This was pretty obvious and it's basically already an officially endorsed logo, but a Microsoft Japan employee has confirmed the new look anyway. We also spotted the new square logo in quite a few places like the Mango Preview Event trailer, the hardware shown off at WPC 2011, the leaked video of the Nokia Sea Ray, and plenty of other places. Despite this being sort of old news at this point, this is still an important piece of the Mango launch puzzle which is becoming clearer with every passing day.
Personally I think the logo is a big improvement and is much more consistent with the Metro UI than the old logo. What do you think?
When it comes to electronics in general, naming conventions and styles of each company can differ so greatly that figuring out exactly which one is what you want solely through its name is a nauseating challenge. Nokia attempted to simplify their previous naming conventions with a letter/numbers combination but the end result was much more confusing than intended, the best examples of it are the Nokia C7 and C7-01 which share a similar name but are completely different from one another.
Earlier this morning Nokia launched a new Symbian Anna powered device simply called the '500' (seen above) and as you may be able to tell, the manufacturer has decided on a new numbers-only system which it went on to explain in detail in a post to its Nokia Conversations blog. Nokia is using the numbers in a very linear way and promises that devices with higher numbers will be better devices than lower numbers; for example, the Nokia 900 will always be a superior device to the Nokia 700.
The reason all of this is pertinent to this site is because Nokia is most likely going to use this new naming scheme for its upcoming Windows Phones. That means the rumored W8 and W7 are probably not debuting with those names anymore and the Sea Ray will most likely not follow the N9 to logically become the W9. We have no idea what these will be called and we're unsure if Windows Phones are going to get mixed into the numbers without any sort of indication that it is not Symbian, but at least Nokia is trying to make things less complicated.
Wanted to attend Microsoft's upcoming new BUILD Conference in Anaheim, CA this year? Tough luck. The event to be held from September 13th to the 16th is already sold out. This ahead-of-schedule sellout is most likely due to the deafening hype around Windows 8 that has been building since its debut at D9 earlier this year. There's also a pretty strong chance that Microsoft will unleash its first public beta of the new OS at the event. Sorry if you missed out on saving a spot, and you may just want to finally download that reminder app you've been putting off lately.
Using the Support area of its website, Apple is informing customers that one OS X Lion feature – AirDrop – will be supported only on relatively new hardware.
“AirDrop is one of the great new features of Lion that provides a really easy way to share files between supported, Wi-Fi enabled Macs, without having to connect through the local Wi-Fi network,” Apple says. Even though you’ve been able to install Lion on your Core 2 Duo iMac from 2006, AirDrop won’t show in your menubar under Go, as shown in the image above.
In fact, Apple bluntly states that “If AirDropisn’t listed under the Go menu or doesn’t appear in Finder window sidebars, your Mac doesn’t support this feature.”
For those whose computers do support the wireless file sharing feature, the company explains that “AirDrop will automatically discover all the other Wi-Fi-enabled Macs running AirDrop that are near your computer (this may take a few seconds).”
“To make sure you’re in the Finder, click the desktop (the background area of your screen), or click Finder on the Dock,” Apple instructs.
The document then offers a list of Macs that support AirDrop in OS X Lion. Some late 2008 systems are supported, while others aren’t, according to the knowledge base article.
Apple is careful to highlight them with an asterisk, as shown below:
“If your Mac is the same as, or newer than, the models listed below, then it supports AirDrop. - MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer)* - MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer) - MacBook (Late 2008 or newer)* - iMac (Early 2009 or newer) - Mac Mini (Mid 2010 or newer) - Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010).
* The MacBook Pro (17-Inch Late 2008) and the white MacBook (Late 2008) do not support AirDrop.” The document ends with a handy link to its Tech Specs site where customers can get assistance with identifying their Apple product.
The Document Foundation company announced the second maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes.
LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes some important bugs found in previous releases, which makes it ready to be deployed for production needs on enterprise environments. LibreOffice 3.4.2 is available for download now (see download links at the end of the article), for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It is much stable than the previous versions and everyone is encourage to update.
“LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code.”
“The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat.”- says Italo Vignoli in the press release. Highlights of LibreOffice 3.4.2:
· ability to work with and import SVG files; · import filter for Lotus Word Pro documents; · import filter for Microsoft Works documents; · easily format title pages and numbering in LibreOffice Writer; · enhanced Navigator Tool in LibreOffice Writer; · better ergonomics for cell and sheet management in LibreOffice Calc; · PDF import support; · slide-show presenter console; · better report builder; · comes bundled with lots of great extensions.
The Document Fundation community and LibreOffice developers will gather in Paris, France, for the first LibreOffice Conference, an event that will take place between October 12th and October 15th. For more information please check the official page.
As the official label implies, HomeOS is nothing more than a platform designed for the home, and OS focused on streamlining the management of technology in the household as well as make it easier for developers to build applications for the users’ houses.
Developed by Microsoft Research, HomeOS is just a prototype at this point in time, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot already be “installed” in homes, even if only for research purposes.
As I said, there are already early adopters dogfooding the new platform. The term dogfooding means eating one’s own dog food, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, it refers to company employees testing the software their putting together.
“HomeOS provides a centralized, holistic control of devices in the home. It provides to users intuitive controls to manage their devices. It provided to developers high-level abstractions to orchestrate the devices in the home,” Microsoft noted.
“HomeOS is coupled with a ithrough which users can easily obtain applications that are compatible with devices in their homes and obtain any additional devices that are needed to enable desired applications.” In addition to the HomeOS early testing program, the operating system is available to academia, free of charge.
A number of students have already built various projects designed to run on top of Microsoft Research HomeOS, as you will be able to see in the video embedded below, or in the additional demos offered by the Redmond company. (via IStartedSomething)
“We are licensing (free; non-commercial use) the HomeOS prototype to academic institutions to encourage teaching and research on connected homes and devices,” the software giant said.
“About ten research groups have licensed our prototype, including those at the Georgia Institute of Technology the University of Arkansas, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Waterloo.”
HomeOS can be used for a variety of tasks around the household, from user tracking and delivering personalized presence-aware services, to boosting security, automating actions, create intelligent notifications, enhancing control over the home to unmatched levels via NUI, etc.
As Microsoft's promised "Fall" release date for Mango hardware quickly approaches, evidence of its impending arrival is slowly leaking. Over the weekend TmoNews received photos of new promotional stickers that clearly show the words "4G" and "Windows Phone" less than an inch apart from one another. If this isn't a clear indication of at least HSPA+ capable Windows Phones being available to the public, we don't know what else could be. We've heard that the 16-megapixel packin' HTC Bresson is headed to the magenta carrier and there's plenty of reason to assume the phone will join in on the 4G fun. Now there's a little bit of hesitation around the credibility of these stickers due to the Windows Phone logo being outdated compared to the revised new 'tile' design, but honestly it wouldn't be the first time (or the worst case) of the brand suffering from a little confusion.
