Development

Barely a day goes by that some company doesn't pitch me on its mobile application developer tools. It shows just how hot the market has become.

I'm not a programmer, but when I got the announcement that iBuildApp now supports Android as well as iOS, I thought I'd dabble a bit. The sales pitch is that anybody can create an app with their tools for free, after all. The company asserts that 10,000 people have already used it.

Not every app is necessarily great, though, and unfortunately, I found iBuildApp's tool unsatisfying. It was workable … Read more

Apple's new beta version of iOS 5 has been jailbroken for the second time this week, now opening the door for users to jailbreak their iOS 5 devices using the latest version of the popular Redsn0w tool.

In a blog post today about the new jailbreak, the iPhone-dev Team, a group of hackers that target Apple devices, announced that it has released a tethered redsn0w jailbreak for iOS 5.

As with the group's first jailbreak of iOS 5 earlier this week, the redsn0w jailbreak will let users install Cydia, which allows them to use apps unapproved and unsanctioned … Read more

Apple's devices are "very difficult to make," says the head of Apple device supplier Hon Hai, but improvements in efficiency should start to "pay off" later this year.

Speaking yesterday at his company's annual shareholder meeting, Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou admitted that profit growth has been sluggish because of the difficulty in making iPhones and iPads, according to Bloomberg and other sources. Hon Hai's Foxconn unit directly assembles the popular devices for Apple.

Gou's statement confirms other reports that have pointed to manufacturing difficulties in ramping up Apple's latest devices. … Read more

LONDON--In the future, somebody walking into a hotel room or a museum will get the opportunity to install an app for that location, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch predicted.

The idea, which Lynch demonstrated at the Open Mobile Summit here to show just how feasible it is, stems from the ever-tighter links between the physical and virtual worlds we inhabit. And it shows that there's still plenty of room for mobile devices to become even more important in people's lives, as if there were any doubt.

"There's a strong future for us with this social- … Read more

Apple's WWDC keynote is now behind us and if they're not at E3, tech journalists around the blogsphere are taking a rest. We didn't get a new iPhone or any new hardware, but Apple rolled out the company's new iCloud service, its Lion OS, and iOS 5, the latest version of its mobile operating system.

We've detailed the full list of changes in our iOS 5 first take--and frankly, they aren't terribly extensive--but we also downloaded the developers version of the update for a test drive. Keep in mind that the final consumer … Read more

As CNET's Nicole Lee reported this morning, Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha this week said that 70 percent of customers returning Moto smartphones are doing so because of poorly written apps that strain the CPU or battery. That's reasonable, but I suggest that there's a more obvious issue at hand here, and it affects more than just Motorola. The problem is poor education. Simply put, most new Android users don't know what they are getting into when they buy a new phone.

Here's a quick, Occam's Razor-style approach to looking at the problem. To … Read more

The MacDefender developers are continuing to uphold their criminal attempts to steal Mac users' information by changing the name of their scam software yet again. So far they have been using the naming scheme of the word "Mac" followed by a security-related word such as Defender, Security, or Protector. The latest name to be used for this software is MacShield, and as with the other names appears to be a drop-in change to the same interface used in the other malware. Unfortunately, beside being confusing to users, this naming scheme is adversely affecting legitimate Mac developers who have … Read more

Update (June 2, 7:51am): In less than a day Apple's Snow Leopard is back in the lead with the ability to detect this new variant.

Let the cat and mouse games commence. Less than a day after Apple tackled the malware threats in OS X with an updated implementation of its malware detection technologies, the MacDefender malware developers have issued another variant that bypasses Apple's definitions to root out and remove the malware.

As described by ZDNet editor Ed Bott, the new variant comes as a download called "Mdinstall.pkg" and will run without being … Read more

Nvidia, an emerging power in the world of ARM processors for smartphones and tablets, has published a demonstration game called Glowball the company says shows what can be achieved with its quad-core Kal-El mobile processor project.

In the demo, an internally lit ball rolls around a playing board. With "dynamic lighting," shapes on the ball's exterior casting shadows on stacked barrels, lurking jack-in-the-boxes, hanging rugs, and a creepy clown face. The game's physics engine is wired into the tablet's accelerometer to determine how the ball rolls, the rugs hang, and the barrels tumble.

"All … Read more