Author: Dr. Bill

Ouch! This is bad for Apple mobile device competitors!

Patent Approved: Apple Now Owns “Slide to Unlock”

“Most touchscreen devices have some sort of slide-to-unlock function. Whether it’s up, down or side to side, a swift, predefined gesture is the way most of us unlock our touchscreen phones and tablets. However, it looks like any phone that does do this is infringing upon a patent owned by iPhone maker Apple.

9to5 Mac reports that the United States Patent and Trademark Office yesterday morning granted Apple approval on a patent an application covering ‘a predefined gesture for unlocking the device.’ Specifically, the patent lays out a scenario where the device is unlocked if contact with the display corresponds to a predefined gesture for unlocking the device:

‘The device displays one or more unlock images with respect to which the predefined gesture is to be performed in order to unlock the device. The performance of the predefined gesture with respect to the unlock image may include moving the unlock image to a predefined location and/or moving the unlock image along a predefined path.’

The application for this patent was filed in 2009, two years after the first iPhone was announced, and one year after the first Android phone hit the market. Though Apple has not yet mentioned anything about pursuing other companies that are now in violation of this patent, we doubt the company will waste any time in taking competitors to court over this one.”

Ouch! Mozilla getting into bed with Microsoft?!? How far down have they come? Oh, the humanity!

Mozilla delivers Binged-up Firefox browser

“Mozilla has released a customised version of Firefox that defaults to Microsoft’s Bing.

The customised Firefox, released yesterday, sets Bing as your default search engine in the search box. AwesomeBar will also set Bing.com as your home page. If Bing on Firefox is your thing, you can download it here. Existing Firefoxers can change by installing the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on.

In a brief announcement here, Mozilla said a Bing-flavoured version of its browser extends the partnership with Microsoft announced last year.

That Microsoft deal, announced in October 2010, saw Mozilla add Bing to a list of search-engine options in the pull-down menu. This allows you to switch from the traditional default, Google.

Before that users could manually add Bing to the menu.

Microsoft welcomed Wednesday’s Bing update to Firefox, saying: ‘Now Firefox users who are Bing enthusiasts can use Firefox with Bing to use the web the way they want without having to take extra steps to navigate or customise their settings to Bing.’

Under its 2010 deal with Microsoft, Mozilla signed a financial agreement with the software giant to share revenue based on traffic sent from Firefox to Bing.

Details were not released back then or this week. The Mozilla post announcing the Binged Firefox browser makes no mention of financials.

Mozilla has been slowly separating itself from Google for about a year.”

Oh, yeah! I knew it wouldn’t be long! Now, Android is the “app-download king!”

Android Blows Past Apple To Take The Lead In Market Share For App Downloads

“According to fresh data from ABI Research, more Android apps were downloaded in Q2 2011 than iOS apps.

Makes sense since Android is a bigger platform, but we think this is a first for the rival mobile platforms.

The good news for Apple: It still gets more downloads per user than Android.

And, ABI says, ‘Apple’s superior monetization policies attracted good developers within its ranks, thus creating a better catalog of apps and customer experience.’

This is key for Apple. As Android grows and grows, the iOS platform is put at risk. If developers start flocking to Android with its greater user base — or if developers just built Android apps first — then Apple’s software advantage dissapears. For now, developers are still happier with iOS despite the smaller user base and smaller number of total downloads.”

Woo hoo! Techpodcast Network shows (including Dr. Bill.TV!) are now available on Samsung Smart TVs! How cool is that?!? Todd said in an email to TPN content creators, “We are one of the very first to be on Samsung, Twit is not there, Revision Three is not there but we are.. The app will migrate to all devices in few days if you do not see it in your Samsung device.. This was a huge amount of work not only for the programming team but also the legal hurdles where significant.”

Tech Podcast Network Shows Available on Samsung Smart TV

“RawVoice, the pioneer in digital media production, hosting and dissemination, is proud to announce the addition of their Samsung Smart TV application for TVs and Blu-ray Players. The TechPodcast Network (TPN) App allows content creators to reach connected audiences that will watch and listen to the networks shows in their offices, dens, living rooms, bedrooms, and anywhere else they watch television.

‘We are excited to be on Samsung Smart TV and Blu-ray platform, and have taken care to make our app experience consistent across all media platforms, allowing consumers to easily switch from device to device to access our networks shows,’ said Todd Cochrane, CEO of RawVoice. ‘The Samsung App is just another extension to our arsenal of media distribution channels.’

Audiences can manage their playlists through the apps MyCast service, whether they have a TPN user account or not. Subscribing to a show is as easy as pressing the subscribe button.

The TPN Community App lets you:
-Navigate the menu system with ease using our MyCast feature to find new content while using TV remote control or while alternately managing your playlist in front of a computer.
-Check out ‘Editors Picks’ for a new selection of great shows each week on the tech topics you care about, ranging from tech news, gaming, platform news, etc.
-Find high quality child-safe shows. All shows featured on the Samsung App have qualified their shows through their account manager at TechPodcasts.com.
With the Samsung Smart TV Channel, TPN provides our members the ability to access new markets that reach a worldwide audience of all demographics.

RawVoice advertisers now have another channel to reach the exclusive audiences that watch the networks content.

Media companies looking to launch their own Samsung Smart TV app should contact RawVoice to develop and deploy their branded Internet-connected TV channel. RawVoice has deployed channel apps on a variety of devices including Roku, Boxee, Google TV, etc.

Tech Podcast Network is a community supported website dedicated to the promotion of technology by using the Internet. These initiatives include streaming, podcasting, and new technology delivery mechanisms. The content producers actively support the broader technology community with a wide variety of content related to technology subjects.

TPN is part of the RawVoice digital media community that also includes Blubrry, Pro Med and TravelCast networks. The RawVoice digital media community has led the way in fulfilling digital media distribution needs since 2004, enabling content creators to publish audio and video or blog content channels and manage users.

Maybe… depends on your phone’s hardware, but it may be possible!

Ice Cream Sandwich supports USB game controllers and HDMI, turns your phone into full game console

“Take that, Xperia Play. USB gamepads are already supported in Honeycomb, so we had plenty of hope that Android 4.0 — also lovingly referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich — would offer the same functionality. We finally have the answer, and it’s a resounding yes, courtesy of Google framework engineer Romain Guy’s Twitter account. The cool part, though, is that HDMI’s playing nice as well. In short, you could hook up an external gamepad to a USB-to-microUSB adapter on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, connect it to your TV and transform your handset into a fancy portable gaming console. It’s definitely something we can see developers flock towards, and we’ll expect some cool stuff to come out of it. Just in case you thought the Nexus wouldn’t let you get anything else done around the house already, this pretty much seals the deal.

Simplify, simplify, simplify! That seems to be the theme behind Google [upcoming refresh of the Gmail interface. Sounds good!

Google confirms Gmail’s pending makeover

“A YouTube video leaked on to the Web (subsequently deleted but since reposted) shows off the new interface for the Web giant’s e-mail service. Jason Cornwell, a user experience designer for Gmail, walks viewers through the major changes ahead.

A Google representative confirmed the video’s authenticity but declined to provide further details.

‘Oops, you weren’t supposed to see that,’ Google representative Andrea Freund told CNET. ‘Stay tuned, we’ll be sharing more info on Gmail’s new look soon.’

The new look is designed to be cleaner, simpler, and more intuitive, he said. One of the biggest changes is that the Gmail window will automatically adapt to whatever size the user chooses.

Conversations have been redesigned to ‘feel more like a real conversation,’ he said, noting that user profile pictures have been added next to their comments, similar to how many instant messaging and chat applications work.

Google is making the size of the label and chat areas on the left more flexible, he said. ‘Even if you do nothing, Gmail adapts to you,’ he said. Gmail has also overhauled search to make it more customizable.”

Watch the video below to see!

Puppy Linux, that is! I really like Puppy Linux! Especially for older machines. If you haven’t tried it, download this new version and install it on one of your older, clunkier systems, and watch it fly!

Puppy Linux 5.2 (Wary) optimized for older PCs

“The Puppy Linux project announced version 5.2 of the legacy-PC friendly ‘Wary’ version of its small-footprint Linux distribution. Puppy Linux 5.2 (“Wary”) features an SMP-optimized version of the Linux 2.6.32.45 kernel, an upgrade path to Xorg 7.6, an updated PuppyPhone 1.1 VoIP app, and a new PupCamera app for automatically detecting digital cameras, says the project.

As with previous Puppy Linux releases — including Puppy Linux 5.0 and Puppy Linux 4.3 — Puppy Linux 5.2 is a fairly ‘minimalist’ distro designed for those who like their operating systems fast and lean. It is available in a 123MB ISO image, and can load entirely into RAM for faster performance, according to the project. The distro can boot off a flash card or USB device, as well as CD-ROMs and other media.
In order to fit that footprint, you won’t find many big-name applications built in. Most are minimalist apps developed by the Puppy community.

Puppy Linux 5.2 is one of many Puppy variants built on the project’s ‘Woof’ build system, including Lucid, Racy, FatDog, and Slacko. Introduced in November 2008, and joined in 2009 with a related Puppy Package Manager (PPM), Woof can build a Puppy variant from the packages of any Linux distro, including Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Slackware, and T2, the foundation used by this latest Wary release.

In addition to ‘Wary,’ the other major variant is called Lucid Puppy (‘Lupu’), which was released in its 5.2.8 version in August. Based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Lucid Puppy offers Ubuntu compatibility and more cutting-edge features. For example, the latest release added C and FFmpeg libraries optimized for i686 computers rather than the older i386 computers, thereby improving performance, says the project.”