The Acorn Archimedes is 25 years old this month. The first machines based on the company's ARM (Acorn Risc Machine) processor were announced in June 1987, the year after the 32-bit chip itself was launched.

Four versions of the Archimedes were released in 1987: the A305, A310, A410 and A440. The first two had 512KB and 1MB of memory, respectively. You could upgrade an A305 to an A310 simply by adding in the extra Ram.


Acorn's Archimedes 310
The A410 had 1MB of memory too, but the A440 had a (then) whopping 4MB and came with a 20MB hard drive as well as the 800KB 3.5in floppy drive – which also supported 640KB discs for BBC Master compatibility – found on the other three models.

Upgrading the A305 or A310 to A410 level was a matter of adding in a "Podule" backplane circuit board, which contained the hard drive controller. You also had to add, of course, the hard drive. There was room for two Podules on the A300 series.

At first glance, you might mistake Clipboard, the impressively-backed web clipping service, for yet another Pinterest clone. But any similarities are only skin deep. Clipboard’s real rivals are things like Evernote’s web clipper, SpringPad, Delicious, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneNote. That’s because, explains Clipboard CEO Gary Flake, Pinterest is about expressing an aspiration, but Clipboard is about getting things done.

For half a year, the company has been trucking along in a private, invite-only beta. But today, it’s open to all with a fresh redesign in tow and a new button for website owners.

Granted, there are several similarities between Pinterest and Clipboard. For starters, its collections are also called “boards.” And they’re laid out graphically, with a heavy emphasis on the image associated with the clipped content. But Clipboard isn’t just for clipping an inspiring or pretty picture – it can clip all kinds of stuff, including slideshows (like those from SlideShare), audio, a functioning web app (like an online calculator), an online game, and more. And the clips are functional, too. The calculator works, the games play, you can click the links in the copied text.

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.
“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).”
“Most unsuccessfully funded projects come up short because of a lack of interest in the project or because their creators didn’t promote it enough, not because of the Kickstarter page itself. Success on Kickstarter comes down to making a video, pricing things reasonably, and telling people about the project.”
In fact, project creators asked that Kickstarter projects be de-indexed for a reason: they ranked high in search results and, if Google crawled them, the resulting failures would percolate towards the top. “Because Kickstarter projects index very highly in search, creators were seeing their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — for their name. That obviously sucked, so we made the decision to de-index them.”

The company has added a FAQ to address the problem: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creators#AreProjThatWereNotSuccFundBrowOnKick

Dall'autore di Mafalda un volume di vignette e brevi storie che mette alla berlina cattiverie e ipocrisie dell'umanità.

Potenziata nelle funzioni e nell'estetica, l'app mobile ufficiale è il migliore strumento per utilizzare in mobilità il social network di Google.

In an interview with Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek, Parker quickly answered a question that made Ek hesitant. He said there was “some indication” (emails from other people in the industry) that Apple tried to block Spotify from entering the United States, and he noted “Apple was threatened by what [Spotify] was doing.” In October 2010, we heard similar rumblings that Apple attempted to sway execs in the U.S. music industry from signing with Spotify.

According to reports coming from Italian blog Fanpage (via TechCrunch), Apple just bought Italian startup Redmatica, a company that creates software to enhance the capabilities of popular audio sampler software such as the EXS24 used in Apple’s Logic Pro recording suite. The proof apparently comes via documents from local regulator AGCOM obtained by the blog.

Apple has not yet confirmed it acquired the company, but if true it looks like Logic Pro could be getting some powerful and easy sound design tools in the near future. Among the highlights of the company’s tech that Logic and GarageBand could certainly benefit from include slick drag and drop management of sampler instruments and full AU plug in support directly in the synthesis signal chain. Another thing we can imagine Apple is probably interested in is the new Escher, Penrose and Moebius Machines, which allow for realtime detailed and sample specific gain control for every aspect of your sampled loops, and none of the gain control is destructive. The company also has its GBSamplerManager designed for managing sampler instruments for GarageBand on iOS from your Mac.

According to Fanpage Radmatica had income of just €26,000 on €100,000 in yearly revenue.

Samsung and Acer have both got ChromeOS laptops on sale, and Samsung has updated its offering with the 12.1 inch Series 5 550, running an Intel Celeron 867 1.3GHz processor with a 16GB solid state drive and 4GB of RAM. At $449 the 550 isn’t cheap and users will have to choose between a 3G version arranged the customary two years of free monthly data rations or one using Wi-Fi to augment its Ethernet connectivity.

The Series 3 Chromebox is Samsung's first desktop ChromeOS system, in a tiny 19 x 19 x 3.3cm package. The Chromebox has a slightly nippier Celeron B840 processor, 4Gb of RAM, a DisplayPort and six USB sockets. It's a cheaper option at $329, but you've got to factor in the cost of the peripherals needed to make it more than a doorstop.

"As the world’s first Chromebox, the Series 3 provides users with the Chromebook’s ease-of-use in a compact desktop product, which easily integrates with their existing accessories," said Todd Bouman, vice president of marketing at Samsung Enterprise business division in a statement. "The second generation Chromebook features powerful components housed in a slim, lightweight body, thanks to Samsung’s advanced hardware engineering."

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook just noted onstage that the company sold 2.7 million Apple TVs in just the first few months of this year. The last time we received official numbers from Apple, it reported 1.4 million units for Q1 and sales of just 2.8 million for the entire previous year, which means Apple is on track to double its Apple TV sales this year. Cook’s comments, as reported by The Verge:

Tim: You know, very uncharacteristic of us, we’ve stayed in the Apple TV product. We’re not a hobby kind of company as you know. Our tendency is to do very few things. And, if something creeps in and isn’t a big success, we get it out of the way and put our energies on something else. Apple TV though, you see what we’ve done. We’ve stuck in this. It’s not a fifth leg of the stool. It’s not the same size as the phone or Mac or tablet business. But last year we sold a little less tan 3m Apple TVs… This year, just in a first few months, we’ve sold 2.7m… This is an area of intense interest for us…

Inizialmente Music Hub sarà disponibile solo per Samsung Galaxy S III, per poi essere allargato ad altri terminali. Gli utenti hanno la possibilità di utilizzare il Music Hub Store in modo gratuito e di abbonarsi alla versione Premium pagando 9,99€ al mese.

Attualmente il catalogo contiene oltre 19 milioni di canzoni, acquistabili dallo store e con possibilità di ascoltare una preview di 30 secondi. La musica acquistata viene quindi archiviata sul cloud e appare automaticamente sul dispositivo Samsung. Tali brani possono poi essere salvati anche in locale e ascoltati offline, mentre abbonandosi alla versione Premium sarà possibile caricare online tutta la propria libreria musicale (fino ad un massimo di 100GB) e di accedervi in streaming dal proprio dispositivi mobile.

Una funzione chiamata “Scan & Match Cloud Locker” consente di caricare i brani preferiti sul cloud e di ascoltarli in streaming con un tempo di caricamento molto inferiore. Gli utenti possono i poi gestire i brani caricati in playlist, inserire anche note vocali registrate dal dispositivo, leggere i testi e condividere i brani con gli amici. Inoltre, Music Hub offre anche la possibilità di ascoltare la musica preferita direttamente dalle stazioni radio, immettendo il nome del brano o dell’artista. Interessante la funzione che consente di “taggare” un brano che ascoltiamo per la prima volta in radio, in modo tale da poterlo ritrovare anche in un secondo momento.

Now you can…
Easily save, share and discover links — they’re called bitmarks, like bookmarks.
Instantly search your saved bitmarks.
Curate groups of bitmarks into bundles and collaborate on bundles with friends.
Make any bitmark or bundle private or public.
See what friends are sharing across multiple social networks, all in one place.
Save and share links from anywhere with our new bitmarklet, Chrome extension and iPhone app.
It doesn’t stop here. We have big plans for bitly, and we want to build this neighborhood with our community. So get in there, start bitmarking and please tell us what you think!

Monotype Imaging today announced a new mobile font suite designed for Android Ice Cream Sandwich devices. The suite, which offers a slew of tools and services for developers and manufacturers, is called "Type Enhancements for Android."
Though some of the tools in the suite have been previously available to developers, it is the first time they have all been offered in an all-in-one package.
One such module, known as the iType font engine with Edge Tuning, promises OEMs better and cleaner text rendering.
In addition to that, the suite offers a greater breadth of language support than within Android's existing capabilities, and a bigger selection of fonts -- both for developers creating their UIs, and for users who want more customization options.
According to Satoshi Asari, Monotype's director of product marketing, one of the most important aspects of these tools is that they all abide by Google's Compliance Test Suite (CTS) for Android.
Aside from wanting to expand Android's global reach by improving its language supporting capabilities, Asari hopes that Monotype's suite will resolve quality issues for low-end devices. This is especially applicable to handsets with small screens or low resolutions, where text does not render well.
But high-end phones can also benefit from "Type Enhancements for Android" too.
"Flagship devices need to have a high-quality user experience across a high number of use cases," Asari said.

The Good
instant up/instant down; start-up and shutdown times are basically instantaneous
thermals very low; ambient noise non-existent
video playback handles various codecs; capable of playback of direct dumps from digital cameras, camcorders, and playback of older .avi files with no issues. Did not play back my 1-week review video, but it did transfer it off the camera and then file-transferred it to YouTube
handles video playback in one window and multi-tasking another app into a different window with no problems
handles bluetooth pickup out of standby as well as any device; better than most Android devices and at least as well as most Windows PC’s
The Bad
offline capability is very limited
multi-tasking workflow management is not the best; In one instance you are looking at a single spawned instance of an app, the next all of your app tabs and windows appear to have collapsed into a single browser icon.
scroll wheel on at least some Bluetooth mice are not recognized
opening File Manager automatically has the first file or folder selected. If you do not know this, and then select a file and then select “Delete”, you’ve blown away the one you wanted and unintentionally blown away the first object in the list because it was auto-selected
not viable as a gaming platform due to apparent dearth of non-casual games in the WebApp Store; jury is still out on this one as I have more games to test

Apple this month is reported to have begun production of the first prototypes of its much-anticipated connected television sets at one of its overseas manufacturing facilities ahead of a general production ramp expected to begin late in the 2012 calendar year.

The news, which was attributed to "informed sources" speaking to the China Business News, was picked up and translated by the WantChinaTimes earlier on Monday.

In particular, the publication cited its sources as saying that this initial build plan is taking place in one of Foxconn's Shenzhen plants as a trial production run, which typically produces a small number of assembly-line-quality prototypes for Apple to put through its design test verification stages. No further details were reported.

Those following us on Twitter already know that last week Apple rejected Instacast, a well-love podcatcher, over its Flattr integration. What does this mean for the future of Flattr inside applications for iPhone and iPad?

With Absinthe 2.0 being made available for immediate public download and version 2.0.2 being pushed out to bring iPhone 4 9B208 build compatibility, the jailbreak 5.1.1 tool has been available for a couple of days and thanks to the Chronic Dev Team’s Twitter account, we now know it has racked up some fairly impressive downloads and usage statistics. One of the largest appeal factors to Absinthe 2.0 is that it is the first tool made available to give a functioning jailbreak on the current generation iPad 3. With that in mind, the tool has been used to jailbreak 211,401 new iPads, truly an impressive number.



Absinthe 2.0 provides the ability to jailbreak pretty much all iOS devices capable of running iOS 5.1.1, with the exception of the third-generation Apple TV, one of the other major reasons why it is proving to be so popular. In total, 973,086 devices have been newly jailbroken spanning across the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV range of Apple devices.

With the total number of devices being jailbroken with Absinthe rising all the time, that number should breach the one million mark in no time and shows that jailbreaking remains as popular as ever. That notion is something that has been mirrored by the official Cydia repositories with the BigBoss repo owner claiming that his repo was transferring a staggering 1 gigabit of data per second across ten servers since the release of Absinthe.

Mark Waid has really put his money where his mouth is: After preaching the gospel of the “culture of sharing” for a couple of years now, he’s making his comic Insufferable available for anyone to download and share.

Although the comic is available for free from his Thrillbent website, he found that within 24 hours the first chapter had been copied and uploaded to torrent and file-sharing sites. “The only thing that startled me was that it took 24 hours,” he said, and sure enough, the next two chapters were uploaded even faster. And he’s happy about it:


Your mileage may vary but, me, I’m okay with torrenters and “pirates” sharing INSUFFERABLE. Not just because, what the hell, it’s free anyway, Mr. Cynic. .. my hand to God, even if we were charging for it, I’d still be happy because the exposure and promotion is worth more to me at this point than dollars and cents. But more than that…more than that … after having been hip-deep in the research for the past three years, I have seen zero conclusive evidence that, on the whole, “piracy” removes more money from the system than it adds to it.

Furthermore, he points out, pirates gonna pirate and he has no way to stop them. So rather than obsessing about that, he’s turned it to his advantage by posting each chapter as downloadable PDF and .cbz files — with a pointer toward Thrillbent on the last page. There’s no reason why the uploaders couldn’t remove that page, but they haven’t. What’s more, he’s finding that most of the uploaded files of Insufferable are indeed the ones he supplied, which means the “pirates” are really providing him with free advertising.

“It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine,” says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011. “I’ve been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management,” he says. “When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority.”

It might also simply be the result of the shift in scale at which Apple is operating today. They sold 35 million iPhones and 12 million iPads last quarter. Is it not inevitable that global-supply management would grow in importance and influence with numbers like that? The question to ask is whether these changes are because of the differences between Tim Cook and Steve, or the differences in the size and scope of Apple’s business a decade ago versus today.

The Verge reported yesterday that Google would soon be assimilating the Hewlett-Packard team responsible for creating Enyo, the HTLM5-based application framework for WebOS that debuted on the failed TouchPad.
Related story
HP's WebOS Enyo team reportedly heading to Google
But a blog item posted on the Enyo Web site today says the majority of the team remains, that development of Enyo will continue, and that the Enyo team is expanding.
In an update to its report, and citing unnamed sources, The Verge had added that the person in charge of Enyo, Matt McNulty, was one of the people headed to Google, along with other team members "responsible for 99 percent of the code."

“Pre-sandbox screening of submissions has been shockingly arbitrary and Apple staff are frequently either unwilling or unable to understand detailed technical arguments,” said one anonymous developer.

Developers looking to Apple for guidance about sandboxing their apps have been disappointed, not least because of Apple’s own failure to sandbox its apps. So far only TextEdit and Preview have been sandboxed.

“A great source of irritation for developers is Apple's own failure to sandbox its own programs,” noted one developer. “Apple has sandboxed some of its applications, but the vast majority remain outside of the sandbox and will still be available via the Mac App Store.”

“The reason that they can't sandbox their own applications is because they experience the very same problems as third party developers: appropriate entitlements do not exist, the APIs are buggy and the sandbox model makes no sense for many applications,” the anonymous developer added. “In order to sandbox their own applications they would need to remove features that users have come to rely upon. For no reason. They don't want to do so. They don't want to irritate their users.”

He claims that Apple is resort to "cheats" that third party developers would “never get away with.” He suggested: “Apple should first have sandboxed its own applications and made sure that the sandboxing works properly. Then they could legitimately have asked us to join them.”

“The sandbox doesn't really make sense and Apple knows it,” another developer, told us, anonymously.

“Something has clearly gone very wrong when Apple imposes changes that require a large proportion of non-game apps on the Mac App Store to be feature crippled. Nobody knows what the real motivation behind it is,” he noted.

“I suspect that Apple's new found love for the sandbox has more to do with exercising greater control over third party developers and streamlining their review process than with any end-user benefits,” suggested one developer, noting that Apple’s reviewers can now “just look at the entitlements to see what the application can do,” rather than “checking what an application does do.”

Though Yahoo's Livestand digital newsstand app has been up and running for less than a year, the company has decided to pull the plug on it.
The company announced its decision in a blog post today, saying it has learned a lot about what works and doesn't work with Livestand and is "actively applying those insights toward the development of future products that are better aligned with Yahoo!'s holistic mobile strategy."
The app has earned four stars in the App Store and is one of the first products the company plans to discontinue this year.
The blog says the company is "pivoting to a mobile products-first development model," and points to Yahoo's recently released Axis browser as proof.
"There's no doubt that one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, priorities for us is to innovate for the mobile user, whether they're using feature phones, smartphones, or tablets -- or iOS apps, Android apps, or mobile Web browsers, for that matter," the post reads.
Yahoo debuted Livestand in November, despite some uncertainty over the future of management at the company. Yahoo's recent management shakeup resulted in the appointment of interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

After bringing Classics Illustrated into the digital age, and onto Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet, in March, Trajectory Inc. announced this morning it has teamed with Apple to deliver the enduring comics series on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
[...] More than 120 titles are available from Apple’s iBookstore.
“Making the Classics available in digital form brings these brilliant works to where people live now, on their mobiles,” Trajectory CEO Jim Bryant said in a statement. “The iPad and iPhone are great for interacting with one of the most beloved comics and graphic novel series of all time.”

Sales of webOS phones never made a dent in the industry, and the much-anticipated TouchPad tablet was cancelled by HP before it even got started.

Then HP reshuffled its management and decided to make webOS open-source to keep the platform from going the way of the dodo. It would offer webOS to the world for anyone to use, and keep the team intact to make a serious effort.

Now comes the word that Google has poached the core Enyo team from HP, to end up doing who-knows-what at Google. Odds are it won’t be bringing Enyo, the application framework behind webOS, into the Android effort. Whatever these smart folks end up doing for Google, their departure pretty much puts the kibosh on the open-source webOS effort no matter what HP says.

HP is not in a position to make a serious run at the webOS open-source effort. Having just announced the impending layoff of 27,000 employees, HP must be the worst place to work in any industry. You read that right, the layoffs are in the thousands, or more than many companies in the world employ in total. What a sad place HP must be to work today.

So don’t expect webOS to set the open-source world on fire, it is coming from too bad a place for that to happen. Given HP’s terrible situation, there is no way the open-source webOS effort will be a priority. Most of the key webOS team have already left HP for greener pastures, and this news about the important Enyo team is just a twisting of the knife.

It’s a safe call to say that webOS is finally dead in reality, if not in name. Such a sad end for what could have been a revolutionary mobile OS. RIP webOS.

Flickr has just announced new Groups features on its blog, including a Justified View, the ability to submit photos directly to Groups via the Uploadr and brand new API methods for developers. Yahoo has, of course, been floundering lately, and Flickr is really feeling the heat from competitors like 500px – all the more reason to push forward and provide some desired improvements for users.

The Justified View, which we’ve already seen on the Photos from Contacts and Favorites pages, looks pretty damn impressive compared to the previous design. With this change, Flickr has also added sidebar navigation

Kickstarter does not want you to see failed projects. Failed Kickstarter campaign pages include robot meta tags to keep search engines from indexing them. Plus, Kickstarter’s front page and “Discover” interface never show failed projects. Ever.)
[...] failed results do show up in Kickstarter’s own search results [but it] has made an interesting design decision when it comes to how it displays (or doesn’t display) “failed” projects.

From today on, you will be able to select the photos you want to transfer in the Bump app, go to the Bump website on your computer, and then tap the phone on the spacebar key to transfer them. In order for it to work you have to enable location sharing on your computer’s web browser.
According to Lieb, the feature works with most modern web browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. There are some sporadic issues with Internet Explorer, he says.
So how does it all work? The new app uses the same technology in Bump’s self-titled app and in Bump Pay. A combination of the sensors in the phone and Bump’s Cloud services allow the phone and computer to communicate and then transfer the photos.

Con un comunicato stampa, Apple ha ufficialmente affermato di voler pagare i dividendi ai propri dipendenti con RSU, ovvero quelle azioni che in genere vengono consegnate ai dipendenti come incoraggiamento per restare all’interno della compagnia. Tra i vari impiegati troviamo una figura di spicco, questo è Tim Cook, egli possedeva 1 milione di RSU per un valore complessivo di 75 milioni di dollari. Nonostante abbia già incassato moltissimo denaro di recente, egli ha compiuto un gesto molto interessante, infatti ha completamente rifiutato la propria parte. Per dovere di cronaca, ricordiamo che le azioni sono state pagate a 2.65$ l’una.

Eccovi un breve estratto del comunicato:

Come richiesto da Mr.Cook, nessun elemento appartenente alle sue RSU verrà pagato come dividendo; assumendo un valore di 2.65$ ad azione e moltiplicandole per 1.125 milioni di elementi, Mr.Cook ha rinunciato a circa 75 milioni di dollari di dividendi.

La notizia dei pagamenti non è stata inaspettata, infatti verso la fine di Marzo, l’azienda aveva comunicato l’intenzione di spendere parte dei 100 miliardi di dollari nel distribuire quanto dovuto ai vari impiegati. I calcoli sono stati effettuati, i pagamenti veri e propri avranno inizio il 1 luglio.

Item 5.02.    Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers
 
(e) Compensatory Arrangements with Certain Officers.
On May 24, 2012, the Compensation Committee (the "Committee") of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. (the "Company") approved amendments to each outstanding and unvested restricted stock unit award granted by the Company to its employees (other than Timothy D. Cook, the Company's Chief Executive Officer). The amendments provide that if the Company pays an ordinary cash dividend on its common stock, each award will be credited with an amount equal to the per-share cash dividend paid by the Company, multiplied by the total number of restricted stock units subject to the award that are outstanding immediately prior to the record date for such dividend. The amounts that are credited to each award are referred to as "dividend equivalents." Any dividend equivalents credited to an award will be subject to the same vesting, payment and other terms and conditions as the unvested restricted stock units to which the dividend equivalents relate. Depending on the domicile of the employee, accumulated dividend equivalents will either be paid in cash or used to offset employee taxes due upon vesting of the restricted stock units.

The Committee determined these amendments were appropriate in light of the Company's announcement on March 19, 2012 that it intends to commence paying ordinary cash dividends of $2.65 per share to its shareholders on a quarterly basis sometime during the fourth quarter of its 2012 fiscal year. As restricted stock units are not outstanding shares of common stock and thus would not otherwise be entitled to participate in such dividends, the crediting of dividend equivalents is intended to preserve the equity-based incentives intended by the Company when the awards were granted and to treat the award holders consistently with shareholders.

At Mr. Cook's request, none of his restricted stock units will participate in dividend equivalents. Assuming a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share over the vesting periods of his 1.125 million outstanding restricted stock units, Mr. Cook will forego approximately $75 million in dividend equivalent value.

 

Now, developers have another business model option thanks to today’s newly-announced in-app subscription feature within in-app billing. The feature is quite self-explanatory—users can purchase subscriptions to any type of extra content from an app using any Android device. Some examples of in-app subscription could apply to bonus game levels/maps or and recurring services like journals and magazines. The ability to sell monthly or annual subscriptions in any app is effective immediately, while users can also start buying right away.

Processori capaci, consumi bassi e bassi costi di realizzazione: sarà questa l'arma decisiva per la conquista del mercato da parte di Google e degli altri produttori di tablet Android?

Platter is a new micro-social network app dedicated home cooking. It allows you to take pictures of food you make and upload them to show the world, tagging them with the you used ingredients. You can then search through those ingredient tags, finding inspiration for something to make with the ingredients you have to hand. As you'd expect, you can also do the usual social networking things, like follow people whose food you find interesting, and post comments and "likes" on pictures.

"Why do I need this?" you might ask. "I have Instagram and Twitter, Facebook and Foodspotting. Why do I need another app?" Well, the Platter team cleverly identified that in fact none of these apps are exactly what you need if you're a home cook looking to show off. Instagram has plenty of food pics, but lacks the ingredient tagging feature. Twitter and Facebook are more general purpose. Foodspotting is designed around the idea of taking pictures of food when eating out, not for home cooking. Platter is complementary to these services.

To underscore this, it has (as you'd probably expect) the ability to cross-post pictures to Facebook and Twitter. These cross-posts are in the form of links to Platter's attractive web interface (self-promotion alert: that's my own Platter page), from where you can drill down into individual pictures. This web view feature is already fuller-featured than Instagram's pared-down approach, as you can navigate from users to pictures and back again, and the Platter team are planning on expanding this further in the future.

[The company] unveiled this morning its newest tool: one that makes transferring photos from an iOS or Android device to a computer as easy as bumping that device against the computer's spacebar.
The key to the new feature is that it requires no software installation on the computer, said Bump CEO Dave Lieb. Instead, it works through users' browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, and Safari -- and the Bump mobile app. Once users load Bump's Web site and the app, they select the photos they want to move and tap their phone against their spacebar. The photos appear on the computer instantaneously.
When the photos appear on the computer, there are a couple of options. One is to download the photo to the computer's hard drive. The other is to create a sharable link to the photo or photos. That means that it's easy to take a group of photos at an event, quickly transfer them later to a computer, and then send a link to everyone who was at the event, Lieb explained.
The new tool works much the same way Bump has all along: it correlates the location of both devices when the app is running and in this case, when the spacebar is tapped, it knows that it's supposed to move photos stored on the mobile device to Bump's hosted Web site.
Users of Bump's existing iOS and Android apps will have to download the latest updates in order for the new service to work.

Google has released the Android version of an overhauled Google+ app, part of the company's attempt to move to a "simpler, more beautiful Google," in the words of Vic Gundotra, the company's senior vice president of engineering.
The new app catches up with the iOS Google+ app that Google released a couple weeks ago with a new visually rich, photo-first interface. And in some ways it surpasses it, for example in its support for tablets.
Google trails Facebook by far when it comes to the magnitude of membership on the overt social-network Google+ site, but the company is trying to compensate by wiring Google+ social interactions into major properties including Gmail, YouTube, and search. And it's trying to outdo Facebook in features, too -- thus today's app update.
Among the new app's features:

The new interface can get cluttered with busy images combined with text, comment boxes, and the +1 icon.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
• Most obviously, a new interface that puts images front and center, with the text of a Google+ post overlaid on the top. It's supposed to be more visually rich, but I find the new look often cluttered and jumbled.
• The old home screen is replaced by a navigation ribbon that slides down the left edge of the screen. That's a lot less dorky for tablets, which before had five tiny icons amid an ocean of wasted space.
• An ability to +1 a post directly from the stream of posts.
• The ability to start a video chatroom "hangout" from from an Android phone or tablet using the navigation ribbon. Hangout requests also can ring the phone like an incoming phone call.
• An option to directly turn a photo seen on Google+ into an Android device's background.
• The ability to edit your posts from the app, not just from a personal computer.

photo sharing is poised to be the service’s next breakout hit, thanks to an enthusiastic community of photographers who like the focus on attractive full-size images, Google+’s new photo-centric iPhone app, and a uniquely Google passion for metadata.

In fact, Google+ is pushing hard on the photography front and is in a great position to dominate the floundering Flickr.

The Google+ team teamed up with Kelby Training for a two-day Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco, or as it was adorably called, a HIRL — Hangout in Real Life. Vice president of product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz (pictured above), who led Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr in 2005, kicked off the event Tuesday by talking about the future of photography, how Flickr changed his outlook, and whether ads will ever make an appearance in Google+.

When Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said we might see $199 Tegra 3 tablets this summer, he wasn't speculating idly. Nvidia has revealed that it's working on just such a tablet: Kai. At the company's annual meeting of investors last week, VP Rob Csonger revealed the idea, and explained Kai isn't just a piece of hardware, but a plan to democratize its quad-core Tegra 3 system-on-chip. Nvidia wants to offer Android 4.0 tablets that are more powerful than the Kindle Fire at the same price point, he said:

Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform we've developed called Kai. So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that's inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we've developed to reduce the power that's used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.

Does that make Kai a reference design? Probably yes, but we wouldn't be surprised if it's also a consumer product. Nvidia and Asus teamed up at CES 2012 to introduce a quad-core tablet with a then-unheard-of $250 price point, the ME370T, and it's a dead ringer for the Kai in the picture above. We haven't heard a thing about the ME370T since CES, but perhaps it's on the way, and if we're lucky, it's the first of a whole new wave of affordable Tegra 3 slates. Maybe Google's Nexus tablet will be among them.

Update: Nvidia didn't have much to add when we asked them about Kai, but told us that devices are already inbound: "Customers are using the Kai platform to build Tegra 3 tablets now."

Since the desktop version of Yahoo! Axis is simply a browser extension, that means that Yahoo’s search deal with Bing drops its search box on top of whatever page you’re on. Instead of building its own desktop browser, which would have taken quite a long time and been a nightmare to support, Yahoo! decided to skip all of that and slip in the backdoor, by making itself extremely prominent.

If, and it’s a big if, Axis can grab a sizeable userbase, then Microsoft Bing just scored itself a whole slew of new search users.

Say I’m hooked on Axis, use its iPhone and iPad apps, I dig on its homepage. Then I visit Google.com. I’m presented with an alternative search option, Bing:



The search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! was made on July 29, 2009, and nearly three years later, Microsoft just got Christmas in July a few months early.

Combine Axis with its newly introduced redesign and Bing’s not having a bad month. Can Bing pick up a considerable amount of ground on Google’s search dominance? Only time will tell.

Yahoo! today released its Axis extension for Chrome – and accidentally leaked its private security key that could allow anyone to create malicious plugins masquerading as official Yahoo! software.
Australian entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic, who last year garnered notice for identifying Facebook's tracking cookies, revealed the certificate blunder on his blog, and said users should not install the extension “until the issue is clarified”.

Cubrilovic peeked into the extension’s source code and found the private certificate, which Yahoo! uses to sign the application to prove it is genuine and unaltered. The result, he says, is that a miscreant could forge a malicious extension that would be verified by Google's web browser as coming from Yahoo!

There are all sorts of attacks that could be executed with a spoofed extension; the most obvious of these, as Cubrilovic notes, would be to create and sign a traffic logger to capture a victim’s web activity.
Also: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57440597-83/yahoo-fumbles-security-in-axis-browser-launch/

Apple designer Jony Ive was knighted today in a ceremony held at Buckingham Palace, according to a BBC News UK report. It's an honor he said was "absolutely thrilling."
Ive's knighthood was announced late last year and the ceremony took place on Wednesday. The famed Apple designer shared some small talk with Princess Anne, who was doing the knighting. You can watch the short ceremony on the BBC's website.

C2 Enterprises has released Photosmith 2.0, a major update to its advanced photographic workflow app for iPad and Lightroom users. Redesigned from the ground up the new version boasts significant improvements in speed, flexibility and memory usage and adds a plethora of the most-requested features by users of the original version.

Photosmith 2.0 now supports wireless two-way synchronization with Adobe Lightroom via a free Lightroom plugin and can also directly receive photos wirelessly from Eye-Fi cards. Users can sort and filter photos, organize them into collections, and apply star ratings and colour labels, all of which can be synchronized with the photos in the user’s Lightroom library. Keywords and IPTC metadata can be applied to photos individually or in batches and users can define presets to quickly apply and reuse the same settings. Users can also share photos to Facebook and Flickr or send them out via e-mail and the app includes native support for Adobe Lightroom’s Export and Publish Services. RAW, JPG, RAW+JPG and DNG formats are fully supported along with advanced file formats from many popular cameras including Canon CR2, Nikon NEF, Pentax PEF, Sony ARW. Photosmith 2.0 requires an iPad running iOS 5.1 or later and is available from the App Store for $20 or as a free update for Photosmith 1.x users.

In a surprising development, Tiger Direct, an online retailer, leaked specs and price of the Samsung Chromebox. They accidently made the product page active.
Even though Tiger Direct removed the page from their website, cached webpages from Google still give us the complete details of the new Chromebox.

Con un'interfaccia compatta, un approccio testuale e numerose impostazioni, Reader X iPad è la soluzione perfetta per chi vuole gestire agilmente tanti feed sul tablet di Apple

EMC is buying Syncplicity for its file-sharing and synchronisation technology and thus taking on Box, SugarSync, and other enterprise Dropbox look-alikes.
[...] Syncplicity says it provides a virtual private cloud and has some 25,000 customers. You can see a great fit with EMC's cloud ideas in Syncplicity's pitch: it "makes it easy for you to store all your files in the cloud, sync them with all your computers, share them with co-workers, access them on mobile devices and ensure they are always backed up. All with the security, IT administration, policy-management and control features businesses of all sizes demand".
Privately-held Syncplicity was founded in 2008 by Leonard Chung, the chief product strategist, and Ondrej Hrebicek, the chief technology officer. Its CEO is Karen White, who became CEO last year after previously being executive chairman.
These three blogged: "Syncplicity will be a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC. Our team will be integrating with EMC’s Information Intelligence Group. The Syncplicity team remains intact so we can continue to retain our unique culture of innovation and agility while also joining our colleagues in IIG to develop amazing new solutions that combine the best we each have to offer. Together we will deliver enterprise-grade sync, sharing, mobility and collaboration solutions that a CIO trusts and users love."
Rick Devenuti, the president of EMC's Information Intelligence Group, said: "It’s our core belief that productivity and security are not mutually exclusive. In acquiring Syncplicity, we validate this concept by uniting enterprise ‘sync and share’ capabilities for the cloud with governance and rigor that is synonymous with Documentum ... our customers require more than simple containers for managing and sharing content."
There is no comment from VMware whose Project Octopus appears to overlap Syncplicity's technology.

Immergiamoci in una New Orleans dalla grafica stilizzata e aiutiamo il piccolo trombettista a raggiungere la sua agognata meta musicale

[...] the actions of Twitter and others show that when companies are mindful of basic privacy principles articulated in the Obama Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and blueprint as they design their services, the very same creative energy that has led to the development of extraordinary new Internet technologies can also help to protect Americans’ privacy.
[Danny Weitzner is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy]

Apple’s AppleSeed program allows a select group of customers to test out Apple software before it’s even released to Apple’s registered developers. These select customers received an email from Apple on Wednesday, informing them that the company is preparing for ‘hardware specific software updates’.

9to5Mac reports that the email reads: “We are preparing for possible hardware specific software updates on OS X Mountain Lion. These contain hardware-specific bug fixes or even special features! In order to make sure you can participate in these exclusive seeds, we need your most up-to-date machine configuration information. The easiest and most efficient way to do this is with Feedback Assistant.”

Bankruptcy will not protect MP3tunes.com or founder Michael Robertson from answering for the copyright violations they allegedly committed, according to EMI, the record company that's home to The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Coldplay.
CNET broke the news today that MP3tunes.com, a music locker service that let users store songs on the company's servers and then access them from Web-connected devices, filed for bankruptcy protection.
The service was noteworthy for being one of the first unlicensed music locker services and helping to pave the way for similar services offered by Google and Amazon. But MP3tunes.com was probably best known for the copyright fight it waged with EMI.
The record company alleged in a copyright suit filed in 2007 that MP3tunes.com encouraged users to locate pirated songs via Sideload.com, a music index, and then store their pilfered songs in their MP3tunes' lockers.
In an interview with CNET, Robertson said the legal costs of battling EMI's lawsuit were too burdensome for the small company -- especially when the nearly 5-year-old case is not close to being resolved.
EMI, however, is skeptical.

A poche ore di distanza da questa “censura”, Apple fa marcia indietro e ora la parola “jailbreak” su iTunes Store compare in modo corretto.
La censura riguardava sia le applicazioni presenti su App Store, sia i brani contenenti la parola “jailbreak” al loro interno. Ora, invece, tutto è tornato alla normalità e non vi è più traccia di tale censura.
Ricordiamo che il jailbreak, oltre ad essere il titolo di alcune canzoni, è anche il nome della procedura che serve a sbloccare il dispositivo e ad installarvi applicazioni non approvate da Apple.

[Twitter] announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.
Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it.

Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, announced Twitter’s involvement in the privacy feature at a New York Internet Week privacy panel.

The announcement occurred during a session titled, “Opting in to Do Not Track: A morning mini-conference on privacy, tracking and more.”

In a message on Twitter, the company confirmed the FTC’s announcement.

On a more practical note, Drexler also seemed to confirm during his talk the endless rumors of a new Apple TV. "You know, Apple has 10 products," he said. "The living room they're dealing with at some point in the near future."
Lastly, Drexler, with his trademark humor, offered up some advice for aspiring CEOs and expressed sympathy for current Apple head-honcho Tim Cook's unfortunate position.
"The best job to have: Take over a company that's doing poorly," Drexler said. "Never take over a company that's doing great. You know, I love Tim Cook, but I wouldn't want his job!"

The folks behind the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, now dubbed “jOBS,” which stars Ashton Kutcher as the late CEO, released a presser this evening to announce the production’s June start date for filming. They also confirmed shooting will begin in the “historic garage” where Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. The film’s early scenes will even feature Jobs’ Los Altos home where he grew up to maintain “accuracy and authenticity” during the movie-making process.
-> http://www.thejobsmovie.com/#!/home

Le interpretazioni di Giulia Sagramola, Michele Petrucci, Jacopo Vecchio, Bianca Bagnarelli e Sergio Algozzino di cinque miti vecchi e nuovi della musica pop e rock nell'antologia a fumetti della Tunué.

today, a new update lets you connect Flipboard with SoundCloud to offer audio clips created by major news services like NPR, and audio clips created by your friends and people you follow.
You can sign into the new SoundCloud component by using a previously created SoundCloud account, by starting a new account, or by using your Facebook account. Once connected, Facebook and Twitter posts, and any story that includes audio, can be listened to with a handy player that resides on the lower left of your screen. You also can browse all the available recommended audio feeds in the new Audio category tab in the Content Guide.
Audio plays another important role in the latest update of Flipboard with added accessibility options, enabling it to read stories out loud for the visually impaired.
One feature that's new to the iPhone version specifically, is the ability to read related sections on social networks. Flipboard describes this as being able to view related sections on Twitter including Your Tweets, Your Favorites, and Tweets Mentioning You.

The update brings a completely new look to the smartphone version of the app, starting with a beautifully overhauled home screen. It not only provides one-tap icons for creating a new note, snapshot, recording, or attachment, but also gives you quick access to your existing notes, notebooks, tags, and places. It's a simple, effective, attractive design.
Navigation has been improved as well: you can now swipe from the home screen to your note list and back again -- a fine improvement over the previous back-button method. Also, you can swipe between notebook, tag, and place views, another welcome tweak.
Evernote's redesigned note list is a little cleaner, with a smarter, easier-to-"figger" toolbar, but I miss the high-contrast section headers. Now everything just sort of blends together. That's one change I could have lived without.
The tablet version, which I tested on a rooted Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, employs a cool tiled interface that's a bit reminiscent of Flipboard. There's no swiping as with the smartphone version, but overall I like its cleaner, more straightforward approach to note lists and management.

A couple of weeks ago, Flickr added a new uploader supporting larger images to its desktop webpage, and now we're seeing the next step in this redesign. The high-res images you upload are now available direct from the photo's main page, if you're using a high enough resolution, with your screen size dictating both the amount of information you see and the size and quality of the image delivered. The new "liquid" design ethos also means that there's no upscaling of images, so your photos should look their best whatever device they're viewed on.

The update is the latest in Flickr's ongoing revamp, and it's clear that each design choice is being made carefully. The page you see is carefully designed to fit the largest possible 4:3 photo (which Flickr says is the most common aspect ratio), so that any smaller images will still fit without the page re-shaping itself every time. The algorithm used also avoids downsampling wherever possible, meaning that if an image is within a given threshold of a size it will be displayed natively. This latest update is available to everyone right now, and the development team says it has plenty in store for the rest of the redesign, too.

Un originale gioco per il tablet di Apple in cui ci vengono proposti rompicapo surreali, con una grafica e uno stile inconfondibili

Adobe has updated Photoshop Touch for the iPad increasing the maximum supported resolution and adding new synchronization and export features. Adobe Photoshop Touch 1.2 now allows users to work with 2048x2048 resolution photos with up to 10 layers, although the default remains at 1600x1600 with 16 layers; users can choose the higher resolution in the application’s Preferences. In addition, Photoshop Touch can now automatically synchronize with Adobe’s Creative Cloud and users can export images to PSD or PNG via the iOS Camera Roll, e-mail and iTunes File Sharing. The updated version also improves workflows for rotating and flipping images, adds two new tutorials and four new effects and is now available in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Italian.

[...] App Store rules don’t allow third-party software runtimes. Yes, Chrome for the desktop is based on WebKit, but it’s Google’s own fork of WebKit, and Google’s own JavaScript engine. Chrome for iOS would have to use iOS’s system standard WebKit, and the slower non-Nitro JavaScript engine.

Last year we proposed the Web Intents API to help web applications integrate with one another with minimal effort. We've now enabled an experimental version of the API in the most recent stable version of Chrome, to gather feedback from the web community and shape the future of the Web Intents API.



This prototype version of Web Intents makes it easier for developers to try out the API and experience its benefits first hand:
Developers who build client apps will be able to easily include functionality from other web services (e.g., photo editing). 
Developers creating those services will no longer need to invest time and resources to negotiate and build hardcoded integrations - they can just focus on offering a great quality product with the integration facilitated by the API. 
In addition, this implementation of Web Intents can help the design discussions in the W3C web intents open standards list.

Filip Radelic, developer of the Cambox application for iPhone, informed AppleInsider on Friday that his software was accepted into the App Store. The approval came after Dropbox modified its development kit with a temporary fix removing the "Make account" feature.

Dropbox also officially confirmed the changes made to its SDK in its developer forums. Brian Smith, who works on the iPhone and iPad versions of Dropbox, said the issue with Apple was resolved after "the worst game of telephone you've ever played."

Using the new SDK, applications no longer offer an option to create an account with Dropbox. If a user attempts to use an application that relies on Dropbox and the official Dropbox application is not installed on their iOS device, the SDK will open a login view for the service directly within the third-party application, rather than opening the Safari Web browser.

The issue stemmed from the fact that Dropbox offers users the ability to purchase more cloud-based storage for their files. By linking to the Dropbox website to ask users to login, they could also follow a link to register for a Dropbox account and pay for additional storage if they so chose.




Apple's official rules for App Store developers explicitly ban links to out-of-app purchases. That's because transactions made through a browser can be used to bypass the App Store and cut Apple out of its 30 percent share of transactions.

Kaspersky has begun analyzing the OS X platform at Apple's request, the company's chief technology officer, Nikolai Grebennikov, originally said in an interview with Computing. The Kaspersky executive has publicly called Apple out for not taking security seriously enough.

"Mac OS is really vulnerable, and Apple recently invited us to improve its security," Grebennikov said. We've begun an analysis of its vulnerabilities, and the malware targeting it."

Update: But in a later comment provided to Engadget, Kaspersky Lab said the quote from Grebennikov was "taken out of context by the magazine." It has asked that the original article be updated to reflect this.

"Apple did not invite or solicit Kaspersky Lab's assistance in analyzing the Mac OS X platform," the statement reads, going on to say that the analysis of OS X was "conducted independently of Apple."

Following a string of complaints across the globe (notably in Australia and the United Kingdom) regarding Apple’s branding of the 4G-LTE compatible iPads, Apple has tweaked the name of their cellular-connecting iPad in some regions. The new name is simply “iPad WiFi + Cellular,” and this is a shift from the former “iPad WiFi + 4G” branding. All first-generation iPad and iPad 2 models with 3G-data connections were referred to as “iPad WiFi + 3G,” and the 3G model of the 16GB iPad 2 that Apple still sells is still called “iPad 2 WiFi + 3G.”



The source of the criticism of the 4G third-generation iPad models is the fact that the 4G LTE only functions in the U.S. and Canada, on a total of five carriers. The third-generation iPad can still connect to any 3G bands worldwide below the LTE level, but Apple still formerly advertised 4G capabilities in non-iPad-4G LTE- supported regions. Apple dropped that marketing weeks ago, but this new iPad name change marks Apple’s full point of not trying to fool customers. Apple did not simply make this iPad name change in the affected Australia and UK regions, but they changed it in the UK, Australia, the U.S., Canada, UAE, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Ireland, and Hong Kong. Not every country (yet?).

While Apple has released updates for both Lion and Snow Leopard to remove the Flashback malware that’s been making its rounds, until today, the company hadn’t released a fix for Leopard. However, this afternoon Apple released a Flashback Removal Security Update for Leopard, that weighs in at 1.23MB. Along with removing the Flashback malware, it also disables the Java plug-in in Safari. Apple described the update:

This update removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware. If the Flashback malware is found, a dialog will notify you that malware was removed. In some cases, the update may need to restart your computer in order to completely remove the Flashback malware…To improve the security of your Mac, this update also disables the Java plug-in in Safari.
Furthermore, Apple also released Security Update 2012-003 for Leopard that “disables versions of Adobe Flash Player that do not include the latest security updates and provides the option to get the current version from Adobe’s website.” A similar update was released for Lion and Snow Leopard in Safari 5.1.7, which was released with OS X 10.7.4 late last week. Hit up Software Update.

This is the first major update Apple has released for Leopard since Lion was released in July of last summer.

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Un coinvolgente racconto del lavoro e delle avventure di John Avery Lomax e del figlio Alan nella loro seminale opera di documentazione del folklore statunitense

Oltre quattrocentomila voci: tutte consultabili, ricercabili e ascoltabili sul nostro iPad grazie alla versione per iOS del dizionario italiano-inglese di Zanichelli.

despite the fact that the Galaxy S III hasn't even been released yet, the Flipboard APK has been posted to the xda-developers forums, allowing any handset to grab the social newsreader. We grabbed the app and loaded it onto an HTC One X, where it runs totally smoothly, and it's worth noting that xda's forum members say it runs just as well on older handsets like the original Galaxy S.

Setting up the app is as simple as picking the topics you're interested in, with Flipboard suggesting common categories, then swiping through the headlines (with large, eye-catching images) until you find something you want to read. From there, tapping through to the story lets you swipe through the pages in the same way. One promised component of the app that hasn't made it to the leaked APK is the widget view, suggesting that this might be an early build, but it's stable enough for everyday use. (Update: some users are reporting that the widget works, we're still unable to see it.) If you decide to give it a try, you'll need to toggle the "Allow installation of non-Market apps" under your Android phone's security settings.

The company has just announced that it's reached 65 million downloads across the platform as a whole, which is just a huge amount of content delivered. And Comixology keeps locking down plans to deliver even more -- their latest deal is with Marvel, and allows Comixology to exclusively release Marvel's single issues digitally through the app. That means every single issue English comic that Marvel puts out is available digitally only through Comixology.

La popolare app per iPad entra a far parte della "famiglia" di Evernote: un acquisto strategico per aggiungere un ulteriore modo di prendere appunti e potenziare la propria offerta.

The shopping spree by cash-rich app company Evernote continues with the acquisition of Penultimate. On Monday, Evernote announced it would be acquiring the breathtakingly simple handwriting app for the iPad. A price was not disclosed.

The purchase makes a lot of sense. Evernote is a web and mobile application that lets users save notes and portions of webpages in one place, accessible from a multitude of web-connected devices. Penultimate, which was recently updated for the iPad’s Retina display, already features Evernote integration. Take notes with Penultimate, and they live in Evernote.

For those fans of Penultimate, Evernote CEO Phil Libin promises not to mess with perfection. “I’ve been in love with Penultimate since it first came out,” Libin told Wired. “The magic of the app is its simplicity, and we’re going to keep it as is: really simple, really pure.” [...]

Last year, Evernote acquired five companies, most notably Skitch, a Mac app that let you take, annotate, and share screenshots. Although they’re not disclosing the financial terms, Penultimate is clearly Evernote’s largest acquisition thus far in terms of popularity and user base: For scope, in March Apple announced Penultimate was the fourth best-selling iPad app of all time.

[CEO] Phil [Libin] noted that handwriting is about a quarter of all of the content on Evernote. Cocoa Box added Evernote integration to Penultimate in January, and many Evernote staffers use the app on a daily basis. Now that Penultimate is part of the Evernote family, it will be much easier for Ben and his team to add Evernote functionality.

One of the early benefits of the acquisition should be improved handwriting recognition. At this point in time, Penultimate users can send their handwritten notes to Evernote, where they're transcribed to editable text via picture-based handwriting recognition. Now Penultimate can be tweaked to capture handwriting stroke information and send it to Evernote for faster and more accurate recognition.

Ben mentioned that up until now, Penultimate has been a fairly self-contained piece of software. Plugging it into a system like Evernote will make the app a view into an Evernote world, bringing along such improvements as better search capabilities. He also noted that their plans include getting Penultimate onto more platforms; unfortunately, I neglected to see if the iPhone was one of those platforms.

Along with the many other apps that are part of the Evernote ecosystem -- Evernote Food, Evernote Hello, Evernote Clearly, Skitch, Evernote Web Clipper, Evernote Peek, and a growing number of third-party apps -- Penultimate adds to the overall usefulness of Evernote. Phil Libin once noted that he wants Evernote to last for at least one hundred years, and with tools like Penultimate added to the mix, that dream is getting more likely every day.

Hot on the heels of raising a $70 million funding round, the popular note-taking service Evernote is announcing today that it has acquired Cocoa Box Design, publishers of the iPad handwriting app, Penultimate.
The Penultimate note-taking app currently has integration into Evernote: You can send pages you create in the app to a linked Evernote account. It integrates with Dropbox the same way.
Evernote CEO Phil Libin told me the app won't be changed substantially, though integration into Evernote will be made tighter. "The important thing is to not break it," Libin says. Evernote will, however, put more resources into the app and port it to additional platforms.
Handwriting was at the heart of Evernote in the beginning, Libin told me. But over time, the product shifted to being more text-based. "We had handwriting in a very early Windows version," he says, "but we neglected it. I neglected it." Libin says the iPad changed everything. "I didn't anticipate the iPad or how beautiful you could make an app like Penultimate."
He says Evernote's character-recognition technology will allow Penultimate notes to be searchable in Evernote data stores. "We have the back-end technology that's great for handwriting but we've never expressed it this way."
Libin points to Evernote's acquisition of the Mac app Skitch in August of 2011 to show how the company hopes to absorb the new app. Skitch is still a separate product but now has an easy way to push images into Evernote. The iPad and Android versions are even more tightly integrated.
More features, and possibly acquisitions, are coming to pipe content into Evernote. The company also recently acquired Minds Momentum, which makes the to-do list app Egretlist. It will be the basis for an Evernote to-do list manager later this year, Libin says.
Terms of the sale of Cocoa Box are not being disclosed, but Penultimate founder Ben Zotto is already working out of the Evernote office in Mountain View, Calif.

"After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering," the official response from Apple Developer Connection's Worldwide Developer Relations team reads.

The developer said they have often used Apple's Bug Reporter to submit requests for new features. However, this standard form letter is the first time that Apple has actually responded to such a submission from this particular developer.

Apple's response is not the first indication that the company may be working on multi-user support for the iPad. In 2010, before the iPad was officially announced, The Wall Street Journal reported that an early prototype of the device was designed to be shared by and customized for multiple family members.

Evernote [...] ha annunciato oggi l’acquisizione di Penultimate, la più popolare applicazione per prendere appunti a mano su iPad, e la quarta app per iPad più acquistata in assoluto. L’acquisizione permetterà a Evernote di ampliare le proprie capacità di scrittura a mano e renderà Penultimate disponibile su un maggior numero di piattaforme e dispositivi.

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As Apple gears up to shutter its MobileMe service next month, the company has extended its offer of an additional 20GB of free storage in iCloud until September 30, 2012.
Apple offered MobileMe subscribers the additional iCloud storage last year in an effort to convince customers to switch over from the sunset service. Users also received a free subscription to MobileMe until June 30, 2012, the service's last day.

Mac Otakara noted on Sunday that Apple had extended the additional storage from its original June 30 expiration to Sept. 30. A Frequently Asked Questions page on Apple's website was recently updated to reflect the extension.

LinkedIn will spend US$118.75m to upload SlideShare into its portfolio of offerings.

CEO Jeff Weiner says, in a press release, that the reason for the buy is that “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity.”

Declaring himself “very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn,” Weiner expanded on the importance of presentations, saying they “ … also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members.”

An Apple programmer, apparently by accident, left a debug flag in the most recent version of the Mac OS X operating system. In specific configurations, applying OS X Lion update 10.7.3 turns on a system-wide debug log file that contains the login passwords of every user who has logged in since the update was applied. The passwords are stored in clear text.

Anyone who used FileVault encryption on their Mac prior to Lion, upgraded to Lion, but kept the folders encrypted using the legacy version of FileVault is vulnerable. FileVault 2 (whole disk encryption) is unaffected.

The flaw was first reported by a security researcher David Emery, who posted his findings to the Cryptome mailing list. The bug has not been corrected by any subsequent updates.

Microsoft has detected a new piece of malware targeting Apple OS X computers that exploits a vulnerability in the Office productivity suite patched nearly three years ago. Microsoft advised those who use Microsoft Office 2004 or 2008 for Mac or the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac to ensure those products have applied their patch.

The malware is not widespread, wrote Jeong Wook Oh of Microsoft's Malware Protection Center. But it does show that hackers pay attention if it's found people do not apply patches as those fixes are released, putting their computers at a higher risk of becoming infected.

"Exploiting Mac OS X is not much different from other operating systems," Oh wrote. "Even though Mac OS X has introduced many mitigation technologies to reduce risk, your protection against security vulnerabilities has a direct correlation with updating installed applications."

The security update that Microsoft released in June 2009, MS09-027, addressed two vulnerabilities that could be used by an attacker to gain remote control over a machine and run other code. Both vulnerabilities could be exploited with a specially-crafted Word document.



The exploit discovered by Microsoft doesn't work with OS X Lion, but does work with Snow Leopard and prior versions. Oh wrote that it is likely attackers have knowledge about the computers they are attacking, such as the victim's operating system version and patch levels.

The malware delivered by the exploit is written specifically for OS X and is basically a "backdoor," or a tool that allows for remote control of a computer.

"In conclusion, we can see that Mac OS X is not safe from malware," Oh wrote. "Statistically speaking, as this operating system gains in consumer usage, attacks on the platform will increase."

Firefox is receiving yet another interface overhaul. Dubbed Australis, the new UI (and UX) will span, embrace, and unify the desktop, tablet, and smartphone versions of Firefox. [...] Australis, rather sensibly, is an attempt to build a user interface/experience model that works and feels the same across every platform; Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Starting with the premise that Firefox is “soft, friendly, and human,” Australis is as curvy as a curvy thing. While the desktop version of Australis obviously has more browser chrome (buttons/widgets) than the smartphone and tablet versions, all three share one recurring feature: Rounded corners everywhere. Tabs are positively swoopy (their curves are likened to those of an aerodynamic supercar). The bottom left and right corners of the browser window will be rounded. The tab thumbnails (when switching tabs on Firefox for Android) have rounded corners. Pop-up dialogs, such as Settings or Downloads, have rounded corners. The address bar and search bar are no longer rectangular: They’re rounded rectangles.