Latest Technology News

Once upon a time the notion of having access to a free image-editing tool that rivalled commercial packages was nonsensical. If you wanted to edit your photos, you had to pay for the privilege. The GIMP was one of the first to break this mold, but despite a powerful feature set it can be off-putting to the beginner.

In recent years Paint.NET has made a powerful case of being the best free image-editing tool for Windows, boasting powerful features and a relatively accessible interface. But now there’s a new kid in town, a tool that resembles Paint.NET but adds some clever features of its own. A tool that once cost money, but is now free. That image editor is PixBuilder Studio.

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Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 55 seconds in the United States?

I joined those ranks two weeks ago. While out on the road I made a stopover in Center City Philadelphia. Not thinking and in a rush to get to my destination, I left my laptop bag on the front passenger seat. I returned to my car to find the drivers-side window broken and the bag gone.

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Cloud storage has come a long way in recent years, and the ever-increasing number of mobile device means that more and more people are finding different ways to make use of it. The importance of backing up valuable data, coupled with the widespread availability of high-speed broadband connections means that cloud storage is ideally suited to safeguarding files you need to protect, not only helping to avoid the risk of data loss, but also making it possible to access your files from other computers.

AVG is a company best known for its antivirus software, but AVG LiveKive sees it branching out into another area of security -- backups. Traditionally, this practice is something that has involved the use of a separated hard drive partition or perhaps a dedicated drive, but the feasibility of storing files online brings a number of benefits. As you are using remote storage, you do not need to worry about running out of space in quite the same way as when using a local hard drive, and the option of remotely accessing files that have been backed up from a machine other than the one from which the backup from created opens up even more opportunities.

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Just a day after HP announced that it wouldn't be spinning off its PC division, with its new CEO Meg Whitman citing "together we are stronger", the same feeling does not extend to WebOS. British newspaper The Guardian reports on Friday that the company plans to shut down the division and more than 500 jobs could be cut.

HP acquired the rights to WebOS through its acquisition of Palm in April 2010. The software was meant to power HP's line of Palm smartphones and the TouchPad, but following the scrapping of both lines in August, the future of WebOS was uncertain.

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The major software update to Google TV, which has been expected for several months, has finally been deemed ready for user consumption, and will be rolling out to Sony's Google TV devices next week, and Logitech's Google TV-powered Revue set top box "soon thereafter." The update brings Android apps to Google TV, fixes the YouTube interface, overhauls the general flow of the user interface.

This update corrects some of the aspects of Google TV that made it feel like a false start. The core idea behind Google TV was both tempting and impressive; The power of unified Google search for live TV content and streaming, web-based content remains an impressive feature. However, the execution of this idea didn't make consumers stand up and applaud.

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Document metadata can be a great help in organizing files on your own PC. Add the appropriate keywords in a Comments tag, say, and it’ll be much easier to find the file later.

If you intend to share the documents online, though, metadata can be a real menace, leaking all kinds of data: network folders and user names, email addresses, details on the operating systems and software packages you’re using and a whole lot more.

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Twelfth in a series. Here’s a dirty little secret: I’m still using Windows XP.

That’s right. A technology analyst -- independent, mind you; not working for a firm that requires a specific load -- and I’m voluntarily using XP. In fact, I’m writing this article on it. I’ve been using it so long, I almost stopped noticing, and as XP crossed the 10-year anniversary of its official launch this week, I thought some about my own experiences with it.

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ARM Holdings, the British company behind the popular ARM processor architecture used in more than 15 billion mobile devices, announced this week that the newest version of the ARM architecture will add 64-bit processing for the first time ever.

This new architecture has two main execution states, AArch64 and AArch32. The AArch64 execution state introduces a new instruction set, A64 for 64-bit processing, and AArch32 supports the existing ARM instruction set that is used in all of ARM's previous offerings, including the popular Cortex A9 and Cortex A15 processors being used by chipmakers such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Toshiba.

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Research in Motion is using a little clothing retailer incentive to motivate businesses to buy BlackBerry PlayBook. But if you don't want any, would you buy three? For a limited time, RIM and its retail partners are offering a buy 2-get-1-free special. If that's not enough incentive, they're throwing in free accessories, too, like leather sleeve and HDMI cable. The deal is available through December 31.

RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks during the launch quarter but only 200,000 the one following. It's safe to assume there's lots of inventory in the channel, and a deal like this is one way to clear the stock rooms. But how good is it really, and is it enough to push you to PlayBook? The latter question is for you to answer in comments. I've got the first here.

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Virtualization is one of the hottest IT topics today. Everyone's talking about it, but few are really doing it -- and there's a big gulf between enterprise and small business adoption, even though many of the benefits are the same. Small business is one of my favorite technology segments, because of its diversity, unique needs, large size, yet small IT footprint. When working as an analyst during the mid-Noughties I launched JupiterResearch's SMB practice. I've been remiss by not writing more about small business tech at BetaNews.

There is much confusion about what is a small business -- how official statisticians and high-tech vendors segment sizes. Small businesses account for 97 percent of employee firms, according to US government agencies. But that segmentation counts firms with fewer than 500 employees as small business -- large by my measure -- and ignores the enormous number of operations with non-payroll employees. This segment is often overlooked by high-tech vendors, many of which count them as consumers. By the US Census Bureau's reckoning, there are nearly 27.3 million small businesses, but only 5.9 million have payrolls and 3.62 million employ fewer than five people. So there are 21.4 million businesses employing less than 5 people -- that's 78 percent of them.

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Just over one week ago, Google officially debuted Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of the Android mobile operating system, which for the first time unifies smartphones and mobile tablets under the same operating system.

Android 4.0 adds support for cursor hover events, stylus distance/tilt/orientation, and mouse button events, but the most exciting new HID support was highlighted in a tweet from Google framework engineer Romain Guy last Friday:

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Hewlett-Packard on Thursday announced it will not spin off its Personal Systems group. For the last month, the company has been looking at possible "alternatives" for the PSG -better known as the consumer computer portion of HP that leads the global market- and one of the options the company discussed was turning it into a separate company, akin to what IBM did when it sold off its PC division to Lenovo more than five years ago.

"HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said HP's new president and chief executive officer Meg Whitman. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

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Testing a site for mobile browser compatibility can be a tricky matter. Each of the different mobile platforms has their own built-in browser in addition to downloadable third-party ones, there are the different screen sizes and resolutions, different orientation sensors, and different processor power profiles.

And there's the ever-present problem of plug-in support and support for the new, growing browser technologies like HTML5 and CSS3.

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Nearly four months to the day after Google first unveiled its social network to the masses, the search giant on Thursday opened up Google+ to users of its Google Apps platform. While users of standard Google accounts have been able to sign up for the service without an invite since late September, those registered under a Google Apps account remained logged out.

Google claims that technical issues prevented a faster rollout for Apps customers, but did not specify the exact cause of the delays.

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Use Outlook for a while and it’s all too easy to build up a bulky Inbox, weighed down in particular by all the attachments you’ve received. And while you can delete or save these individually, Outlook doesn’t provide any global way to manage all your email attachments. Which is why you may well need NirSoft’s OutlookAttachView.

The program has more filtering capabilities than we expected. So, for instance, you can choose to view only attachments sent within a particular date range, of a particular size or file type, from a specified group of senders, or to defined email addresses, amongst other options. But if you don’t care about any of that – or you’re just in a hurry -- simply click OK on the opening Scan Options dialog and OutlookAttachView will show you all the attachments for messages stored in the default Outlook profile.

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