The Harry Potter franchise is one of the most popular of all time. What started off as a few books has spanned a lengthy series of feature films and merchandise, and although the wizardry is mainly focused towards youngsters, plenty of adults count themselves a part of the Potter-manic legion.
When the iOS App Store was first launched in 2008, not even Apple themselves could have predicted the store’s meteoric rise to become the undisputed heavy-weight champion of the app distribution world. At the beginning of 2011 Apple launched a competition, offering a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the lucky App Store user who downloaded the 10 billionth app from the store. The Cupertino company has since repeated that offering by giving away a gift card of the same value to whoever downloaded the twenty-fifth billionth app.
One of the more significant additions to Windows 8 (on the latest Consumer Preview build) - which is critical for the platform to succeed in the tablet space - is the Windows Store, essentially an app store where you can purchase applications for Windows, particularly Metro-style ones. Thus, in terms of functionality, it's pretty much like a combination of the iOS and Mac App Stores. But, in usability and design, it does have its differences.
The controversial new Apple TV software was in testing at Apple five years ago, according to an ex-employee, and then-CEO Steve Jobs was the man that knocked it back. Years later, Apple has released it upon an unsuspecting public.
TweetDeck, which initially plied its trade as a cross-platform Twitter app running on Adobe AIR, has grown in popularity since freeing itself from Adobe's debated platform, and today, the application for OS X, Windows, and Google's Chrome browser has received a very significant update.
Angry Birds has been to iOS and Android what Call Of Duty has been to consoles over the the last few years. Those crazy, unstoppable birds have flown as far as PC, Mac, Facebook and Google Chrome in their never-ending quest to defend the nest.
Apple today announced that its $100 billion pile of money is to be used, not for buying Twitter, Facebook or even Google, but to initiate a stock buy back and to offer dividends to existing share owners.
We're only three months into the year, but I can already tell that it's going to be exciting. And, contrary to what many PC hardware manufacturers wish to assert, this is not because of some gimmicky new PC form factor that nobody will care about in a few months; rather, it is because two of the major players in the tech space, Microsoft and Apple, are each doing awesome and unique things this year as far as their entire product ecosystems are concerned.
It has been a very busy Friday in tech, Apple has just seeded a revised Developer Preview to its upcoming Mountain Lion OS for Mac.
In amongst all the talk of new iPads and Samsung Galaxy S III's, another product trending in the blogsosphere of late is Apple's MacBook range.
