Development

Eagle-eyed readers have been pointing out a curious omission on the imagery of the iPad-theme invitation Apple released this morning: there's no home button in sight.

The simplest explanation here is that it's a photo of (what is presumably) an iPad 2 on its side, something that's not that much of a stretch, given that the iPad has been designed to work the same way, no matter which end is down.

Yet it's also curious, given rumors of Apple ditching the home button on the iPad, an option that came to light when the company introduced … Read more

Not long after Mozilla brought its browser to Android, the organization has adapted its Jetpack tools for building browser add-ons for mobile use, too.

"Now you can start developing add-ons for the mobile version of Firefox," said Dave Mason, Mozilla's product manager for add-on technologies, in a mailing list message yesterday about the latest Jetpack, formally called the Add-on SDK version 1.5. "For this initial release we have the page-mod API working so that you can, among other things, create add-ons that will display mobile-friendly versions of Web sites that do not have that option.&… Read more

If you've taken a look at Apple's sneak peek of its upcoming revision to OS X, you might wonder if your system will be able to run the operating system. In recent versions of OS X, some requirements have resulted in older hardware no longer working properly, including the drop of PowerPC support in Snow Leopard, and Lion not installing on some of the earliest Intel-based Mac systems.

Unfortunately Apple has not yet officially released the system requirements for the new OS, but the developer release that is being issued to members of its Mac development community does … Read more

In the battle between native apps and Web sites, an Italian startup called Apps Builder wants to help those on the Web side defect to the enemy.

The company offers a subscription-based Web service that converts Web sites into mobile applications. Last month it added Windows Phone app support to its earlier options--iOS, Android, HTML-based Web apps, and Chrome Web apps. And it's seeing some significant usage of its service.

Specifically, the company just passed the milestone of 20,000 apps developed through Apps Builder, and those apps have been downloaded a million times from their various app stores, … Read more

After a less than perfect 2011 in which even HTC admits that it "tried to do too much," the handset maker is looking at the new year with a new perspective.

What should the company do to resurrect the glowing brand that helped build Android? Ask around and you'll get a variety of suggestions, from releasing considerably fewer devices to scrapping its custom Sense UI skin. Talk to HTC, however, and you'll find that it has plans of its own.

Recently, the company announced that it has formed a new internal group for creating key products … Read more

One of the pesky fragmentation issues Android programmers must worry about is different screen sizes.

With resolution changing from one phone to another, programmers have to figure out exactly how much room they can devote to icons, photos, video game backgrounds, dialog boxes. But, Google argues, paying the price upfront pays programmers back in the long run--and helps them avoid the fixed-resolution difficulties that afflicted Palm.

Indeed, even before the first Android phone hit the market, Google had set on an approach designed to accommodate not just different pixel resolutions, but also pixel densities--the number of pixels per inch. Android … Read more

This year's Consumer Electronics Show may not have produced much in the way of quad-core Android phones, save one Fujitsu-made Android prototype that was encased and untouchable, but make no mistake: this is their year.

Thanks to abundant and well-defined product leaks, we have strong expectations for next month's Mobile World Congress (MWC). Thanks to quad-core devices already in existence, like the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, we also have a real-world example of just how big a performance leap we'll see between dual-core and quad-core speeds.… Read more

One of the more widespread malware efforts over the past few years was the DNSChanger scam, which installed a Trojan horse that would change the DNS server settings on affected computers to divert traffic to rogue servers.

The DNS system is essentially the Internet's phone book that allows your computer to resolve a URL to the IP address of the server that hosts its contents. By changing a computer so that it uses a rogue DNS server, the DNSChanger malware was thus able to redirect valid URLs (such as those for banking institutions) to malicious Web sites in order … Read more

If you've been following the development of the Raspberry Pi, you know that it's a $25 bare-bones PC that could go on sale as early as this month.

What would you do with such a tiny, low-powered machine? How about turning it into a poor man's Apple TV? That's exactly what one Raspberry Pi developer did, as shown in this video. It depicts a YouTube video streaming from an iPad to a Pi, which is connected to a TV, using a bit of AirPlay-powered hackery. Take a look:… Read more