News Digest. The First Novemberish Week
This week at the Software Informer office has been marked by several hotly debated issues, and we would be glad to share the most interesting points with you. So, here we go!
News Digest. The First Novemberish Week
Windows 8, the new operating system by Microsoft, keeps its way towards impeccability. We all remember the Metro interface integrated into the vivid and user-friendly operating system. The developers have recently revealed the way the newly introduced live tiles are to work. They are supposed to affect the battery life as little as possible. All in all, Microsoft has set their development team the following goals:
- Allow hundreds of live tiles without affecting efficiency;
- Throw out all the badges and text and replace them with catchy images;
- Afford new opportunities for developers;
- Make sure delivering “instant messages†is done instantly.
In order to make it all possible, the company has decided to get rid of all the code running in the background. The live content will still be delivered, which means the Start screen is going to be data-driven, rather than code-driven. As a result of the innovations, they hope, the user will experience better power efficiency as well as better computer performance.
In the meantime, the most popular version of Windows, XP, is gradually losing popularity due to the significant growth of Windows 7. The market share of the latter has grown by almost 15% in the year to October, which consequently led to the decrease of around 10% in the usage of Windows XP. On the whole, Microsoft's share keeps on falling, giving room to Mac OS X and Linux. By the way, as long as we've mentioned Linux, we should also touch upon the fact that among all the Linux distributions the first place by popularity was given to Linux Mint, after a severe fight with Ubuntu. Perhaps it was thereafter that Ubuntu developer Mark Shuttleworth, together with his financial angels, Canonical, have decided to announce that they are planning to penetrate the market of smartphones and pads. No details are yet revealed, as in which companies are going to take part in the affair and when the first devices are to appear in the window shops, but the developers do have to introduce something stunning to gain a significant number of clients in this competitive market.
Concerning the tablet market, we could also add that the rivalry there is getting even more fierce than it used to be. Another famous hi-tech company, HTC, is going to strengthen its positions in the tab market by releasing a new device on Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Despite these plans, the company fears decrease in sales due to rising tension on the part of Apple and Samsung.
Here we would like to express our sincere condolences to those suffering from the flood in Thailand. Moreover, it's possible that the whole world will soon need this condolence, as Thailand is the home country for a significant number of plants that manufacture a bigger proportion of all high-technology goods worldwide. Some of these production sites have already declared that they are going to shut down for an indefinite term due to the natural disaster. This means that we may suffer from the lack of component parts for computers, tabs, and smartphones, and therefore experience a dramatic price growth.
Good news for those who pay attention to the condition of their hardware: SpeedFan, the program that helps look after the temperature, cooling speed, and voltage, has been updated. The latest version, 4.45, has been relieved from some significant bugs and, what is more important, now the program fully supports ATI Radeon, one of the most widely used graphics cards.
One of the most striking news of late is the proposed cooperation between Walt Disney and Google's YouTube. One of the oldest motion picture companies in the USA has announced it is going to create unique content for the online video service. The sum assigned for the project equals $10 mln, and this money will be spent on exclusive videos for online broadcasting on both Disney.com and YouTube websites. The genre of the videos is still unknown.
Remember the MMO game DC Universe Online by Sony Entertainment, where you can control your favourite DC Comics heroes? Well, in September, it became free to enter the imaginary world, so since then the users have had to pay only if they want to obtain some special skills and opportunities, such as creating clans and making use of items unavailable to the others. Lifting the fee made it possible for the developers to attract new players, so within one and a half months the number of players increased by over 400%. It finally allowed Sony to sigh with relief and become sure that their costly project is in demand. This coin has, however, a flip side: the administration was not quite ready for such inflow of new players, and at the moment the servers noticeably suffer from excessive loading.
In one of our articles we mentioned a very nice program suitable for both entertainment and education: Stellarium. It is designed to display the starry sky at any time of the year and day from any point on our planet's surface. The latest version corrects about 50 serious errors and makes the interface much friendlier.
That's it for the week. Stay with us and be updated!
