OSnews

The Pebble Time Kickstarter project brought more than just color, voice, and ergonomic design to our family of smartwatches. The campaign also introduced a focused and delightful new operating system with Pebble Firmware 3.0. Featuring the timeline interface to organize your past, present, and future, 3.0 is all about delivering the best ways to get things done from your wrist.During the campaign, we promised to bring support for Pebble Time's 3.0 operating system to the rest of our lineup as well. We're happy to announce that timeline, unlimited apps, and more are on their way to Pebble Classic and Pebble Steel this month.I'm still not entirely used to watches being a playground for operating systems now.

In their latest article, the developers of the Genode OS Framework document the long-winded way to their new ARM TrustZone demo on the USB Armory - an open source flash drive sized computer. This undertaking was motivated by the prospect to put Linux, which normally runs on the USB Armory, under the supervision of a significantly less complex Genode hypervisor. This construction enables shielding sensitive information like cryptographic keys from Linux by exposing them to Genode only and thereby drastically reduces the attack surface.The article illustrates how the TrustZone technology is used to isolate Genode from Linux without compromising the rich feature set of Linux, and how both worlds can safely communicate with each other. Finally, the article provides you with all tools and information for easily bringing the demo to your own USB Armory.

Pixel C reviews are pouring in, and they're all virtually the same: pretty awesome hardware, but Android on tablets just isn't any good. The Verge:But the performance issues, the lack of apps, and the lack of split-screen functionality show that, right now, Android isnât really even trying to participate in that future. Simply put: the Pixel team has mostly delivered something really good, the Android team has not. Android may not be Googleâs answer for the next generation of computing on a tablet. Maybe that will have to wait for whatever weird hybrid ChromeOS / Android thing that Google is supposedly working on.Ars:iOS and Windows are both much better suited to a larger form factor device. Maybe some day Google will implement that "experimental" multi-window mode, which will help. However, right now it's selling a $650 tablet/keyboard combo that can display a single app at a time. Even with a hypothetical split screen mode, you'd still have to deal with a sea of phone apps from developers that are reluctant to implement a large-format layout, in part because even Google doesn't take its own tablet platform seriously.They're all right, of course. That being said, it's clear the Pixel C isn't really intended as a mass-market product - at least, not right now. No, the real purpose of the Pixel C is to serve as a development device for Google's Android developers, who are currently, by all accounts, working hard not only on combining Android and Chrome OS, but also on bringing more traditional functionality, such as multiwindow, to Android.Android is movin' on up, and the Pixel C is nothing more than the ladder Google's Android developers need to get there.

Farewell Firefox OS smartphones. Mozilla today announced an end to its smartphone experiment, and said that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. It will continue to experiment on how it might work on other connected devices and Internet of Things networks.Firefox OS was doomed from the start, just as all the other attempts at competing with iOS and Android. The cold, harsh, and sad truth is that modern mobile computing just isn't conducive to small and upstart platforms. You need the applications, you need the scale, you need the hearts and minds.And all of those are taken by Google and Apple, and nobody else matters. It's too late.

Apple's released a whole bunch of point releases today - iOS 9.2, watchOS 2.1, and tvOS 9.1. These are all relatively minor point releases focused on bug fixes, so don't expect your experience to change in any drastic or meaningful way - unless, of course, one of the fixed bugs affected you.You know where to get them.

Verizon is pushing for phones to be equipped with technology to make use of unlicensed spectrum to speed up the internet and clear congestion, but not everybody's happy.That sounds great, say Google, Microsoft, Comcast, and others, except for one thing. The proposed system, called LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum or LTE-U, which relies on a combination of new, small cell towers and home wireless routers, risks disrupting the existing Wi-Fi access most people enjoy. For several months, the three companies have been among a group lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to delay LTE-U's adoption pending further tests. All three declined to comment for this story, referring instead to an Oct. 23 FCC filing they joined that claims LTE-U "has avoided the long-proven standards-setting process and would substantially degrade consumer Wi-Fi service across the country."Let me put it like this: since the intricacies and specifics of wireless technology and its possible interactions are far beyond my own personal comprehension, I'll just make the safe bet and side with whomever is opposing the carriers, which in this case are Microsoft and Google, and Comcast....oh.

According to leaked documents from the Ministry of Interior the French government is considering two new pieces of legislation: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.Right, because the answer to people who want to attack our freedom is to restrict our freedom.

At JSConf in Florida today, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing Chakra, the JavaScript engine used in its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. The code will be published to the company's GitHub page next month.Good move, but they should just go the whole way.

The HTC HD2 began its life unassumingly enough back in 2009 as a simple Windows Phone 6.5-powered smartphone. We highly doubt HTC knew of the legacy the phone would end up carrying. As most of you probably know, we're talking about how dev-friendly and dev-embraced the phone has been over the years, finding various ports of Unix, modern versions of Windows Phone up to 8, Firefox OS, and of course Android.Over the years, the HTC HD2 has seen Android 2.1, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop, and now Android 6.0 Marshmallow.The HD2 might be the greatest phone of all time.

Two major developments related to Linux hosted version of AROS reached significant milestones in November. Jyrki Koivisto continued development of the USB driver that communicates directly to Linux USB subsystem and brought it to a state where storage devices now can be accessed on the AROS side. Second development, the ALSA based AHI driver developed by Krzysztof Smiechowicz reached release level and is now included in the AROS nightly builds. It replaces the obsolete OSS based driver. This development was done based on bounty hosted by Power2People.org and this bounty has been closed as well.While on topic of bounties, a bounty to deliver a working implementation of FUSE filesystem and read/write driver for NTFS filesystem has been completed by Frederik Wikstrom. The bounty was also hosted by Power2People.org. The sources of the port are not yet integrated into AROS, but are freely available on GitHub.AROS has finally been posting development news on its website again, making it a little easier to follow what's going on. Great progress!

Today we launched the open source Swift project along with the Swift.org website. We couldn't be more excited to work together in an open community to find and fix issues, add enhancements, and bring Swift to new platforms.Apple's Swift is open source now.Swift is made up of a number of different projects, providing a complete ecosystem for building great software. The Swift compiler project interprets Swift syntax, produces diagnostics to help you write correct code, and employs LLVM to generate machine instructions. The LLDB project is a first-class debugger that includes a REPL for interactive programming. And the Swift standard library project includes all the core types and basic functionality you need to write software in Swift.Today, we released two additional projects for Swift in open source: the Core Libraries project, and a new Swift Package Manager project.It's also available on Linux.

If the global Internet is going to be warped to suit governments' interests, we must ensure that it isn't broken up into cantonized national networks with less privacy, less efficiency, less commerce and less speech. That means making it easier for foreign governments to get data when that access is justified and harder when it is not.International agreements are one solution, and America and Britain are rumored to be negotiating such a deal. In the meantime, American technology companies should be free to comply directly with foreign government requests for data, as long as that access is warranted and meets international standards of due process and human rights. If America fails to allow such access, it will happen anyway in a brute and extralegal manner - and the result will be a less secure, less efficient Internet.Hand over data, with all the privacy risks that involves, or the internet breaks up. Really? That's the best we can? Those are the outcomes we have to settle for?What a deception.

If you are an iOS developer, the Windows ecosystem can appear a strange and frightening place. Writing an app for Windows requires an investment in all kinds of new things: new tools (Visual Studio), new languages (C#), new APIs and Controls (Win32, XAML), new graphics engines (DirectX) and before you know it, life seems too short and wouldn't another Flappy Birds clone be more fun anyway?Fear not, brave adventurer, for Project Islandwood is here.

With the just released version 15.11, the Genode OS framework takes a big step towards desktop computing. On that account, its GUI and audio stacks have become much more modular, dynamic, and flexible. Moreover, the release features the port of Intel KMS from Linux, extends the support for the USB Armory and Xilinx Zynq-7000, and introduces new file-system infrastructure such as a VFS server.In their release documentation, the Genode developers dedicate an entire section (including screenshots) to the ambition to use Genode as desktop OS. It turns out that the framework's existing component architecture solves a number of difficult problems in new and elegant ways. For example, the configuration of all types of components - be it low-level device drivers or high-level GUI components - can be edited live with a plain text editor. The changes become effective by merely saving a file. This works even for components that have no means or permissions to access a file system at all. Another interesting twist on classical GUI-integration features is Genode's new copy-and-paste mechanism that prevents the clipboard to be misused by malicious applications as a covert information channel while retaining the convenience of traditional clipboard mechanisms.At a lower level, the desktop theme of the release is supported by the new Intel KMS driver ported from the Linux kernel. It allows the use of multiple displays, and screen resolutions can be switched on the fly. With nearly 70,000 SLOC of Linux kernel code, the porting was a major feat. This work continues the pattern of reusing Linux kernel code, which already enabled Genode to use the Intel wireless stack, the Linux USB stack, and the Linux TCP/IP stack as user-level components. The Intel KMS driver is interesting also in another respect: Since it is tightly coupled with the Intel GEM and DRM infrastructure of the Linux kernel, those subsystems had to be ported as well. So the driver may become a suitable starting point for the development of a future GPU multiplexer.Thanks to the developer's continuous focus on making the framework fit for day-to-day computing, Genode is now used by a hand full of die-hard Genode enthusiasts as their primary OS. Still, many tasks are carried out via a guest OS in VirtualBox. But all of the circa 40 underlying components such as the kernel, device drivers, protocol stacks, and a growing number of applications are working nicely together and are stable and fast enough to get productive work done.Besides the main focus on desktop computing, the release is not short of other areas of improvement. Xilinx Zynq-7000 has been added to the supported platforms, TrustZone on the USB Armory received a lot of attention, and a new VFS server makes Genode's file-system infrastructure much more flexible. Those and many more topics are covered by the detailed release documentation.

Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker:Therefore I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology. The current setting isn't stable, and we should start actively looking into how we can transition in an orderly way to a future where Thunderbird and Firefox are un-coupled. I don't know what this will look like, or how it will work yet. I do know that it needs to happen, for both Firefox and Thunderbird's sake. This is a big job, and may require expertise that the Thunderbird team doesn't yet have. Mozilla can provide various forms of assistance to the Thunderbird team via a set of the Mozilla Foundationâs capabilities.Are there still any Thunderbird users left? It's been in maintenance mode for a while, and there's several great alternatives (some of them even based on Thunderbird). That being said, having Thunderbird as a separate entity from Firefox, that can make its own decisions, could benefit the open source project greatly.

The one thing that disappointed me about the Robin was the state of its software optimization. Nextbit hopes to ship out the first handsets to preorder customers and Kickstarter backers in late January, but it still has a long way to go until its software is up to the task. The Robin's current Android build is slow, in spite of the capable Snapdragon 808 processor within, and unfortunately buggy. The camera app, for example, is not yet functional, so there's nothing to judge one of the phone's key components on.This phone would be a lot more interesting if they cut the cloud nonsense, and just focused on delivering this unique design as a high-quality, affordable pure Android phone.

There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store - many of which in isolation wouldn't cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.And this is yet another lauded developer leaving the fledgling Mac App Store behind. Tapbots' Paul Haddad is pretty on point.Five to ten years from now, we'll all laugh about how terrible of an idea the centralised, controlled, closed application store was, and mourn the immense damage it has done to developers. A short gold rush, followed by the total destruction of the independent developer community. I hope it was worth it.

To provide the best experience for the most-used Linux versions, we will end support for Google Chrome on 32-bit Linux, Ubuntu Precise (12.04), and Debian 7 (wheezy) in early March, 2016. Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes.We intend to continue supporting the 32-bit build configurations on Linux to support building Chromium. If you are using Precise, we'd recommend that you to upgrade to Trusty.The first signs of the end of 32bit are on the wall - starting with Linux. I wonder how long Google will continue to support 32bit Chrome on Windows. For some strange reason, Microsoft is still selling 32bit Windows 10.

The following series of maps depicts the speed at which news traveled to Venice, fron 1500 to 1765. The isochronic lines represent one week, and give a broad indication of the time required for letters to reach their destination. All three maps describe the speed of letters traveling toward Venice.Today, thanks to telephony and internet, this is all instantaneous. Kind of amazing how we went from weeks and weeks for news to get around, to mere seconds, in a matter of just several centuries. The moment I press 'publish' on this news item, it's there in your browser, hitting the RSS feeds, going on Twitter.

If a report from the Japanese blog Macotakara is to be believed, Apple is planning on getting rid of the headphone jack in the next iPhone. As it attempts to once again shrink its flagship device, Apple is reportedly planning on shipping EarPods that connect through the Lighting port with the next iPhone in order to remove the thicker 3.5mm headphone jack. This is a bad idea.Indeed it is. If Apple were to really remove the 3.5mm jack, it will do so for one reason: control. The 3.5mm jack is obviously an open standard, and Apple can do little to control what kind of headphones you use. Now that Apple owns a very popular brand of headphones, I'n sure the company is itching to lock consumers into its Lightning port.If true, yet another terrible anti-consumer move from Apple.

I am less frustrated, and more focused working on this setup. A big chunk of that is even outside the constant popups in OS X, there's simply less to be distracted by.I've gone so far as to have to literally switch a cable to move between machines (as opposed to a KVM), to help me train my brain into a different context.Overall I'm quite happy with the choices I made here.A nice write-up from someone switching from OS X to FreeBSD, and everything that entails.

XINU stands for Xinu Is Not Unix -- although it shares concepts and even names with Unix, the internal design differs completely. Xinu is a small, elegant operating system that supports dynamic process creation, dynamic memory allocation, network communication, local and remote file systems, a shell, and device-independent I/O functions. The small size makes Xinu suitable for embedded environments.

From the good women and men over at the EFF:Earlier this year it was revealed that Lenovo was shipping computers preloaded with software called Superfish, which installed its own HTTPS root certificate on affected computers. That in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except Superfish's certificates all used the same private key. That meant all the affected computers were vulnerable to a "man in the middle" attack in which an attacker could use that private key to eavesdrop on users' encrypted connections to websites, and even impersonate other websites.Now it appears that Dell has done the same thing, shipping laptops pre-installed with an HTTPS root certificate issued by Dell, known as eDellRoot. The certificate could allow malicious software or an attacker to impersonate Google, your bank, or any other website. It could also allow an attacker to install malicious code that has a valid signature, bypassing Windows security controls. The security team for the Chrome browser appears to have already revoked the certificate. People can test if their computer is affected by the bogus certificate by following this link.Did you buy a Dell computer during your Black Friday shopping thing over there in the US? Might want to look it over before handing it your loved one.Alternatively, just buy a Mac and don't deal with this nonsense.

The latest problem I was working out was how to run Unix on the Atari ST. The Tramiels had somehow wrangled a license for AT&T's SVR-something-or-other version of Unix (might have been SVR3, but this was in the bad old days when AT&T was actively fucking up Unix, and it could have been just about any version, including SVR666). The license was for a mind boggling, nay, jaw-dropping ten bucks a seat. The problem was that the ST didnât have any kind of memory management hardware, just a raw CPU flinging real addresses at naked DRAM, and the machine's cheap-ass vanilla 68000 was incapable of recovering from a fault unless you cheated.On a related note, there's MiNT.

Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you'd expect, including a microprocessor. This charger teardown looks at the numerous components in the charger and explains how they work together to power your laptop.Fascinating little bit of technology you don't really pay much attention to.

From the Jolla Blog:Many of you have been rightfully asking, where did our tablet money go? Below is an analysis of it in a simple graph. Big part of the tablet project went to Sailfish OS software development (more than 50% of project costs). As I have said in earlier blogs, hardware is the easy part, software is the king (and the beast).[...]Overall, as I also explained in a recent TechCrunch interview, the alternative OS is a really big and challenging agenda. But I still believe it is moving ahead, yet very slowly. The primary challenge for us is that our agenda might be somewhat forward leaning, and we need to wait until the world catches up with this vision that other OSs are heavily needed to create an alternative for Android. The interest for our agenda is just now emerging. I firmly believe that companies and consumers will soon realize that the world really needs options in mobile OSs. We've already had many interesting discussions with potential new partners about using Sailfish OS in their own projects. I'm looking forward to announcing the results of these talks soon.I wonder how the story would have been different if Sailfish OS were free software and had a strong community to aid in software development.

Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user. (This does not include accidental errors.) This page explains how Microsoft software is malware.Malware and nonfree software are two different issues. The difference between free software and nonfree software is in whether the users have control of the program or vice versa. It's not directly a question of what the program does when it runs. However, in practice nonfree software is often malware, because the developer's awareness that the users would be powerless to fix any malicious functionalities tempts the developer to impose some.Discuss.

One of the biggest freedoms associated with free software is the ability to replace a program with an updated or modified version. Even so, of the many millions of people using Linux-powered phones, few are able to run a mainline kernel on those phones, even if they have the technical skills to do the replacement. The sad fact is that no mainstream phone available runs mainline kernels. A session at the 2015 Kernel Summit, led by Rob Herring, explored this problem and what might be done to address it.This indeed a big problem, and I'm glad it's finally being picked up.

One the most requested features we receive is to make app builds and deployment faster in Android Studio. Today at the Android Developer Summit, we're announcing a preview of Android Studio 2.0 featuring Instant Run that will dramatically improve your development workflow. With Android Studio 2.0, we are also including a preview of a new GPU Profiler.Instant Run allows you to change the code of your program as it's running on your device or emulator, and if it indeed works as advertised, this should be a major boon for developers. TechCrunch claims Google's also improved the emulator in this release, and if there's one thing I know about programming for Android, it's that the emulator was absolutely terrible, so good to know they're working on it.

Recently I started playing Minecraft, again. I find vanilla Minecraft somewhat boring, so I always look out for modpacks. After searching for new modpacks, I stumpled upon FTB Horizons: Daybreaker. Looking at the included mods list, OpenComputers caught my eye.As the name suggests, OpenComputers adds computers to Minecraft. Real computers! They are highly modular too. You can add peripherals, from monitors to keyboards and expansion cards that add capabilities such as graphics and network. They can also be programmed in Lua, in-game. Another type of card also exists, the Internet card which, as you can imagine, can communicate with the real-life Internet. Awesome.It never ceases to amaze me what can be done with Minecraft.

The first reviews for Microsoft's latest flagship smartphones are coming in, the first device with Windows 10 for phones. This is going to be the big one, right? After several false starts and restarts, this was finally going to be it, everyone told us.The Verge:In the mobile world, Microsoft is way behind Google and Apple, and has what many would say is an insurmountable deficit to make up. It could have pulled out all of the stops and produced a phone that was visually impactful, wildly innovative, and truly riveting compared to anything else to make up lost ground.The Lumia 950 is, unfortunately, none of those things. Sure, Microsoft put some newer guts in it, and Windows 10 has some interesting features, but there's nothing really here that would drive anyone but the most die hard Windows fan to buy it.The WSJ:It feels like the Lumia 950 is a proof of concept that might help Microsoft get momentum for its new strategy. But I can't recommend buying a $600 proof of concept. For now, your phone stays... A phone.And Ars Technica:If the Lumia 950 were more keenly priced then it might be easier to get excited about it. Along with its bigger brother, it fills a glaring gap in the Lumia range and does at last offer an upgrade path. For Windows Phone fans (and I am one), this phone, or its bigger brother, is much needed and very welcome. But this is not a phone that is likely to win over new converts. It does its job, and it keeps the platform ticking over. The struggle to attract new users, however, remains.Way too little, way too late. Windows Phone is done.

Jolla Ltd, the mobile company from Finland today announced that its latest financing round which aimed to end in November, has been postponed and the company needs to adjust its operations accordingly. At the same time the company has filed for a debt restructuring program in Finland, to ensure the continuity of its business. Jolla will also temporarily lay off a big part of its personnel.To anyone capable of basic pattern recognition, this does not come as a surprise. I doubt I'm getting my tablet, even though I backed it in the first hour of availability, but to be honest, I'm much more concerned about the people being "temporarily" laid off. These are all people who took an incredible risk to follow a dream, and I hope - despite the dire signs - Jolla pulls through and they can keep their jobs, or that they can easily and quickly find new jobs.Almost two years ago, I wrote in my Jolla review:Few devices have a history as complicated as the Jolla and Sailfish. The ten-year journey from the Nokia N770 to the Jolla was long, arduous, filled with focus shifts, mergers, and other complications. Like the nameless protagonist in The Last Resort, in order to step out of the shadows of the old world, Jolla had to leave Providence behind, traverse the Great Divide, cross the Rockies to reach the Malibu, and set sail across the Pacific to end up on the pearly white beaches of Lahaina.However, also just like the nameless protagonist, they found that the natural beauty of Lahaina had already been framed and plasticised by hotel chains and fast food restaurants. It is in that environment that Jolla must make a stand and survive - because there's no more new frontier.It seems like Jolla was unable to survive amidst the hotel chains and fast food restaurants of the mobile technology industry.Only a few days ago, my brother had a gift for me. Something special, something I know he cares about a lot. A square black box, embossed with the outline of a phone with a slide-out keyboard, and, in silver lettering, the timeless "NOKIA Nseries" and "Nokia N900". None of you know my brother - obviously - but I know just how huge of a moment this was. Up until only a few months ago, he still used his Nokia N900 as his one and only smartphone. Not as a curiosity for parlour tricks - no, as his primary, day-to-day smartphone.His attachment and love for his N900 is something you don't see very often in technology. It's not the kind of deluded fandom you see in some other circles, but more of a "I know this device is outdated and slow and that the software isn't very modern, but it works for me". Talk to any current N900 user, and you'll get the same vibe. In fact, the N900 my brother gave to me wasn't his only one, he still has another one as back-up.As a back-up to what? Well, after a short stint with a Nokia N9 - which I bought from him a few years ago - he went back to his N900, until a few months ago, when he finally settled on a new device, a Sony Z3 Compact. After the last few months, he finally felt comfortable enough to donate one of his N900s (but not both!). Unsurprisingly, he was always interested in Jolla and kept an eye on them, and while he certainly played with mine on occasion, it never clicked.When, as Jolla, spiritual successor to the infamous and beloved Nokia Maemo/Harmattan family, you can't even entice someone like my brother, you know you're lost in a world where you're never going to compete with Android or iOS.My limited edition Jolla The First One will always have a special place in my heart, and the tablet, if it ever ships to me, will certainly be one of the more prized curiosities in my collection, but I'm afraid the ship has sailed on Jolla.It's probably in Fiji by now.

Much of the marketing around Apple's new iPad Pro has been centered on its ability to run professional grade software and the variety of creativity apps it supports. But for smaller developers of pro software, the iPad Pro may present more of a quandary than a new computing platform.The reason? Despite the new tablet's processing power and capabilities, it's still running on mobile software - and developers aren't totally convinced the economic incentives exist in the App Store for iOS. In short, they feel they wouldn't be able to charge users the amounts they normally would for a version of their software that runs on a desktop.It's a problem that exists not only around the iPad Pro, but mobile software development in general, and highlights the very real challenges that smaller software companies face when deciding which software platforms to prioritize - especially as mobile tablets and PCs converge.This is a huge problem for closed, mobile-first devices like Apple's iPad Pro. Large companies like Adobe can run comprehensive cloud infrastructures and fund the burden of mobile development with the sales of proper software. Smaller developers, however, cannot. This problem doesn't exist on competitors like the Surface Pro, because they run a traditional, proper desktop.After the starry eyes of the initial gold rush subsided, it became clear centralised application stores wreaked havoc in the software industry, and caused a spiraling race to the bottom. Sadly, it seems like Apple has no answer to this problem for its iPad Pro.

In addition, you're also going to start seeing an option to "stream" some apps you don't have installed, right from Google Search, provided you're on good Wifi. For example, with one tap on a "Stream" button next to the HotelTonight app result, you'll get a streamed version of the app, so that you can quickly and easily find what you need, and even complete a booking, just as if you were in the app itself. And if you like what you see, installing it is just a click away. This uses a new cloud-based technology that we're currently experimenting with.This seems like a hell of a lot of work and infrastructure for something that could be solved by, uh, I don't know, installing the application?I'm getting old.

With Continuum, capable Windows 10 Mobile devices will be able to act like PCs, hooking up to keyboards, mice, and monitors for a full Windows desktop experience, and Microsoft is looking into ways of expanding these capabilities. Apparently, that involves investigating the possibility of running Win32 apps from phones, according to Microsoft's Kevin Gallo during the Connect() 2015 conference.I have two things to say about this. First, this is totally cool. The idea of having just one smartphone with me that can hook up to a display, keyboard, and mouse, and then also run proper Win32 applications (instead of crappy Metro applications) is incredibly appealing to me. I like the concept of the Surface and Continuum (the device being smart enough to adapt the UI to the current input method), but a desktop with just Metro (and yes I will keep using that name) applications is pretty much useless. It's going to need big girl applications.Second, while cool, this is also yet another admission from Microsoft that they just can't get developers - either inside or outside - to care much about Metro and all that it entails. Microsoft would love to move everyone - users and developers alike - over to Metro, but it just isn't happening, and there's no signs that it's going to get any better in the near future. I would love for Metro to be adopted enough (and capable enough) so that it can start replacing Win32 - but it's been years now, and it's pretty clear that we're just not getting there.

Oppo has been putting a customized version of Android on its phones for years, but now it's letting you strip most of those customizations away. It released a nearly stock version of Android today that's basically just Android Lollipop with a few pieces of Oppo software, including its camera app, audio tools, and gesture support. The new release, which it's calling Project Spectrum, is able to be installed on its Find 7 and Find 7a phones and will be coming to other Oppo phones in the near future. Sometime early next year, Oppo plans to release an updated version for Android Marshmallow.More and more manufacturers seem to be getting the message: users want stock Android, because stock Android is better than whatever crap OEMs can come up with. A good development, obviously, but it still doesn't address Android'd biggest weakness: updates.

Enough time has passed that I feel safe blogging about my prior project here at Microsoft, "Midori". In the months to come, I'll publish a dozen-or-so articles covering the most interesting aspects of this project, and my key take-aways.Midori was a research/incubation project to explore ways of innovating throughout Microsoft's software stack. This spanned all aspects, including the programming language, compilers, OS, its services, applications, and the overall programming models. We had a heavy bias towards cloud, concurrency, and safety. The project included novel "cultural" approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.The first two articles have already been published. This looks like it's going to be an excellent series.

MINIX3 now has support for live update and rerandomization of its system services. These features are based on LLVM bitcode compilation and instrumentation in combination with various run-time extensions. Live update and rerandomization support is currently fully functional, although still in an experimental state, not enabled by default, and available for x86 only. This document describes the basic idea, provides instructions on how to enable and use the functionality, provides more in-depth information for developers, and lists open issues and further reading material.A very detailed look at this piece of MINIX3 functionality.

The NES was the most popular game console of its time, and rightfully so. From the minds of Nintendo engineers, programmers and audio experts came some of the best video games ever made. Unfortunately, some of these great games cannot be played on your Raspberry Pi favorite emulator due to the incompatibility of the Zapper gun and modern digital monitors. None of us can forget the fun that Duckhunt brought. The game came as standard issue with all NES systems, so we've all played it. But its nostalgia is currently entombed by a technological quirk that has yet to be solved.From one hacker to another - this can no longer be tolerated. First, we're going to learn how the Zapper works and why it doesn't work with digital displays. Then we're going to fix it.

I've dropped the codename "Vienna" before on our weekly podcast and in the forums, but these renders are the first real look we've had at the design. Vienna ditches the Priv's slider in favor of the iconic BlackBerry layout, with a front-facing physical keyboard that is always present. The keyboard looks to be of the same size and design as that of the Priv's, but it's hard to tell simply based off of the renders alone.They're really going all-in on building Android devices with physical keyboards, and you know what? In this mobile landscape of boring sameness and nothingness, these devices are a huge breath of fresh air.Successful or no, good work. Now all we need is a horizontal slider!

If you look too closely, the old proof set artwork is pretty ugly, certainly nothing we could use if we wanted to build a larger museum exhibit, say 3x4 feet, or import the mask artwork into a PCB layout package to build a giant, working circuit board. The old artwork just wasn't going to cut it. So McNerney took a pair of high-resolution photomicrographs (kindly donated by reverse engineer extraordinaire, Christopher Tarnovski), and set out to trace every wire, transistor, resistor, and capacitor using Adobe Illustrator. Just hours before the 44th anniversary, he finished tracing the first, complete draft of the mask set artwork. The next step is to verify it against the schematics and try it out in simulation.Amazing work.

How unsurprising:At a Center for Strategic & International Studies talk today, CIA Director John Brennan renewed one of the government's favorite lies about spying: that mass surveillance has been successful in stopping a bunch of mysterious threats while it is simultaneously too ineffective to stop real attacks, because of privacy advocates and whistleblowers.Meanwhile, in the UK, Cameron is using the Paris attacks to further his totalitarian agenda of mass state surveillance in the UK:Some politicians in the UK are calling for the government to hurry new surveillance laws into power following deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. Lord Carlile, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said that the Investigatory Powers Bill - which was unveiled in draft form two weeks ago - should be "expedited" and put into action "as soon as possible," rather than by the end of 2016.The UK prime minister David Cameron expressed similar concerns on BBC radio this morning, saying that the government should "look at the timetable" of the legislation. He also announced that the UK would hire 1,900 new security and intelligence staff at MI5, MI6, and GCHQ (an increase of 15 percent) in order to "respond to the increasing international terrorist threat." Cameron added that the attacks in France, which killed 129 people and wounded more than 300, "could happen here."France already has these draconian mass surveillance laws. Sadly, they didn't prevent the attack.

All that said, right now, it seems that choosing SteamOS over a Windows box means sacrificing a significant amount of performance on many (if not most) graphically intensive 3D games. That's a pretty big cost to bear, considering that Alienware sells its Windows-powered, console-style Alpha boxes at prices that are only $50 more expensive than identically outfitted SteamOS machines. That's not to mention the fact that Steam on Windows currently has thousands of games that aren't on SteamOS - including most AAA recent releases -while SteamOS has no similar exclusives to recommend it over Windows.Hopefully, Valve and other Linux developers can continue improving SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games can be expected to at least run comparably between Linux and Windows. Until then, though, it's hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Windows and DirectX clearly reign supreme, with graphics card vendors focusing most - if not all - of their driver development on that platform.

An absolute must-read from Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, two absolute heavyweights in the field of usability. On top of that, Tognazzini was heavily involved in the development of the early interface guidelines at Apple, which gives him a unique perspective on the matter.The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple's operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple's well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple's design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining peopleâs true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer's sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.The problem Apple is facing - as has been explained to me by people who are in the know about these matters - is that the people originally responsible for usability at Apple, including those responsible for the first multitouch interface of the first iPhone, are no longer at Apple. The company currently doesn't have an overarching philosophy when it comes to user interface design, leading to the problems described in detail in this article. The software side of Apple lacks its own Ive, if you will.And boy, does it show. I bought an iPhone 6S (the pink one, 64GB) a couple of weeks ago, and while I don't want to reveal too much from my review, I'm appalled at just how unfocused, chaotic, messy, inconsistent, and hard to use iOS has become. This article articulates really well where the main problems lie.It's easy to look at Apple's massive profits and the quality of its hardware and miss the abysmal state of Apple's software. They've got a lot of work to do - and they really need the right people to get there.

Windows Central is now hearing from multiple sources that Project Astoria is on hold indefinitely, and maybe even shelved completely. Although Microsoft is not publicly - even privately - stating Astoria is cancelled, they are not openly talking about it anymore, or even privately discussing it with developers.One source has told us that "the Android app porting is not going as planned."The interpretation by others familiar with the matter is that Astoria is not happening anytime soon and Microsoft has yet to find a way to announce the news publicly. Indeed, while the news will be welcomed by Windows developers, it could come across as a failure by the company to execute on a publicly announced strategy.All evidence is pointing towards the Android application support promised for Windows 10 being axed.

Today, the US Department of Energy announced that it had established a partnership with NVIDIA that would be enhancing the LLVM compiler collection. The goal will be to port an existing FORTRAN compiler that targets massively parallel GPUs. The results are expected to be released as open source in late 2016.Cutting-edge research still universally involves Fortran; a trio of challengers wants in.While FORTRAN isn't a mainstream language, it's still heavily used in scientific computing, and there's lots of legacy code that relies on it. A lot of that code is maintained by people at the US National Labs, and the new project is being organized by staff at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.

Today we have made Firefox OS 2.5 available worldwide. We are also making an early, experimental build of the OS - Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview - available for developers to download on Android devices.So you can flash Firefox OS 2.5 as a standalone operating system, or run parts of it atop your existing Android device.On a related note:Firefox for iOS lets you take your favorite browser with you wherever you go with the Firefox features you already love including smart and flexible search, intuitive tab management, syncing with Firefox Accounts and Private Browsing.iOS, of course, doesn't provide real browser choice to its users, so even this Firefox iOS browser uses iOS' own rendering engine.

Mac users faced trouble with their apps overnight after the security certificate Apple uses to prevent piracy expired late on Wednesday.Applications downloaded from the Mac App Store were temporarily unavailable from 10pm UK time, when a security certificate expired, five years after its creation, with no replacement immediately available.Even once Apple fixed the error, issuing a new certificate for the apps (with an expiry date of April 2035, this time), users were still faced with problems. Those who could not connect to the internet couldnât verify the new certificate, while those who had forgotten their password or couldnât log in to iCloud for some other reason are also unable to use the downloaded apps until they can log in to the service.My tweet from yesterday seems apt here. Unbelievably incompetent.

The Windows 10 November update is available now to everyone running Windows 10. This first major update has a handful of visible features, a variety of bug fixes, and even some enterprise features. Microsoft's message to businesses is that if they were following the traditional policy of waiting for the first Service Pack or major update to Windows before deploying it, this is it: time to take the plunge.It's also the time for gamers to make the switch too - in parallel with this release, Microsoft is rolling out the new Xbox Experience, which is based on Windows 10, and gives the dashboard a big shake-up.Only a Windows update could extoll the virtues of reducing the number of differently design context menus.

The reviews for the Apple Surface are coming in. There's two reviews at The Verge, one at the Wall Street Journal, and John Gruber's got early access from Apple as well.The general gist? If you've ever read a Surface Pro review, you've read all the iPad Pro reviews. Well, mostly - the complaints leveled at the Surface Pro are being tip-toed around a bit now that they apply to an Apple product, of course, and suddenly, the magic argument "but it will get better in the future" is now completely valid, while the same argument is never considered valid for the Surface Pro (or something like the Priv and its early bugs).That being said, all reviews dive into just how uncomfortable the iPad Pro is to use as a laptop - and the problem, of course, is iOS itself. iOS is a mobile, touch-first operating system that Apple is now trying to shoehorn into a laptop role. iOS provides no support for mice or trackpads, and the keyboard and iOS lack most basic shortcut keys, so in order to do anything other than typing, you'll need to lift your arm and reach for the screen to use touch. This is something Apple has mocked for years as the reason not to include touch on laptops, and now they release a device which requires it 100%.This is what happens when you run out of ideas and try to shoehorn your cashcow - iOS - into a role it was never intended to fulfill, without being gutsy enough to make the changes it requires. The iPad Pro is clearly screaming for a touchpad (and proper keyboard shortcuts), but it doesn't have any, and according to John Gruber, it never will (a comment I filed away for later when Apple inevitably adds mouse support to iOS).Microsoft's Surface may not be perfect, but its problems stem almost exclusively not from a lack in hardware capability or a faulty concept, but from Microsoft's Metro environment being utterly shit. The concept of having a tablet and a laptop in the same device, seamlessly switching between a tablet UI and a desktop UI, is sound - the only problem is that Microsoft doesn't have a working tablet UI and applications. Meanwhile, trying to shoehorn a mobile, touch-first UI into a laptop form factor is just as silly and idiotic as trying to shoehorn a desktop UI into a mobile, touch-first form factor - and Apple should know better.Or should they? Paul Thurrott, earlier this week:While the iPad Pro was in many ways inevitable, it also points to a crisis of original thought at Apple, which has been coasting on the iPhoneâs coattails for perhaps too long. At Apple, the solution to every problem is another iPhone. And the iPad Pro, like the new Apple TV and the Apple Watch, is really just another attempt to duplicate that singular success in other markets.Thurrott really hits the nail on the head. The iPhone became a success because Apple sought - and succeeded in - designing an interface and interaction model that was specifically designed for the iPhone's input methods - the multitouch display, the home button. Ever since that major big hit, they've been trying to shoehorn that exact same interface and interaction model into every major new product - the Apple Watch, the new Apple TV, and now the iPad Pro. However, if there's one thing we've learned from Palm OS (pen-first, mobile-first) and iOS (multitouch-first, mobile-first), it's that every form factor needs a tailored interaction model - not a shoehorned one.When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - which sums up Apple's new major product lines ever since the release of the iPhone, and the iPad Pro seems no different. It will do great as an iPad+, but beyond that? It's not going to make a single, meaningful dent, without considerable restructuring of iOS' UI and interaction models - and lots and lots of crow. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...