News (172)

Google's Android gets app market

Google on Thursday in the US announced Android Market, an online center similar to the iPhone application store that will let people find, buy, download, and rate software and other content for mobile phones equipped with the open source operating system. Read more »

Bloomberg publishes Jobs obituary

An electronic gaffe at news outlet Bloomberg mistakenly sent an incomplete obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the wire on Wednesday afternoon in the US. Read more »

Sun open-sources mobile Java UI toolkit

Sun has open sourced its toolkit for creating Java-based user interfaces for mobile phones. Read more »

Gates: Privacy a 'challenge' as software advances

As software gets more powerful, privacy issues pose an "interesting software challenge," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Read more »

Sun throws JavaFX hat into Web app ring

Sun Microsystems on Thursday released a preview version of JavaFX, programming technology the company hopes will be the foundation of splashy, whiz-bang Internet applications. Read more »

LiMo gets Openwave browser and messaging

Purple Labs, an increasingly prominent mobile Linux firm and a member of the LiMo Foundation, has bought the browser and messaging side of Openwave's business. Read more »

Mobile users like disabled PC users

Mobile-device users find they have the same usability problems that some disabled users encounter with PCs, according to researchers from the University of Manchester. Read more »

Will software set the mobile phone free?

Open source software will mean the end of proprietary phone and software bundles, and create universal compatibility and lower the cost of handsets within three years, according to analyst firm S2 Intelligence. Read more »

What does Nokia's Symbian move mean for Android?

The next great operating systems wars are about to be fought, as traditional computing companies collide with teams representing the mobile phone industry. Read more »

Firefox 3 goes for Guinness, Australia declares love

The Mozilla Project has smashed its target of five million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, achieving a final tally of 8,290,545, and a six percent share of the total browser market Read more »

Features (57)

JavaScript -- a Flash competitor?

Open source software has its problems when it's trying to keep up with proprietary software, but when it does what it's good at -- creating ideas and developing them very quickly in public -- it can be revolutionary. Read more »

An outage: Lessons learned

This article talks about two outages that occurred at a college and lessons learned from them. Read more »

Nokia enters the mobile open source battle

Tuesday's big announcement, that several major mobile platforms — Symbian, UIQ, Series 60 and MOAP — are to be pooled into one open-sourced über-platform, came out of the blue. Read more »

Improving the mobile Web user experience

Traditionally our experience with the mobile Web was pretty terrible, but the good news is that this is starting to change, at least according to Oliver Weidlich, usability specialist at Ideal Interfaces. Read more »

Ecosystem breaking from Microsoft's grip?

Microsoft got where it is today through its influence over manufacturers. It no longer has the control it once enjoyed. Read more »

Location-based publishing and services

Geocoded content is transforming our Web. By adding geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) to our media, we can help others find it through location-based search engines and web maps. Read more »

Be aware of AJAX's drawbacks

Some developers view AJAX as the silver bullet for every scenario. However, AJAX introduces its own set of hazards in various areas, which include: development time, browsing history and experience, search engine interaction, accessibility, server load, and security. Read more »

Developing Bluetooth wireless applications in J2ME

This article reviews the principles of Java development for Bluetooth on mobile devices and describes how to write a Java application for Bluetooth communications. Read more »

Programming smartcards with the Java Card platform

The Java Card is an open, interoperable platform for smartcards and secure tokens; the technology is also widely used in SIM cards (it's used in GSM mobile phones) and ATM cards. Read more »

Case Study: Taking the Smartpath with Flex

Sometimes it's worth taking a risk on a beta. For Smartpath, taking that risk has led to the creation of a robust and industry-tested asset, help desk and facilities management tool based on Flex. Read more »

Video (6)

Wii remote creates $50 digital whiteboard: IDF

Intel chairman Craig Barrett introduces innovative projects such as a $50 digital whiteboard created from a Wii remote, and a mobile phone that can read bar codes on a health ID card. Read more »

Captain Obvious vs the Crackpots -- Club Builder

In the case of the bleeding obvious, IBM says open source needs good designers; a claim is made that China can activate your phone to snoop on you; and we take a look at the Defcon conference. Read more »

Cynicism, Barcodes, and Guns -- Club Builder

Club Builder asks whether Google's indexing of Flash content will be good for the Internet? Is Gentoo merely a testbed for rsync? And we show how Telstra wants to increase mobile phone data usage. Read more »

JavaOne '08: Sun demos JavaFX platform

Here's a look at Sun Microsystems' new JavaFX application, with Flickr and Twitter feeds running in Facebook within the browser, dragged to the desktop, and then put on a mobile phone. Sun Microsystems executives Rich Green and Nandini Ramani showed the JavaFX environment at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco. Read more »

Using mobile phones to track traffic

News.com's Erica Ogg reports on what happens when 100 volunteers with GPS phones start driving up and down a 10-mile stretch of freeway. Read more »

Opera browser for mobile phones mimics iPhone's Safari

At the Digital Life Show in New York City, ZDNet executive editor David Berlind gets a demonstration of an iPhone-like browsing feature that Opera will be introducing into Opera Mini, a browser designed specifically for mobile phones. Read more »

Blog (17)

VMware shows how not to do it

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- As a developer there will be a time when you ship a bug -- be it a stub that you left in, or a flaming, crashtastic segfault. The next time this happens and your bosses come baying for blood, point them in the direction of VMware, who this week gave the developer world a great example of how to ship a showstopper bug. Read more »

Screw-ups, Mobile Linux shakeup and kthxbai Bill

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- The Roundup looks at where Sun went wrong with open source, what is happening in the Mobile Linux world and look at the departure of Bill Gates from full time work duties. Read more »

China poised for 3G

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- A major overhaul of the telecommunications industry in China will clear the way for 3G services to possibly over half a billion mobile phones. Read more »

Opera Widget SDK released

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Opera has announced the release of Opera Widgets SDK beta, that allows Web developers to create Web applications capable of running on all devices. Read more »

Nokia starts trolling

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- This week Builder AU is on the road at linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne -- but before we get into all that is happening here, there is the small matter of Trolltech. Read more »

Still many questions about software for mobile computers

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- The great thing about the development of future mobile computers is that no one school of thought has come to dominate the territory. Of course, that's also a problem. Read more »

Newbie guide to Google's Android

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Google's platform for mobile devices has been announced and ready for developers to get their hands dirty. Here's the basics of what it's all about and the core architecture overview. Read more »

Google's Android parts ways with Java industry group

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Google's Android software gives Sun Microsystems' Java technology a starring role -- but not the version of Java the rest of the mobile phone industry has been developing since the 1990s. Read more »

XSS fun with Howard: Liberal Party says no

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Political parties have no sense of humour. Far from being a revelation, it was merely reinforced yet again as both the major parties in this country had their sites fall victim to XSS. Read more »

Adobe's MAX Conference 2007, Day One Keynote

Andrew Muller [blogs:nouveauricheinternet] -- The big event of a Flex, Flash or ColdFusion developer's year is Adobe's annual conference held this year in Chicago. Builder AU's Andrew Muller attended this year and reports on the first day's opening. Read more »

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  • Staff Shadow chasing in browsers

    The punching and counterpunching continued in the ongoing web browser development bout. Each time one browser closes a feature gap, a new feature appears in one of the others -- how we ever put up with the years of browser stagnation, I'll never know. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett Safari gets Gears

    Since its release in May last year, Gears has supported only Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. With the addition of Safari into the Gears fold, it closes the loop of major browsers to support Gears Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Renai LeMay MyPerfect.com.au has potential

    Victorian Web start-up My Perfect has a strong story and rationale for why it will succeed. But it has to overcome some challenges and design flaws first. Read more »

    -- posted by Renai LeMay

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