Microsoft’s Surface RT is a thing of beauty, and that comes from personal experience. The tablet is solidly built, with amazing externals and powerful hardware inside. The display on the Surface RT tablet, too, is stellar, and puts to shame many in the competing arena. That said, the only proper limitation that comes packaged with the tablet, is its inherent ability to run only ARM applications. In other words, you can forget all your legacy x86 apps and remain stuck with only those that Microsoft has approved, and is selling through, the Windows Store. This restriction is not limited only to the Surface RT tablet, either; all Windows RT tablets suffer the same dilemma, and for those users that are looking for an alternative solution, the choice lies in opting for either the much-pricier Surface Pro, or any other Windows 8 Pro-based tablet.
The long-awaited release of iTunes 11 ran fairly smoothly for Apple towards the close of last year, and although the completely overhauled UI does take a bit of getting used to, it would seem as though the vast majority of users have now managed to adapt. Following on from the hurried release of iTunes 11.0.1 to alleviate a bunch of teething issues back in December, Apple has just released iTunes 11.0.2 which, among a bunch of bug fixes, also adds a new Composer view, and improves playlist responses.
Mozilla's biggest export is Firefox, and with Windows 8 having been in circulation for a few months now, the next stage of preparations for a version of the popular browser tailored to Microsoft's latest OS release have begun. Last week, the Metro/Modern-ized browser reached Mozilla's nightly build channel, and today, it has reached Mozilla-central. Although Firefox desktop product manager Asa Dotzler confessed there is still "plenty of work" to be done, it has now reached a point where it is stable enough for regular testing.
BlueStacks has built its solid reputation on providing software which enables Android apps to run on a variety of different platforms besides Google's. With the Windows beta version released last year to some 5 million+ downloads and the OS X beta arriving just six weeks ago, the BlueStacks team has now compiled a version adapted to the relatively-new Windows 8 platform, as well as optimization for the Microsoft Surface Pro. Details after the break.
Mozilla has delivered the latest of its ongoing, sixth-weekly updates to Firefox, pushing the browser up to version 18.0. As you may expect, the company has packed in a whole bunch of new features, and while most concern the overall running and general performance of the app (read: under the hood housekeeping), there are one or two which many will notice from the get-go. Details, and info on where you can grab the new Firefox, are available after the break!
After playing the waiting game and sitting in review with Microsoft for just over a month, the official Dropbox app for devices powered by Windows 8 and Windows RT is now available as a free of charge download from the Windows Store. The app has probably taken a little longer to go through the verification process than Dropbox would have liked, but the most important aspect is that owners of Windows 8/RT machines and devices now have official access to their Dropbox accounts through the natively produced app.
VLC media player is considered the de facto media player of choice for those who want a feature rich media player that can handle any format. Having used VLC for nigh-on ten years on a variety of platforms from Windows XP to iOS, and in that time, it has - in its various forms - played everything I have thrown at it with aplomb. Now, the VideoLAN team behind VLC want to make a version in-keeping with the tiled interface of Windows 8, and in order to gather the funding for this “Modern” take on the iconic app, has begun a Kickstarter campaign.
How good or necessary (or not) was the Start Screen and the move away from Start Orb was for the future of Windows as an operating system, is a rather different debate, but ground reality is that it has been done. It’s out there now, and you can either take it or leave it, but it won’t change. Now, there is a number of tools that will bring back the good old Start Orb and menu for you under Windows 8, and some of them are completely free, too, but if you start using the new Modern UI screen, it begins to grow on you. While it remains a matter of personal aesthetics, it can’t be denied that there is always room for improvement in almost everything, and in that sense, the Metro Start Screen isn’t perfect. That’s what the Start Menu Modifier application aims to target.
Yahoo! may have been bullied from its once-prominent web position by the likes of Google, but the Sunnyvale-based company still has something to offer. Today, Yahoo! has released a glut of new mail apps targeting those on iOS, Windows 8 and Android, as well as revamping its web-based offering, and we've got all the details after the jump.
I personally like Windows 8 a lot. The missing Start Orb doesn’t bother me, since I have pretty smoothly adapted to the new Start Screen (I find it more convenient, in fact), and even if some of the features have been buried down deep within the operating system, that actually piques up the geek inside me, making it more challenging to use the operating system with as much ease as its earlier variants. However, that nowhere implies that everyone is a power user, and for casual ones, some of these hidden items are downright annoying. Take the ability to turn your laptop into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot, for instance; it was all too easy under Windows 7 thanks to the ad hoc network support. With Windows 8, things have become more complicated.
