By Shane Luckman / 7 February 2010 / No Comments
Sega has unveiled a new console, which seems to be pretty underwhelming in contrast to the other major consoles out now. Only time will tell whether the Zone Sega Wireless Gaming Console will be a contender in the “Console War” or just another knock-off like the Wii.
The Zone Sega Wireless Console boasts 50 games; 20 from the Mega Drive and Genesis era, 14 arcade games, and 16 sport games controlled via a Wii remote like controller. The Sega games though do not use motion control which leaves the question, will emulator get the best of it or will Sega and 3rd party developers make the Zone a worthwhile buy.
The console will sell at £50; roughly $90 here in Australia, and due out in the 3rd quarter of 2010.
By Terence Huynh / 3 January 2010 / No Comments
RUMOUR MILL: Want a rumour to keep your senses tingling? Well, it might for some of you - especially those with an Android phone. WordPress is rumoured to be launching an Android application where, like the iPhone and BlackBerry applications, to edit and manage your WordPress-powered blog from your phone.
Turns out it may be true, they have created a special blog on the subdomain android.wordpress.org, hinting at the development of the application. And, if you are a master of hacking, you are more likely never going to see what is behind the protected blog.
So, what OS is next after Android? Symbian?
Source: The Blog Herald
By Terence Huynh / 10 December 2009 / No Comments
Does your loved one want to get his own web business started? Does this loved one want to share his opinions to the world, or wants to showcase his portfolio to customers outside of their neighbourhood? Well, Media Temple has brought out again its “The Hosting Card” product this holiday season. For just only US$95, you can get a domain address and 5GB of hosting space for one year.
However, the physical gift cards are no longer in stock (at the time of writing), so digital delivery is the only option to give this web designer-orientated gift.
Buy it: Media Temple
By Terence Huynh / 14 November 2009 / No Comments
Microsoft will release a Windows 7 tool under the open-source license GPL after it had violated the terms of the license by not making it open source after modifying the code. The tool in question, the ImageMaster USB/DVD, allows users to create a bootable USB version of the Windows 7 DVD, or a DVD backup, from the electronic version of Windows 7, which can be found at the Microsoft Store online.
Well, after pulling down the software because of an internal investigation and a story publically revealing Microsoft’s code violation, it found that it did use code licensed under the GPL and will make its source code and binaries public, though it did say it was “not intentional”.
“After looking at the code in question, we are now able to confirm this was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process,” Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft, wrote on its Port25 blog.
“We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.”
By Terence Huynh / 18 October 2009 / 1 Comment
While WordPress is still the best blogging software tool out there in the web, it is still being criticised for not being a “real CMS (Content Management System)”. But, it seems that will change once the 2.9 beta is released around the end of October with brand new features, according to Dougal Campbell.
Campbell has said that the next version of 2.9 will include Post Thumbnails, meaning that an image will be automatically created of the post – making it easier for people to create a list of “Featured Posts” without creating custom metadata for the post; simple image editing – including cropping, resizing, flip and rotating options; and custom post types - so you can post things outside the conventional page, post or attachment page.
Also included is the integration of a plugin that allows you to simply paste the URL that contains anything that you can embed, like a YouTube video, and it will find the embed code and put the code for you. So far, according to Campbell, it only supports YouTube, Google Video, PollDaddy (owned by WordPress developers Automattic).
Theme and plugin developers will also be happy to find out that you can now place widgets outside the Loop; and you can now access the metadata for all comments. Plugin developers will also be allowed to add additional theme directories to the core, allowing plugins to ship with their own themes.
Those who cannot wait for the beta of WordPress 2.9, you can follow these instructions to get involved. WordPress has also said that the final version of 2.9 will hopefully be released in late November to early December.
By Terence Huynh / 5 October 2009 / 1 Comment
Adobe will announce tomorrow at this year’s MAX conference, Adobe’s worldwide developers conference, that it has secured partnerships with Research in Motion (RIM), Windows Mobile, Palm and Google to roll out full Flash capabilities, similar to what you can see on your desktop, to various products and their respective platforms.
The technology will be rolled out to Windows Mobile phones and Palm’s webOS devices later in the year, with public betas for Symbian OS (Nokia) and Google Android sometime early next year. Adobe has not announced when the Flash Player will be coming to RIM’s BlackBerry devices.
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By Terence Huynh / 1 October 2009 / No Comments
Despite being a very useful tool in keeping up with breaking news, it seems that people don’t know where to find interesting users, mainly because they are afraid of adding them or don’t really have anything to say. While there are many tools that do that job for you, but that means you have to go to another site outside of Twitter.
Well, until now. Twitter has announced a brand new feature that will be implemented soon. Called Lists, it will allow users to create custom lists of users they follow with a click. Lists will be public by default, meaning that everyone can see who is in that particular list, but you can set it to private. Just like the profiles themselves, you can subscribe (or “follow”) the list.
“We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter,” Project leader Nick Kallen said on Twitter’s blog.
Currently, it is in limited testing, meaning that you most likely won’t see it, unless you are really, really lucky; but after that, it will be launched for all accounts. Twitter developers will also be given the API once it receives a public launch, so apps can take advantage of the new feature.
You can follow TECHGEEK.com.au on Twitter at @techgeekcomau. You can also follow me at @terencehuynh.
By Terence Huynh / 25 September 2009 / No Comments
Microsoft has a long history of being non-compliant with web standards. For example, it took until Internet Explorer 7 to support many of the CSS attributes that were commonly supported by rivals Firefox and Safari. However, as speculation that Microsoft may not support new tags from the new HTML5 standard, looks like we were wrong. In a shock to many, Program Manager for IE, Adrian Bateman, said that the next version of Internet Explorer will be supporting the two media tags - <audio> and <video>.
These two tags are known as future replacements for video and audio playback on the web, and will allow developers to actually create the player with simple HTML, CSS and Javascript; unlike today, where it is either built with Adobe Flash, Silverlight or using embeddable players from QuickTime, Windows Media Player or Real Player – all which require a person to install plugins or the players themselves to play the video.
Out of all the browsers, the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari have support for the new HTML 5 tags, but all have different ways on playing the format as the working group have made no specification on what codec should the browser use. The team over at Redmond have not made any comment on how will they support the codec.
By Terence Huynh / 4 July 2009 / No Comments
The latest revision to the code that makes up the entire Web is set to drop codec requirements that would set specific formats (codecs) on video and audio files that could allow people to distribute multimedia easier as browsers fight over which format should be the standard.
The main five browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera) have not been able to agree on the specific format that all browsers will support, according to the editor of the new HTML5 specification Ian Hickson from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
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By Terence Huynh / 1 July 2009 / No Comments
From the new features comes new things for developers to play around and enjoy in the new version of Firefox 3.5, and because of this, TECHGEEK.com.au will now bring you up to speed what developers can now use in the latest version of the open source browser.
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