Miscellaneous Material

And another week passed by, another Week in Review. Lots of different stuff this past week, there’s no theme or recurring subject, though. My item of the week is Palm’s announcements regarding freeing up webOS development. What’s yours?

Adobe Flash 10.1 Offers GPU Acceleration, Mobile Support – Adobe and various members of the OpenScreenProject announced today news about the upcoming release of Flash 10.1, the first Flash version to get released as a full browser plugin for various smartphone platforms.

Tablets: Sought by Nobody, Hyped by Everybody – Ah, the tablet computer. For over two decades now have companies tried to get the public to buy the darn things, and yet, despite all the efforts, promises, analysts, and even personal involvement by Bill Gates, they simply never took off. Recently, the tablet has seen renewed attention – but will they succeed now?

Psystar Announces Licensing Program for OEMs – Just when you thought you saw it all. So, we all know about Psystar, the two lawsuits between them and Apple, and all the other stuff that’s been regurgitated about ten million times on OSNews alone. Well, that little company has taken its business to the next level – by announcing an OEM licensing program.

Palm Frees up webOS Development – Palm has just announced a number of changes its webOS development platform that should really be welcomed by developers. They are fully blessing application distribution outside of the App Catalog, open source developers will no longer have to pay a dime to have their applications in the App Catalog, and Palm will also open up all their analytical data for developers to use.

Windows Mobile 6.5: “There’s No Excuse for This” – Before the iPhone, we were content with stylus-based interfaces that worked well – mostly – for what you needed to do. Then came the iPhone. From a pure feature perspective, it was (and is) lacking, but it more than makes up for it by being a polished product that’s easy to use. The iPhone shook the entire industry up, and while newcomers have done relatively well (webOS, Android) Windows Mobile is now so far left behind you can barely see it any more. Windows Mobile 6.5 is supposed to be the first step towards modernising Windows Mobile – but it fails miserably.

Review: MacBook Pro 13″ – Late June 2009 I bought a 13″ MacBook Pro (2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM). I suppose that after just three months, the blinding “first joys” over getting a laptop have worn off. By now, I deem my thoughts about this device to be realistic and of an appropriate level. The past few weeks I attained mastery over the Mac OS through personal discovery, accompanied by a very insightful book; I bought additional software and hacked the Dock to suit my preferences.

Microsoft Offers Improved Browser Ballot for Testing – After long negotiations and back and forths between the EU, Microsoft, and other browser makers, Microsoft’s browser ballot proposal has been amended and offered up for debate yet again by the EU; this time around, it will actually be tested out by consumers. A number of changes have been made since the first proposal, so let’s take a look.

Microsoft Axes Works, Introduces Office 2010 Starter with Ads – Are you familiar with Microsoft Works? It’s sort of a My First Office Suite kind of thing which includes support for Microsoft Word and Excel documents. It is usually not sold separately, but instead comes pre-installed on new OEM machines. Well, Microsoft has announced today that it will kill Microsoft Works, and replace it with Microsoft Office 2010 Starter – an ad-supported version of Office 2010.

NVIDIA Ceases All Chipset Development, Blames Intel – The future of integrated graphics processors lies somewhere on the dies of future processors, that much is a certainty. However, this creates a big problem for NVIDIA, whose chipset business will be out, of well, business. Beating everybody to the punch, the company announced yesterday that it is ceasing all development on future chipsets, citing unfair business practices from Intel.

Review: MorphOS 2.3, EFIKA – Not too long ago we published a review of AmigaOS 4.1, which made some readers argue we should take a look at MorphOS as well. However, nobody currently makes any MorphOS compatible hardware, so I had nowhere to go and beg. Luckily, OSNews reader AmigaRobbo generously offered to loan me his EFIKA machine, with MorphOS installed. I took a look at MorphOS, and found a very quick and efficient operating system – which was sadly held back by the limitations of the EFIKA.

Digging Into Mac OS X’s Single-Application Mode – Way back, when we were recovering from our hangovers from the millennium parties, Apple introduced, for the first time, Mac OS X and the Aqua user interface. This was still a preview, so it wasn’t quite as polished and finished, of course. It also contained a feature that never made it into the final releases: single-window mode. Or did it…?