Just as promised, today Rockstar released the first trailer for its hotly anticipated GTA V (that’s five) game. The trailer doesn’t reveal too much about the gameplay of the upcoming action title, but gives us a rough idea of the kind of graphics we’ll be getting.

The story in GTA V will take place in the fictional city of Los Santos in California (Vinehood is in the neighbourhood too). Ok, it’s not the real Los Angeles, but I doubt this will steer too many people away from the game – real city or not, this one is still high on the wish list for millions of gamers around the globe. Read more »

Google has updated the user interface of Gmail, making the popular email service even more attractive. The new UI design adds contacts images to your conversation so you can easily identify the sender of each message and lets you choose the spacing between the elements on the screen.

That makes it easy to customize Gmail for different screen sizes and resolutions. The Gmail devs have also collaborated with iStockphoto and have created new HD themes, if you are into that kind of stuff. Read more »

Opera 12 Alpha, also codenamed as Opera Next, has stepped out of the shadows and is now available for you to download. The Opera Software team has been working hard integrating a new HTML5 rendering engine, tweaking the navigation bar and most notably enabling full hardware acceleration for web page rendering.

What’s great about this hardware acceleration feature is that all the elements of a webpage get rendered by your graphics card, which increases the speed of displaying the page on your monitor. Read more »

Sticking to their bi-yearly schedule of releasing new updates every April and October, Canonical has released the latest version of their Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu. Called the Oneiric Ocelot, this new version takes the release number to 11.10.

Among the list of addition is a new launcher placed on the side of the screen. It reminds one of the dock in Mac OS X. The launcher even shows tiny white indicators whenever an application is running, just like the dock on Mac. You can add or remove icons from the launcher by simply dragging them. Read more »

Adobe’s 2011 MAX event wowed the crowd with their developmental “unblur” feature.

Adobe software already sports some pretty impressive algorthim-based photo manipulation magic. First they gave us Content-aware scale, then Content-aware fill and now Unblur to sharpen shots that at the time, looked like you’d taken them whilst on a rollercoaster. Read more »

It’s taken just under five months, but for the biggest acquisition in the company’s history, Microsoft’s 8.5 billion dollar deal has finally gotten the green light.

Skype Technologies SA was previously under split ownership, with eBay buying up 30% of the company in 2005 and the remainder spread amongst tech investors. Read more »

If you just bought yourselves a shiny new Nokia N9, you are probably eager to connect it to your computer and fill those 16 or 64 GB with tons of multimedia. And, boy, does Nokia have the tool for you.

The Finnish company has just posted an article on their blog, dedicated to Nokia Link – the software kit that makes the connection between your N9 and your computer seamless. Available as a free download for Windows 7, Mac Snow Leopard and Mac Lion, Nokia Link only takes a minute to set up. Read more »

The i-dotting and t-crossing is complete and Adobe released the latest versions of their Flash Player and AIR. Available to desktop operating systems and compatible mobile platforms, Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 promise a dramatic improvement in performance.

The new releases finally enable 3D hardware acceleration, which should allow much more demanding applications to run smoothly even on mobile platforms. Android users will probably benefit the most from that, but some low-powered portable computers will get the chance to do Flash properly, too. Read more »

Dropbox has become a popular third-party solution for cloud storage and file management, allowing users to sync files between specialized folders, across OS’s and more recently mobile platforms.

Currently the service is available in mobile form for iOS (as an alternative to iCloud), BBOS and Android users, but this recent partnership looks to sweeten the deal for those running the latest HTC kit. Read more »

If you like to run your favorite Linux distribution alongside a copy of Windows on the same machine then you might want to stay away from Windows 8 computers. Thanks to a new secure boot in Windows 8, dual-booting might just become a thing of the past.

Now before I begin explaining, let me say that this will affect only those devices with a ‘Designed for Windows 8′ logo on them, so you can still install Windows 8 on your current computer and dual-boot it. The reason it won’t work on these branded computers is because of the UEFI or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that these machines will be having instead of a traditional BIOS. Read more »

Adobe announced that the upcoming versions of their Flash and AIR platforms will be out in October and published a laundry list of improvements. One of the biggest changes is the hardware acceleration of both 2D and 3D graphics. Adobe claims gives 1000x performance increase compared the old versions, which will allow devs to create “console-quality games”.

Flash 11 and AIR 3 will run on every platform you can imagine – Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, including 64-bit support for these OSes, but also Android, iOS, BlackBerry’s tablet OS and connected TVs. Read more »

iOS users should watch out next time they decide to take up a conversation via Skype, they could be exposing themselves to a pretty fundamental security hole.

The vulnerability can easily be used to steal content direct from an iOS Skype user during a normal chat log and the victim is none the wiser during the attack. Read more »

It was just yesterday that Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer’s preview, and allegedly, it has clocked more than 500,000 downloads already. Well, I already took it for a spin and I’m full of optimism about the Windows’s next edition.

This first public build is a developer’s preview alright, there are a lot of bugs and stuff but that’s understandable. What got me excited however is the integration of the Metro-style UI right into the OS complete with buttery smooth transitions and excellent animations. It feels so unlike the Windows I’m used to. Read more »

Major Nelson is the go-to guy on Xbox, real name Larry Hryb, the Major covers all things Xbox, Kinect and LIVE.

Following the BUILD conference just the other day, Larry posted on his blog that next year, Xbox LIVE will be appearing on Windows 8. Read more »

We have been itching to get our hands on Windows 8 – which is still just a working title, by the way – ever since the first screenshots surfaced. But when Microsoft officially unveiled it to the public yesterday the itch turned into a proverbial rash.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait for long to try it out for ourselves because Microsoft has has finally released the Developer Preview on their website for everyone to download. Read more »