Half Men’s Ashton Kutcher playing the Machiavellian Apple co-founder in Jobs, and now we have the boyish Justin Long as the titular iSteve in Funny or Die’s forthcoming full length feature film.

The teaser trailer for iSteve, which was released just now, doesn’t give much away, as it mostly consists of lines from the movie, but we do get a very brief look at Justin Long in the role at the very end.

Google really embraces 1 April and some of its fools are excellent. This year’s highlight, for me, is a new Treasure Hunting mode in Google Maps (I’m currently using Bing for all my mapping needs, but I had to switch back to Google just to try this).

According to the search giant, "Treasure Maps is our Beta Maps technology and has certain system requirements. Your system may not be able to display at higher resolutions than paper print. Take care when unfolding the map to avoid ripping it".

Windows Blue, the next Windows release, leaked onto the internet at the weekend. It has some interesting new features and tweaks, but because it’s such an early and buggy build it wouldn’t be advisable to replace your existing OS with it. You could of course dual boot from it, but it’s just as easy to run it in a virtual environment where any crashes or issues won’t lead to you having to reboot your PC.

For this guide I’ll use Oracle VM VirtualBox because it’s a great free program and setting up Windows Blue is incredibly straightforward with it.

So a very early build of the next version of Windows has leaked online. Codenamed Windows Blue it includes features such as additional Snap Views and changes to the Charms. There’s nothing to get too excited about here, not yet at least.

But I’ve been wondering lately, if it isn’t time for Microsoft to change course and steer away a little from the direction it set with Windows 8. There’s no sign of that happening in the Windows Blue leak, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see more fundamental changes added to the new version as development progresses.

Millions of people around the world use Foursquare to check into places they visit. The company has taken a year’s worth of these check-ins at two of the planet’s largest cities -- New York and Tokyo -- and plotted them on a map.

The result is a video that runs from 4AM right round the clock and up to 2AM, showing the cities pulsing as they come to life and then die back down again.

I’m a big fan of Google Reader. I don’t just access it every day, I access it, probably on average, every couple of hours or so (and still do, despite my switch to Microsoft). I have hundreds of feeds in there, and thousands of stories starred. So really I should be gutted that Google has decided to kill it off. But I’m not.

I was at first though. I even signed the petition to get Google to change its mind, even though I knew it was futile. But then I took a step back and realized that what initially seemed like devastating news for a Reader fan such as myself, was actually a blessing in disguise.

Kinvey, a Backend as a Service (BaaS) company that helps developers set up and operate scalable cloud backends for mobile, tablet and web apps, is branching out with a new Enterprise Edition.

According to the firm, the new platform integrates with various enterprise backend systems including Oracle, Salesforce CRM, LDAP and Active Directory, and will allow developers to easily create their own enterprise-grade mobile applications.

Second in a series. You know when you go somewhere on holiday and in a moment of fancy you think to yourself "I could live here"? But a small part of you knows deep down inside that the reality would be very different from the fantasy? That’s a bit like what my first experience of swapping from Google to Microsoft has been like so far.

I’ve used Internet Explorer on and off over the years, but I’ve never used it for very long. The last time it was my main browser was in 2003, ten years ago. Similarly I’ve used Outlook.com since it launched, but not as my main email provider. So in setting them up to use on a daily continual basis I’ve found it all quite odd. I’m adrift in a place where they do things differently. Not worse -- well not really -- just differently.

I’m a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, the super-affordable ARM GNU/Linux computer that’s bringing programming back into schools (and beyond). In one year alone, more than a million Pis have been sold globally, which is a phenomenal achievement, and demand for the uncased credit card-sized device shows no signs of abating.

I chatted to Liz Upton, Head of Communications at Raspberry Pi Foundation (and wife of the foundation’s Executive Director Eben), about their eventful first year, and plans for the future.

A week ago, I had a dream. I was sitting on a beach with a glass of wine and a laptop and I was searching the internet using Bing. My wife came up, saw what I was doing, and said "Why aren’t you using Google?" To which I replied, "I’m boycotting it. The company shutdown Reader." Yes, that’s right, I dreamt Reader was being shuttered before Google even announced it, and now I’m using Bing. Spooky or what?

But let’s make one thing very clear here. Although I plan to switch to using Microsoft’s services for a while, it’s not a boycott. I realized, after the dream, that I’ve been so tied into Google that I’ve never really given Microsoft’s alternatives -- Bing, Outlook.com, Bing Maps, and even Internet Explorer -- a fair chance to see how they compare. I've used them, in passing at least, but I've never used them full time. And today that’s about to change.

Piriform’s CCleaner is on its way to Android smartphones, but there are powerful all-in-one cleaning apps already available on Google Play, such as Clean Master.

The app, which has just received an update, can clean the cache, removing unused files, residual files, and clear search history. The app can also kill running tasks to free up more RAM, and let you uninstall any apps you rarely (if ever) use.

Security firm Lookout reports that it has a seen a staggering increase in the number of NotCompatible detections this week. While not a new threat (it first appeared last May), the remote proxy malware has moved on from infecting Android devices through hacked websites and is now spreading via email spam.

Once installed, NotCompatible turns the infected phone into a proxy which is used to commit online fraud, such as through the purchase of concert tickets.

Bitrix24 offers social intranet for enterprises and small to medium businesses, but with a twist -- the firm’s cloud-based service is entirely free for organizations with 12 or fewer users and includes 5GB of online storage space and essential tools, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), project management, and instant messaging.

We’ve covered the firm’s service previously, but Bitrix24 has just rolled out a new version of its CRM platform that comes with project management fully integrated. Tasks, calendars and other similar tools are now available from within the CRM module and documents can be stored inside the CRM, attached to entries, and shared with employees (with different rights levels controlling access).

Before you go abroad, or meet someone from another country who speaks a different language, it can be useful to come up with some handy phrases to use. Even if it’s just "how are you?" and "nice to meet you".

You can probably memorize the basics quite quickly, but for more involved phrases you may require a bit of help to recall them, which is where Phrasebook for Google Translate comes in.

The new addition lets you save the most useful phrases for easy reference later on, hopefully also helping you commit them to memory. To use it, just translate something, then click the star icon under the translated text to add it to your phrasebook.