ios

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Microsoft buys Skype

Google's Music Beta

Underage Facebook users

More content coming to YouTube

Pirates face suit over Stallone flick

Adobe releases iPad apps

SAN FRANCISCO--Angry Birds is coming to Web.

At the Google I/O developer conference today, Rovio head Peter Vesterbacka took the stage and demonstrated the popular game played in the Google Chrome browser.

Rovio is using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build the Web-based app. And it's hosted on the Google App engine. The game is available free of charge in Google's Chrome Web Store in "beta."

Vesterbacka said Rovio liked Chrome in particular for the browser-based version of the game. Building Web apps with high-end graphics is tough in a browser, CNET's Stephen … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--On the second day of Google's developer conference here, the Google team announced a feature that lets developers add one-touch in-app purchasing to their Chrome Web Store apps, using Google's payment system.

Now with a single click, app users can make a purchase and then jump right back to the application, be it a comic book, game, or whatever else.

In addition to making it easy for users to make one-touch payments, said Google's Vikas Gupta, the company wanted to make it simple for developers to add the feature--it requires the addition of only a single … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why yesterday.

Because people can scrutinize Android's source code, modify it, and build it into their own hardware, the mobile operating system qualifies as open-source software. But Google exercises tight control over what gets built into the official Android software, what gets released as Android, and when that source code appears--especially with the tablet-oriented Honeycomb version.

The reason for Google's approach is so the company can control Android's interfaces, the underlying features that … Read more

Today's Google doodle honors choreographer Martha Graham's birthday--and with animated dancers revealing it, the doodle also showcases the company's push to build a more dynamic Web.

The only problem: some people find it's slowing their machines. That's hardly the outcome that Google--obsessed over every millisecond of delay in delivering search results--could have wanted.

The dynamic doodle is a rarity for Google, but you can expect more as the company tries to draw attention to what can be done on the Web, not just to the subjects of its doodles. Indeed, Google had a whole session … Read more

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET reporters. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. To get the key points from today's announcement, you can check out our summary of what got announced, in our story here.

Google I/O day one was about Android and music, but the second … Read more

Not only is the Android OS customizable, but now you can customize the hardware that Android runs on thanks to Google's new Android Device Kit.

Check out this slideshow showcasing several examples from Google I/O 2011 of what the ADK can do.

SAN FRANCISCO--iRobot hopes someday soon a robot waiter will deliver your food--and it might well use an Android tablet to see, hear, speak, and think.

At the Google I/O show here today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle showed off a prototype called AVA that the company plans to begin selling this year to developers to try to ignite the market.

Today there are two general robot types that are sustainable businesses: high-end, expensive ones for defusing bombs in Afghanistan or monitoring radiation in Japan, and low-end ones for vacuuming. Angle wants an intermediate category and believes tablets will enable that market to develop.

"The third option is the interesting one, with technology advances enabling robots to do things more like Rosie from the Jetsons," Angle told thousands of developers assembled at Google's show. "That's where you all come in. The robot industry can't be trusted to solve this problem. We need the mobile computing industry to come in and save our bacon through things like this."

AVA grafts a tablet onto a mobile robot body that can navigate floors. An Android-powered Motorola Xoom tablet was not just the brains of the operation, but the senses and face as well.

"We in the robot industry realized this is a fantastic head for a robot," with a camera and microphone for visual input and a screen and speakers to let people interact with the robot. "What was missing was the body," Angle said.

Thus, AVA, with a tablet on top of a stalk and a wider base with wheels to move around. The robot can create its own map of an area as it navigates. … Read more

Frisbee Forever is the fully licensed flying disc app that lets you guide a Frisbee disc through colorful obstacle courses. Against a cartoonlike 3D backdrop, you start by flicking your Frisbee onscreen, then guiding the disc through rings and around obstacles, all the while gathering stars as you go. You have the option to use onscreen control arrows, but I found the tilt controls to be much more fun. If you gather all the stars and make it through all the gates to the finish line, you'll be awarded a gold medal along with experience points and Star Coins. … Read more