Apps and software

E-Ink sees a big future in small displays.

Perhaps best known for making the display for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, E-Ink is hoping to capitalize on the growing hubbub around smartwatches with an addition Monday to its Mobius line of electronic paper displays that measures 1.73 inches. The Mobius flexible display is based on thin film transistor (TFT) technology developed by Sony.

The screen, which supports a resolution of 320x240 pixels with 16 gray-scale levels, is touted as lightweight and rugged, making it ideal for use in smartwatches. The new screen will make its debut in the Sonostar Smartwatch, … Read more

TAIPEI -- Are you someone who loves drawing on a smartphone but bemoans the fact that you need a Galaxy Note 2 to get the precise strokes required for your masterpiece?

Well, the good news is that during a demonstration at the Computex electronics show in Taiwan, Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a software-based pressure sensitive display powered by the company's Tegra 4 chipset, and he was using a normal nondigitizer stylus to draw on it.

The trick behind the tech lies in Nvidia's Prism display, introduced with the Tegra 3. Prism basically reads the screen … Read more

In what has become an annual ritual, the higher-end segment of Intel's new generation of processors has been launched at the Computex trade show in Taipei. This includes the quad-core versions of what Intel calls the fourth-generation Core i-series, which was until recently known by the code name Haswell, and was extensively previewed at CES 2013.

Quad-core CPUs are generally found in higher-end desktops and laptops, and are part of Intel's i7 CPU line. Most mainstream PCs use Core i3 and i5 dual-core CPUs -- the Haswell versions of those are coming later.

For laptop and desktop shoppers, … Read more

Editors' note: This story was originally published on August 20, 2012. It has been updated several times since then to include additional programs and other details, most recently with Start Menu Reviver on May 15, 2013.

Still miss the classic Start menu in Windows 8? Never fear, alternatives are here.

Microsoft lopped off the Start menu in Windows 8 to force people to use the Start screen. And I'll admit it, the Start screen does offers several benefits.

Live Tiles can clue you in to the latest e-mails, appointments, news, and other information. You can easily search for any … Read more

Updating apps in Windows 8.1 will apparently be a simpler process than it is in Windows 8.

Users who installed the latest Windows 8.1 build, known as 9385, discovered that several apps had automatically updated themselves in the background, according to blog site Winbeta. One of the apps that took care of its own update was a new one called Movie Moments, which lets people create and edit short video clips.

The new update process could be an improvement over the one in Windows 8. Currently, people are notified of new app updates but need to venture into … Read more

In the first part of our Living with Chromebook series, I outlined the initial hardware and account setup required to use a laptop running Google's Chrome OS. In this second installment, the focus is on productivity.

For my long-form Chromebook test-drive, I'm spending most of my computing time with the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook. Like the smaller 11- and 12-inch Chromebooks we've reviewed, it operates almost entirely within the Chrome Web browser, which looks and feels the same as the Chrome Web browser you may be using right now on your Windows or Mac OS computer.

That … Read more

Microsoft has updated its various Bing apps for Windows 8 in a move designed to make them quicker to use and easier to customize.

The News app now lets you manage the different news categories that appear in the app. You can add or remove categories for world news, technology, politics, business, and entertainment, and sort the order in which they appear. You can also add a particular news source or RSS feed to your featured sources and to the Windows Start screen so that you can more quickly access their stories.

The News app's app bar has also … Read more

Microsoft has tweaked its Xbox Music app with a few audible enhancements.

The app now lets you add and sync your songs from your local library to the cloud so they're available on your other Windows 8 or RT devices. You can also automatically add any matched songs from your library to the cloud.

You have more options when listening to an album. You can tell the app to repeat as well as shuffle songs. You can turn on a Smart DJ feature that tries to create a playlist based on songs you may like. Finally, Xbox Music offers … Read more

Microsoft has tweaked its Mail, Calendar, and People apps for Windows 8 and RT users with some much-need improvements.

The three core apps, which are bundled together, received some long overdue tweaks last night that make them a bit more user-friendly. But along with those improvements comes one negative: the Calendar app will no longer sync with Google Calendar appointments.

On the plus side, the Mail app now offers full folder management. You can create, rename, and delete folders and subfolders to better organize your e-mail.

Managing individual messages is also much easier. You can select multiple e-mails to delete, … Read more