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Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone have captured most of the headlines at the Mobile World Congress 2013. We already knew a bit about each but the Barcelona show has seen both platforms step into the limelight.
We had the opportunity to experience both new operating systems first hand to expose their differences and similarities. Read on and find out what we thought about the two new mobile OSs on the block. Continue reading “Firefox vs Ubuntu – a new mobile platform war begins”
Did you know that as well as make video calls, you can also share your screen with Skype? Screen sharing is particularly useful if you need a friend to help with some trouble shooting on your computer or if you’re having a business meeting. Screen sharing works fairly well on Skype although it does use more bandwidth. If you experience screen freezes or the screen sharing responds slowly, try deactivating video calling if you’re in a video call.
Ubisoft have confirmed that the Assassin’s Creed franchise will continue this year, with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. As the rumors suggested, there is indeed a Pirate theme to the game, as you can see from the background of the box art below.
The artwork also shows the protagonist, although he probably best described as ‘generic Assassin’s Creed man’ at the moment. We’ll have to wait for details about his history and links to the Assassins.
Continue reading “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag confirmed”
Sony has released official high definition imaged of the PlayStation 4 interface. You can see how it will look on tablets and smartphones as well as your TV screen.
The screenshots show how much more social the new PlayStation will be, with the new profile, friends activity, video and screenshot sharing options, game streaming and more.
The new interface bears a striking resemblance to the Windows 8/Xbox interface. This highlights how out of date the old PlayStation interface had got, and how much better Microsoft have been with updating their interface experience with this generation of console.
Sony also released an image of PlayStation 4 logos, which you can see below the break.
Continue reading “Official PlayStation 4 interface photos released”
The new Facebook Timeline, originally released to New Zealand users in January, is now being made available to users around the world.
The new design, which simplifies the Timeline into two main columns, makes your profile page into a much more complete view of your activity on Facebook and other websites. The main column now displays your updates and life events, while the left column includes your personal info and pulls in content from Instagram, Good Reads, Spotify and other social apps linked to Facebook.
Tumblr has had integrated audio blog posts for some time now. Thanks to partnerships with Spotify and Soundcloud, you can quickly embed music and podcasts into Tumblr. There are multiple options to find audio such as search and external URLs. While Tumblr doesn’t support all of Spotify’s and Soundcloud’s features, it will be sufficient enough to share your favorite tracks with your followers.
Both audio services have advantages and disadvantages when used with Tumblr. Spotify provides only music, but has playlists and a much more detailed embedded player. Soundcloud includes podcasts along with music, but only allows single tracks. Regardless of which audio service you prefer, they are both great for enhancing your Tumblr.
We’ll show you the best ways to get your Spotify and Soundcloud collections on to Tumblr.
Continue reading “How to add Spotify and Soundcloud to Tumblr”
Free Pandora mobile users have some bad news today. The company has announced that it will start capping mobile usage to 40 hours per month.
Pandora previously had this cap on both desktop and mobile usage, but dropped it in September 2011. Rising royalty costs have forced Pandora to reinstate this monthly cap.
The 40 hour cap will only apply to mobile app users this time around.
Pandora has claimed that this cap will only impact about 4% of mobile users but if you’re one of the 4%, you have little recourse than to move to another service like Spotify or pony up for a paid subscription to Pandora. If you hit the 40 hour cap that month, you can pay $0.99 to use the service the remainder of the month. A subscription to Pandora One will cost $3.99 a month or $36 for the year, which will get rid of the listening limit and ads.
Source: Pandora Blog
Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer for Electronic Arts, has announced that the company has plans to include micro-transactions in all future games. Micro-transactions are in-game currency, weapons, or abilities that you can purchase with real money.
There was some controversy over EA including micro-transactions in its Dead Space 3 game, which recently came out. Some gamers feel like having micro-transactions to unlock in-game perks devalues the experience. Compound this problem with tons of downloadable content (DLC) and gamers feel like they’re getting an incomplete product.
Here’s what Jorgensen had to say:
“We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be. Consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.”
Micro-transactions are nothing new for the company as its game, Mass Effect 3, had the option to purchase more credits in its multiplayer mode. Even EA’s racing series, Need for Speed, has had the ability to use real money to progress faster in the game.
It’s no surprise that EA wants to add micro-transactions to games as it is very profitable for the company. They allow an avenue for the publisher to sell items to users after they’ve already paid for the game. Micro-transactions have been successful for casual mobile games and publishers have taken notice. Whether consumers will actually embrace micro-transactions remains to be seen.
Do you like micro-transactions? Let us know why or why not in the comments.
Source: Euro Gamer
Even though iTunes has become less necessary for iOS users, there are still a lot of people who use iTunes to manage their music collections. iTunes 11 evolved the interface and brought a more streamlined look to the aged program to make the usability more transparent. At the same time, iTunes hid some of the previously standard menus that users were fond of in favor of this new visual look.
It is actually easy to show both the Menu Bar and Sidebar, giving you access again to the file-to-help Menu Bar and the Sidebar that shows the information older versions of iTunes natively displayed.
If you need these menus again, it only takes a couple minutes to enable the two menu bars.
Continue reading “How to enable Menu Bar and Sidebar in iTunes 11”
Google has updated its Chrome browser for Android users. While many of the changes had to do with performance, the biggest feature that has been added is background audio.
Previously, Chrome would stop playing audio if you jumped out of the app. With the new update, you can start streaming a song and have it continue to play within Chrome while you’re in another app. iOS users can scoff as this feature has been available to them for years. It’s quite shocking that it took Google this long to add background audio to its flagship browser.
Besides background audio support, users will find performance increases across the board. Here are some highlights from the changelog: Continue reading “Google Chrome for Android updates with background audio”
