Archive

I was looking for an app that would substitute for the dedicated and expensive rangefinder device that's used for judging long distances while hunting and golfing, when I came across Android Boy's remarkable all-in-one $2.50 Smart Tools. This product has taken the smartphone-as-tool concept to th...

Similar to Apple's iOS, Android is apparently vulnerable to apps secretly copying photos. Android developer Ralph Gootee created a test app that masquerades as a simple timer but steals the most recent image on the user's smartphone and posts it on a public photo-sharing site. Critics said the devel...

Frantic buyers cleaned out the shelves of two UK retailers offering a small $35 Linux computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The credit-card-sized device, which is named after the foundation, plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It can be used to work on spreadsheets, play games, and do word processi...

The Clementine Music Player is an up and coming application that could replace your default music app. It is a close cousin to Amarok with just enough of its own personality to make it stand apart from the crowd. On any computing platform today, users have ample choices of music players. Most of the...

"Bug #1 - Microsoft has a majority market share." - Ubuntu bug tracker. Much has changed since Canonical started on its quirky quest to "fix bug #1." Seven years ago Microsoft was seen as stagnant, ripe for plucking. Longhorn was still MIA, and Microsoft users were busy patching XP against the lat...

We all know that the 20th century predictions of a paperless office were a pipe dream, maybe never to happen now. Digital media appear to have created more paper swirling around us, rather than less. If you've been holding out for the paperless dream, forget it. Give up now, because there's currentl...

The Mozilla Foundation will begin accepting developer submissions for its own app market at the Mobile World Congress, which will be held in Barcelona next week. The Mozilla Marketplace will let devs distribute and monetize their apps. It will also be the sole repository for cross-platform apps and ...

If you spend endless hours at a keyboard crunching words, avoiding distractions is essential. Sometimes, the worst offender in causing distractions comes from all the bells and whistles in the word processor itself. That is where WordGrinder comes to the rescue. In today's Linux world of GUI-filled ...

Canonical expects to start rolling out the first phase of Ubuntu's new heads-up display in the April release of Ubuntu 12.04. But HUD will supplement Unity, Ubuntu's default desktop interface, rather than fully replace it. The move to radically change the desktop's default interface is being made ou...

The concept of mobile connectivity in today's multi-device world is changing. Connectivity means more than connecting our laptop computers to WiFi or 3G carrier networks wherever we go. Today people work on more than one computer. Increasingly, workers and consumers alike rely on a growing collectio...

gThumb is one of the best image viewer and browser applications available for the GNOME Desktop. I particularly like its adeptness in handling both still photography and videos. That is an unusual pairing for an image viewer on any platform. You are not likely to find this combination, or at least ...

We've seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today's technology world -- where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount -- exist in open application programming interfa...

Has anyone else noticed that you rarely receive a copy of hotel room-service receipts? Why is that? It hadn't really bothered me that much over the years -- despite a niggling feeling it should -- until an incident recently where the dollar amount I had signed for clearly didn't match the checkout b...

Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market. A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, only about 1 percent of Android's millions of us...

If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience. Radio Tray is a streaming player for online radio that sits on the Linux desktop ...