Hardware

According to German Web site Macerkopf.de, iOS 5.1, the first major update to Apple's mobile operating system, will give Apple's voice-controlled assistant Siri the capability to access certain hardware features of the iPhone 4S.

The Web site's source is listed as an Apple developer commenting on a forthcoming iOS 5.0.2 update that will address battery issues yet again, as well as the future iOS 5.1 update that will contain the Siri updates.

If you're a power user, this news should be fairly exciting. Giving Siri the capability to adjust hardware settings … Read more

Microsoft today launched a Web site, The Art of Touch, that lets Netizens create their own digital paintings.

On the site, which uses HTML5, users can select three different width paint brushes as well as six effects that alter each "brush stroke" with mouse movements. The palette of pastel colors are pre-selected, generated as would-be artists move their mice at different speeds. So when users slide their mouse slowly, for example, they can create a ribbon of red surrounded by starbursts of blue and yellow.

For Microsoft, the idea is to generate interest in its "Touch" … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software took the hardware acceleration plunge today with the release of its first alpha version of Opera 12, code-named Wahoo.

Hardware acceleration offers a range of benefits to Web browsers--faster performance, lower battery consumption, and new features that would be otherwise impractical. So it's no surprise that browser makers--catalyzed in part by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9--have been rebuilding their engines to support the idea.

But Opera, while not the first with hardware acceleration, thinks it's got a competitive approach. It uses hardware for everything its Vega display engine handles--font display, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) effects, … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software is a browser company, but its chief technology officer believes the modern Web still could learn a thing or two from publishing technology that's hundreds of years old.

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and … Read more

OSLO--The next version of Opera Software's browser will get a major graphics-hardware boost, an approach that's been spreading to browsers keen to increase battery life, improve performance, and enable new features.

"Everything is accelerated," said Jan Standal, Opera's vice president of desktop products, in an interview today at the company's Up North Web press event here about Opera 12. "The whole user interface."

Specifically, that means hardware acceleration for Cascading Style Sheets transitions and animations, for Canvas 2D drawing, and for text, he said. And Opera 12 gets support for the WebGL … Read more

In a conference call Thursday, HP Chairman Ray Lane and newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman reaffirmed HP's commitment to hardware .

Ray Lane--who is now executive chairman, a more active position than his previous role as nonexecutive chairman--began the conference call by stating that "as an active member of HP's board of directors for the past 8 months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and our markets...as an executive chairman I will partner with Meg and support her as she leads the management team to improve execution and enhance accountability."

Whitman began by addressing … Read more

Monotype Imaging is bringing its font-rendering software a step into the future with hardware acceleration features it expects will help improve readability, add fancy features such as 3D, and offload work from mobile devices' main processors.

The company, while perhaps best known for creating and licensing typefaces, also has a business selling software that lets printers print the text and devices such as e-book readers display it on screens. It's this last category where the company offers its iType product, and the new version 5.0 announced today adds the new hardware acceleration features.

iType 5.0 draws upon … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for some popular maintenance tools, a few file management and search utilities, and a couple of hardware management suites, including a relatively good software monitor calibrator.

Maintenance With OS X Lion's release the various maintenance … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were mainly updates for file system management tools, but also a couple of maintenance tools and a hardware utility.

Files and file systemWhile not technically applications, AppleScripts and compiled AppleScript applications can be coded to perform a variety … Read more