An anonymous reader writes "Google is already experimenting with GPU acceleration in its latest Chrome developer builds. Chrome 7 can separate different layers of a webpage into CPU and GPU processes and combine those layers using the GPU as long as the browser is now launched with certain switches. Chromium 7 has also a new Labs feature that reveals that Google is thinking about moving tabs from the top of the browser to the left side. It seems that Chrome will be catching up with Firefox 4 and IE9 in terms of hardware acceleration soon."

zerOnIne writes "Dr. Mark Micire of UMass Lowell has built an intriguing new user interface on the Microsoft Surface, a multitouch-capable table computer. The interface is being used to control swarms of robots for disaster response, search, and rescue. One of the most interesting things about it is the intuitive tabletop joystick widget. Using a very fast hand-detection-and-identification algorithm, they can paint a touch joystick (dubbed the DREAM controller) directly underneath the hand. This joystick conforms to the size of the user's hand and tracks with hand movements, making sure that the control is always directly under the hand where the user expects it, even without haptic feedback. I've had a chance to go hands-on with this system, and I think it's truly remarkable."

DeviceGuru writes "Although it won't help Linux run Windows-specific software applications, this easy hack produces an Ubuntu desktop that looks and feels a lot like Windows 7. It's particularly suitable for reviving older PCs or laptops on which the main activities will be web-browsing, email, document writing, and streaming music and videos from from the web. The process installs a Windows 7-like GNOME theme on an otherwise standard Ubuntu 10.04 installation, although it might work on other Linux distros with GNOME and appropriate other packages installed. Naturally all this begs the question: why would anybody want to do this? Why indeed!" People have been doing this sort of look-and-feel swap-out for years; it seems best to me as a practical joke.

An anonymous reader writes "Elliptic Labs is set to debut their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology which uses ultrasound to let the user navigate through a device's commands simply with the motion of their hands. From the article: 'Elliptic plans to showcase their “Mimesign” technology at IFA in Berlin from the 3rd to 8th of September 2010. Mimesign will bring intuitive ways for people to interact with devices. The possibilities range from tablets, remote controls or in-car media controls. The interface is based on ultrasound technology and allows the user to remain in an unchanged state.'"

An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's 'social desktop,' I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparse (pre-Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials." I fondly recall downloading build after build and installing them. But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.

eldavojohn writes "On June 17th, the X.org team was notified by Invisible Things Lab of a critical security flaw (PDF) that affected both x86_32 and x86_64 platforms. The flaw deals with escalated privileges of a user process that has access to the X server. The founder of ITL said of the flaw, 'The attack allows a (unpriviliged) user process that has access to the X server (so, any GUI application) to unconditionally escalate to root (but again, it doesn't take advantage of any bug in the X server!). In other words: any GUI application (think e.g. sandboxed PDF viewer), if compromised (e.g. via malicious PDF document) can bypass all the Linux fancy security mechanisms, and escalate to root, and compromise the whole system.' This has apparently been a security flaw since kernel 2.6 was released. From the article, 'On 13 August, Linus Torvalds committed an initial fix, but several patches were added afterward for various reasons. The problem has been addressed in versions 2.6.27.52, 2.6.32.19, 2.6.34.4 and 2.6.35.2 of the kernel.'"

jitendraharlalka writes "Mark Shuttleworth recently announced on his blog that the first cut of Canonical's UTouch framework is ready and will be available in Ubuntu Maverick. He goes on to talk about the development of 'touch language' by the design team. The 'touch language' will allow the chaining of basic gestures to create complex gestures. The approach is quite different from the single magic gestures implemented elsewhere. In Maverick, a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling."

adeelarshad82 writes "Google introduced the next generation of interaction with its Android operating system by introducing a set of new features. The most prominent one is the voice-driven actions. Google executives outlined 12 new 'Voice Actions for Android,' including phone calls, reminder e-mails, direction search, and music search. The app is called 'Voice Search,' requires Android 2.2, and is available in the Android Market now. Voice actions can be triggered by clicking the 'microphone' icon on the screen. Saying 'call John Smith at home' will trigger the contacts list and voice dialer, 'find art museums in Amsterdam' would launch a Google Maps application, and 'listen to Ace of Base' will search for music from the artist on Pandora, Last.fm, or another music application. Another improvement worth a mention is 'Chrome to Phone,' allows users to click on a new 'mobile phone' icon to send links, YouTube videos, even directions, to the phone. So far, the features are exclusive to Android phones and US English, although the capabilities will be moved to other languages and other operating systems (including the iPhone) in the future." Add reader CWmike: "JR Raphael takes a first look at Voice Actions for Android, and tells you how to get voice control even if you are not on Froyo."

DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"

supersloshy writes "The GNOME Census, a project to see who contributes to GNOME and how, has released its first set of results. The results group people by their reasons to contribute code, what they contributed code to, and what percentage of the total contributions they have. For example, 23.45% of code contributions were volunteer, 16.3% of code contributions came from Red Hat, 1% of contributions came from Canonical (which has caused a lot of controversy), and 0.24% came from Mozilla Corporation. The census results are also represented in diagrams (release activity, why contributions were made, and what was contributed to and by who). The report is also available here and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license."

An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."

Julie188 writes "GNOME 3.0 was scheduled to be released in September but during the developers conference, GUADEC 2010 in Den Haag, the organization had to face facts: the much ballyhooed GNOME Shell really wasn't ready. The Shell is supposed to bring 'a whole new user experience to the desktop.' So now, in September, what users will see is GNOME 2.32, distributed as a new stable release. Next target date for 3.0: March 2011."

Nunavut writes in with a note from TechCrunch on Aza Raskin's latest Mozilla goodie, Tab Candy. "Be sure to watch the video for a full overview — from the looks of it, it seems as if Tab Candy is sort of like Apple's Expose feature mixed with their Spaces feature, both of which are baked into OS X. For those who don't use a Mac, basically these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird's-eye-view of all your windows (or tabs, in this case) that are open — and you can also arrange open windows (or again, tabs, in this case) in certain spaces so they're clumped together. This allows you to more easily find what you're looking for with so many tabs open." Here's Raskin's blog post, the download link, and the FAQ.

joel.neely writes "R is a statistical computing environment that is fully-compliant with state-of-the-art buzzwords: free, open-source, cross-platform, interactive, graphics, objects, closures, higher-order functions, and more. It is supported by an impressive collection of user-supplied modules through CRAN, the 'Comprehensive R Archive Network.' And now it has its own O'Reilly Nutshell book, R in a Nutshell, written by Joseph Adler. I am pleased to report that Adler has risen to the challenge of the highly-regarded 'Nutshell' franchise. As is traditional for the series, this title mixes introduction, tutorial, and reference material in a style that is well suited to a reader who already has a background in programming, but is a new or occasional user of R." Read on for the rest of Joel's review.

kai_hiwatari writes "Jolicloud 1.0, a Linux based OS for netbooks, was launched a few days back. In this new release, the developers have completely replaced the old interface based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix in favor of a new one based on HTML5. Jolicloud 1.0 also features a new syncing feature using which you can sync installed applications across all your systems running on Jolicloud. Other interesting features includes new app center, social stream, etc."

eldavojohn writes "Ever seeking to out innovate their competition, Microsoft has applied for a patent on animating page flips in devices like the Nook or Kindle. The application summary reads, 'One or more pages are displayed on a touch display. A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display. The virtual page turn actively follows the page-turning gesture. The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page. A lifted portion of the page is given an increased transparency that allows the back side of the page to be viewed through the front side of the page. A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.' Maybe you've seen this before?"

werfu writes "Compiz 0.9.0, the first release of Compiz rewritten in C++, has been announced on the Compiz mailing list. See the announcement for more info." Compiz has for years been one of my favorite ways to make Windows users envious, despite my (Linux) systems' otherwise low-end graphics capabilities. Besides the switch to C++ from C, this release "brings a whole new developer API, splits rendering into plugins, switches the buildsystem from automake to cmake and brings minor functionality improvements."

darthcamaro writes "How many times did you click the 'Back' button in your browser last week? According to a new study from Mozilla, it's likely that you clicked 'Back' a whole lot. 'Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days. The next most used button is the 'Reload' button with 73.2 percent usage and 22 clicks on average per user over five days. Other areas of the main window that were heavily used include the Search Bar where users input search queries. The study found that 67.9 percent of users used the Search Bar for an average of nearly 16 clicks per user over the course of five days.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Nokia announced that moving forward, MeeGo would be the default operating system in the N series of smartphones (original Reuters report). Symbian will still be used in low-end devices from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The move to MeeGo is a demonstration of support for the open source mobile OS, but considering the handset user experience hasn't been rolled out and likely won't be rolled out in time for its vague June deadline outlined at MeeGo.com, could the decision be premature?"

An anonymous reader writes "Google's latest Chrome 6 Developer Update comes with a few subtle GUI changes, but there is also a major update under the hood. As its ties with Adobe quite apparently grow stronger, there is not just an integrated Flash player, but also a native PDF reader in the latest version of Chrome 6. Google says the native reader will allow users to interact with PDF files just like they do with regular HTML pages. The reader is included in Chrome versions (Chromium) 6.0.437.1 and higher, and you can use the feature after you have enabled it manually in the plug-ins menu. That is, of course, if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on." The Register has some more details on the PDF plugin and a link to Google's blog post about it.