Latest Technology News

For early adopters that prefer to live on the bleeding edge of technology, popular cloud storage service Dropbox unveiled a new preview release. The most noteworthy feature for keen beta users is the ability to receive updates to future early and final releases.

The current preview build also introduces the option to share multiple pictures at once. The functionality is enabled by a long tap on a photo and selecting the remaining ones afterwards. In a similar manner users can also organize pictures into albums, the latter of which can also be shared, and delete multiple photos.

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Exstream Software Development, the team responsible for Android four-track app Audio Evolution Mobile, has released an app called USB Audio Recorder Pro which lets users attach USB microphones and other USB audio interfaces to Android 3.1+ devices that support USB host mode.

Musicians, podcasters, and filmmakers alike can now attach microphones to their Android tablet or smartphone and record mono or stereo 16- or 24-bit audio, and also play back over their USB device. Many of the recording variables depend upon the audio interface and Android device that are being used, but the maximum sample rate the app supports is 192 kHz, and files can be saved as wav/flacc/ogg on internal or removable storage.

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While there are plenty of tools around which promise to help you download online videos, most have snags or compromises that make them annoying to use in real life. They don’t support your favorite sites, maybe; they don’t let you download the precise format or resolution you need; there are restrictions on downloading videos simultaneously, or whatever it might be.

4K Video Downloader claims to be different, though. “Downloading is simple and pleasant”, the authors say. The program covers “YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Metacafe”, and you’ll want to use it because “we pay great attention to simplicity and usability”. Interesting, but can the reality live up to the hype? We took a look.

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Apple's newest iPad and mainstream Android tablets couldn't be more different in the display department -- the former embraces a more conservative 4:3 format while the latter prefer the multimedia-oriented widescreen panels. However, French consumer electronics company Archos deviates from the norm with the 97 Titanium HD, an Android tablet with an iPad 4-like display.

The 97 Titanium HD tablet features a 9.7-inch IPS display with 10 point multitouch and a resolution of up to 2048 x 1536. Power comes from a 1.6GHz dual-core processor based on the A9 architecture, a quad-core Mali 400 MP4 graphics card and 1GB of RAM, a combination similar to the one found in the original Samsung Galaxy Note. The tablet also sports 8GB of internal memory, alongside a microSD card slot that can extend the storage capacity by a further 64GB. What about the software?

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On Friday, Microsoft unveiled a host of new features for the company's cloud platform, Windows Azure. The latest update beefs up the software corporation's offering by expanding the availability of Windows Azure Store into more regions as well as adding support for Mobile Services in Northern Europe.

Microsoft states that the company also plans to extend support for Mobile Services to "all Windows Azure regions world-wide", but did not provide any specific details as to when that will happen. The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation touts a number of other changes in the last Windows Azure update to Mobile Services, Web Sites, Media Services, SQL databases, Virtual Network improvements as well as Subscription Filtering support.

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Amazon is Netflix's biggest competitors, but the company had a gaping hole in its armor. While the app works just fine on the Kindle Fire tablets, it was MIA for every other Android user out there. Now the retail giant has finally made the service available to other users on the popular platform, but before you get excited, there is a catch, and it is a big one.

When you find the app in the Google Play store you will immediately notice two things -- one is that it only works with version 3.2 and up of the OS. The other is even more troubling. The app is for Google TV only. Even the new flagship Nexus devices are not capable of using it.

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Oracle has announced the release of VirtualBox 4.2.6, the latest edition of its powerful cross-platform virtualization tool. This is a maintenance release, and so looks more or less unchanged. But the build does include plenty of welcome bug fixes and other small improvements.

VBoxManage now properly converts disks from raw images, for instance. It improves media handling, supports new metrics for “network rate” and “disk usage”, and includes fixes to ensure other metrics are now properly handled. An El Torito BIOS fix should help when you need to boot VMs from a CD. Windows Additions has been tweaked to work better with Windows 8 and Windows 2000.

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Eighth in a series. Since the world is going down today anyway there is not really much need for today's article and while I thought for a moment about taking the day off, I'd like the idea of leaving the world with work done. So, here it is, the eighth part of the best Windows 8 apps of the week series on Doomsday.

Pssst: If the world doesn't end, and you have Windows 8, now you have something to look forward to.

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Catering to applications that need to query huge stores of data very quickly, Amazon announced High Storage instances for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud application platform on Friday. They fall in line with Amazon's High CPU, High Memory, and High I/O instances.

These instances offer users 35 ECUs (also known as an EC2 Compute Unit, the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor), 117 Gibibytes of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage spread out across 24 HDDs. With 10 Gigabit Ethernet, these instances can offer 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O.

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Sharing an image of your desktop can often be a useful way to help someone understand a point you’re trying to make, but making this happen isn’t always entirely straightforward. You’ll have to figure out how best to capture the screen, get the image to a file and send the file to your contact, for instance. And while none of this is complicated, it can take a little while, especially if you need to share several images with several people.

Puush is an application and web service which can greatly simplify this process, though, by capturing your image, uploading it and making the file accessible to others in a single step -- potentially a real time-saver.

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Arriving far too late to influence any gift buying for Christmas, here’s my review of Surface with Windows RT. The tardiness of the review isn’t really my fault. Microsoft only put its device in proper shops in the UK last Friday, and I wanted to include the shopping experience as part of the article (even though I didn’t actually spend my own money -- a friend purchased the tablet I’m reviewing).

Before we get into the review, I need to preface it by saying the following: I love Apple’s iPad. I bought an iPad 2 as soon as it was released and replaced it with the new 4th gen model a month or so ago. And even though I use Windows 8 daily, I really don’t like the new OS all that much. So, inevitably, I’m going to hate Surface, right? Absolutely loath it. Well, that’s what I thought. But surprisingly I like it. I like it a lot.

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We're not dead, at least not as I write. Dec. 21, 2012 is supposed to be the end of the world, based on ancient Mayan prophecies. If we do all die today, well, it was nice knowing you. Humans certainly are obsessed with apocalypse. Hell, it's biblical. Civilization's end, and how survivors cope, is quite the popular theme in literature and other artwork, including movies and television. I got to thinking: "Why not review some of the classics?"

So I've compiled a list of my favorites, from least to most, all but one from the twentieth century (the other circa 1898). Sorry, "The Walking Dead" fans. I also skip late-1990 movies like "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact". Some of the works are deliberately chosen for not being mainstream but worthy of the world-ending genre.

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Concurrent with third-quarter earning results late this afternoon, Red Hat announced plans to acquire ManageIQ, an enterprise cloud provider. The all-cash deal is for $104 million. Red Hat is uniquely positioned, opportunity and risk, for enterprise server consolidation and transition to private clouds -- for which virtualization is a linchpin technology. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company plans to expand its own capabilities by fitting ManageIQ's monitoring and management tools onto existing solutions.

Red Hat's acquisition rides the cusp of a trend. Last month, IDC forecast big cloud-related mergers for 2013 -- totaling $25 billion over 20 months. The analyst firm sees three converging trends vertically related. "The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market," Frank Gens, IDC chief analyst, says. "Companies that are not putting 80 percent or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP.

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If your eyes often feel tired after a lengthy session on your PC then one possible explanation is that your display isn’t using an appropriate color temperature. Monitors will be typically be set very high, which may be fine in bright daylight, but is less appropriate for night-time viewing (and may, some suggest, even contribute to sleeping problems).

You don’t have to put up with this, though. Not with a little help from F.lux, a simple free program which uses your location, the date and time of day to figure out your sunrise and sunset times, then automatically adjusts your monitor’s temperature to an appropriate level.

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Valve Corporation's popular multiplayer gaming ecosystem Steam has officially hit public beta on Linux, specifically for all users of Ubuntu 12.04.

In November, Valve's Linux team launched Steam for Linux in private beta for about a thousand users, and it included support for approximately 25 games. That number now has grown to almost 40, but with the exception of Team Fortress 2, most titles come from indie developers. Steam's most popular titles like Half-Life 2, BioShock, Portal 2, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, all of which are now several years old, are still missing on Linux, and will likely remain so.

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