The popular VLC media player for Windows and OS X has received another update, which brings it to version 2.0.2. Among the chief changes in this version is support for the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro. This means that the application interface will be displayed at native resolution instead of being upscaled as before.
Another important change is that VLC will no longer ask users on OS X to wait while updating the font cache. As users of this player will know, you had to wait for a lengthy loading animation as the player built the font cache after every update, but that stops with 2.0.2. Of course it will still build the font cache, just that you won’t have to stare at a dialogue box for ages. Read more »
Google Chrome is among the topics of discussion at day two of Google’s I/O developer conference. According to Senior Vice President of Chrome and Apps over at Google, Sundar Pinchai, Chrome has 310 million active users.
This makes Chrome the most popular web browser in the world. Year over year the jump of active users has almost doubled from the 160 million back in 2011. Read more »
Bing Maps has received a huge update, amassing a total of 165 terabytes of information and imagery. This is the largest update to the mapping service ever and it’s larger than all of the past Aerial releases combined! To give you a little perspective the prior existing Aerial coverage of Bing Maps was 129 terabytes in total.
The update brings high-quality aerial photos of North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia with the total covered area being around 38 million square kilometers or roughly Russia’s land area multiplied by two plus the whole of India. Pretty impressive stuff. Read more »
Today Facebook officially announced that it has sealed the deal for acquiring the face-recognition software company Face.com for an undisclosed sum. A move that’s hardly surprising as we’ve been hearing about it for a while now.
The deal is expected to go through in the coming weeks. There’s no telling what Facebook’s plans about Face.com are, but the company’s services are already widely used around the world’s largest social network. Read more »
Apple just announced the market availability of the latest version of their OS X computer platform. OS X Mountain Lion was first unveiled in February and is now about to graduate from beta and is heading towards the Mac App Store, where it will be available in July. Apple’s official repository will exclusively offer the new release so don’t bother looking for it elsewhere.
OS X Mountain Lion brings a number of new features and tweaks, most notably iCloud integration, voice dictation as well as several iPad-inspired extras. The upgrade price is the pretty reasonable $19.99 and the same fee applies for both Lion and Snow Leopard users. Read more »
Adobe has updated the Flash Player for the desktop and Android. On the desktop, the Flash Player 11.3 now supports keyboard input even in fullscreen mode and low latency audio support for streaming audio and Sound API. Other features include sandboxing which is available for Firefox users on Windows. On the Mac, you now get the ability to upgrade the Flash Player in the background. It also comes signed with the Apple Developer ID so it can work with the Gatekeeper feature in the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion.
On the mobile front, 11.3 update adds stylus support for Android 4.0 devices. Read more »
Just couple of months ago, Epic Games showed off an insanely impressive looking trailer of what upcoming games utilizing the Unreal Engine would look like.
And now, with Unreal Engine 4 getting ready for prime time, the company has done more of the same to show off the capabilities of its updated engine. Read more »
Just days after Microsoft launched the Release Candidate of Windows 8, the company proudly announced another great achievement – Windows 7 has been sold in more than 600 million copies.
Steven Guggenheimer, CVP of the OEM team at Microsoft made the announcement at Computex adding that more than 75 million licenses were sold in the past four months alone. Read more »
Mozilla is launching Firefox 13 via its regular Release channel today and has packed it with new features deeming it a “landmark release”.
One of the first things you’ll notice when firing Firefox 13 for the first time is the all-new start page. As before, it’s minimalist in design, but now features a new navigation bar, allowing you to access your Downloads, Bookmarks, History, Add-ons, Sync and Settings. Read more »
A video demo of the new CryENGINE 3 shows its enhanced physics in action with a wobbly 4-by-4 pick-up truck doing lots of collisions and stress tests.
The CryENGINE by Crytek is what powers the highly popular game Crysis (1 and 2). In the video you’ll see the the new version of the popular engine coupled with the beam physics system. Read more »
It seems Microsoft is all set to release the next version of Windows 8 Release Preview today on May 31. This information comes courtesy The Next Web, who noticed a prematurely published blog post on Microsoft’s developer website announcing the launch of the new update.
The post was written by Chuck Chan, Corporate Vice President on the Windows Development team who talked about the Release Preview. The blog post was written yesterday on May 30 but had May 31 time stamp. Needless to say the post has since been pulled down but you might see it being live soon. Read more »
Samsung has stepped up its game with Music Hub, now offering unlimited streaming of your music and access to a library of over 19 million songs for 10 euro a month.
Currently Music Hub is a Galaxy S III exclusive but will become available across Samsung’s smartphones eventually. Read more »
A lot of people have complained about the discrepancy between the two modes on Windows 8. As you may know, Windows 8 will ship with the new Metro UI as well as a standard desktop mode for legacy apps. While the Metro side of the OS looks modern and fresh, the desktop version looks almost similar to older versions of Windows and the two couldn’t be more different.
Microsoft has heard your complaints and although they won’t be redesigning the desktop side in Metro they have made some changes to the existing UI to be more in sync with the Metro design language. Read more »
Apple has released two new updates today, one for OS X Lion and the other for the desktop Safari browser. The OS X update brings Lion to 10.7.4 and includes some crucial security fixes.
Recently OS X came under fire when the OS would display FileVault passwords in plain text file for users who upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and kept their FileVault settings. The issue has now been patched in the latest update. Read more »
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