Latest Technology News

Adobe Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, major updates to its browser plug-in and runtime environments, are now available. Flash Player, which is built into Chrome and available as a separate download for Internet Explorer, was until the advent of HTML5 the de facto standard for accessing rich, multimedia content on the web.

Both updates are aimed very much at repositioning Flash as a rival gaming platform to consoles, focusing on providing developers with tools to produce immersive, graphically rich games across all supported platforms.

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Inspired by the look of Windows Metro, MetroTwit is a unique-looking, clean Twitter client that oozes style and simplicity. The app has just hit version 1.0, having already proved itself to be worthy of note in the beta stages. The official release sees the addition of a number of important new features including highly configurable filtering that helps you to ensure that your stream is not cluttered up with tweets you are not interested in.

In a similar vein to TweetDeck, the MetroTwit interface includes multiple columns that can be used to display different aspects of your Twitter account, and there is great integration with Windows 7 that sees notification area popups revealing direct messages and other interactions.

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User experience is important when developing any mobile app but in an enterprise context, what about security? For example, if you are developing an app that stores personal information there are regulations that ask where this information resides. Depending on the industry, mobile app developers may be completely accountable if any security issues happen on an app that they develop.

To ensure that you are in full compliance to any privacy, security or regulatory questions, it is recommended that apps be developed in-house or through a partner. So do mobile app developers need to consider regulatory, security or privacy concerns in advance of mobile app development projects?

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Piriform Software has released CCleaner 3.17, the latest monthly update of its immensely popular Windows cleaning tool. Version 3.17 adds wildcard support when cookie cleaning, the ability to clean the Hosts history in Firefox Aurora and Shortcuts history cleaning in Google Chrome Canary.

Version 3.17 also improves various cleanup tools and applications, plus widens its support to cover three new applications: CyberLink PhotoDirector 10, DivX Player and Snagit 11 in addition to the dozens of applications and system settings, including the Registry, already covered by CCleaner.

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When it comes to security, it is fair to say that there is no shortage of apps to choose from. This is especially true for PC users, but anyone with a Mac or Android device now has new tools to add to the list of choices -- thanks to the most recent releases from security experts Avira. Both Avira Free Android Security and Avira Free Mac Security are, as you’ve no doubt determined, available free of charge, and both apps tackle security in different ways.

Avira Free Mac Security is very much what you would expect, offering protection against viruses and malware. This is an app that prides itself on the minimum of interaction that is needed from the user -- for the most part it will sit quietly in the background fending off threats as and when necessary. Definitions updates are made available frequently and the app does its job well. It is sign of a great piece of software when it is not necessary to think about the fact that it is installed.

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When will someone stand up to the bully in the room? He roves around in intimidating manner boasting how kind he is. Hey, he can make friends without being evil. But bully is anything but good. That's how I feel about Google this fine Spring day.

Yesterday, "Google Play", the renamed Android Market, popped up on the black bar adorning my Google search page, with a beaconing red -- or is it orange -- "New". The service is now front and center with other Google services hawked from search, spotlighting an ongoing trend of aggressive integration that has rapidly accelerated under Larry Page's leadership. Microsoft spent nearly a decade under house arrest for doing less.

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Dutch security company AVG on Tuesday rolled out the 2012 service pack for all of its security products which adds the new "Do Not Track" and WiFi Guard features to the protections it offers users.

The service pack includes both Passive and Active Do Not Track (DNT) features that are turned on by default as soon as the software is installed. Passive DNT is the World Wide Web Consortium standard HTTP header request, that allows users to browse sites without being tracked.

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After a little more than six months in Alpha, the BlueStacks Android App Player has officially been released in beta.

This environment lets users run Android applications on their Windows machine, and it translates the touch- and sensor-based inputs into mouse and keyboard gestures. With this beta release, BlueStacks has added support for accelerometer commands, pinch-to-zoom inputs, and most importantly, support for apps that utilize Android's NDK.

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If you feel like I've asked this question before, absolutely. Just without the price. Now that AT&T has announced availability -- and more importantly, pricing -- I ask again. Will you buy the Lumia 900?

AT&T starts taking pre-orders on March 30, with the phone available in stores on April 8. Available colors are cyan, magenta and black, or you can wait until April 22 for white. Oh my. Decisions, decisions. Lumia 900 is one hotly anticipated Windows Phone and marks Nokia's biggest push into the US market in years. There's LTE, too, something your haughty, obnoxious iPhone friends don't have. So will you buy? Please answer in comments (with color choice, please) and take our poll.

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Microsoft’s image of the future makes Windows 8, supported by cloud services, the hub integrating all devices and personalization in the user’s life.  The key is the new log-in method, which requires Windows Live ID. Metro application, user settings, Start Screen layout, desktop icons and user files follow the user wherever he or she signs in with Windows Live ID. Microsoft plans one consistent experience across devices. Apple and Google use similar identity mechanisms for iOS and Android devices and syncing content among them.

The problem, and perhaps it's one of those beta things, the process doesn't work so well. Then there's this: everything has to be stored within the Microsoft cloud -- that's Windows Live and SkyDrive, with the optional integration of DropBox. This is all nice if you don’t mind storing you information on someone else's server, with an unknown location and, even worse, risk some unknown people snooping inside your stuff. Do you really trust your files in someone else's hands? Even Microsoft's? There is another way to achieve this lifestyle.

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Having to reinstall Windows is always a hassle, but it can become a real issue if you can’t find your product key. Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder can help, though, by retrieving product keys for Windows and more than 300 applications, allowing you to save them in a plain text file for easy reference at some later date.

The program was easy enough to use on our test PC. Just install and launch it, and you’re immediately presented with a list of the applications and keys it had detected (which did include our Windows 7 details, despite the site saying this wasn’t supported).

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The development of Opera continues apace and for anyone wanting to try out the very latest features of the browser, there's a new version to install. The latest build of Wahoo (the codename for Opera 12) is available for the first time as a 64-bit release for both Mac and Windows users and the latest snaps shot also features improved support for HTML 5 and CSS3. As with previous builds of Opera 12, it is possible to install this alongside your current stable version of the browser so you can try it out while maintaining the version you have become used to.

Opera changed the way plugins are handled, to make the move to 64-bits. Plugins now run in a separate process to the browser itself, known as OOPP or Out of Process Plugins, which also not only help to improve overall stability, but the security of Opera as well.

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Popular, open-source text editor Notepad++ 6.0.0 is now available . This landmark release doesn’t contain many notably new, but is merely the latest step in a product’s evolution that is constant and ongoing.

Version 6.0.0 does add one feature -- a Document Map panel that can be toggled on or off via the View menu -- and also promises improved performance when loading large files into memory.

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Nokia has shown a score of developers the door since announcing its Windows Phone distribution deal in February 2011. Surely you remember the 2,300 Symbian developers off-loaded to Accenture? Is it cheaper to invest in new ones than keep the old? I ask because of today's Microsoft-Nokia announcement: Each will invest up to 9 million to fund AppCampus at Aalto University, in Finland.

The program is designed to help generate applications for Windows Phone and, get this, Symbian! Someone slap me aside the head and explain why Nokia doesn't just capitalize on the experience of existing Symbian developers. Easy answer: Both platforms need more third-party apps, and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop must make a desperate show of face, given his brutal axing of employees and ripping the Finnish heart out of Nokia's management culture.

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Cloud computing presents both challenges and opportunities for personal computing giants. Microsoft is "re-imagining" Windows for cloud-connected devices. Meanwhile, Intel rethinks its microprocessor strategies for mobile devices and servers, seeking to embrace the cloud at both ends of the consumption supply chain. For these incumbents that defined the personal computing era, the post-PC era future requires leaping from the past, not clinging to it.

Where the "Wintel" marriage is likely to remain strongest is the server. Microsoft's post-PC -- what I call cloud-connected device -- strategy is two-fold: Providing direct, hosted services or applications businesses can host internally and expanding Windows' support for additional chip architectures. For its part, Intel develops microprocessors for more device categories, while optimizing server chips for cloud applications and services, such as the recently announced Xeon processor E5-2600 product family.

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