By Greg Mills
We know Apple and other companies have been working on ePay systems using smart phones and some sort of electronic “radio bridge” to make it possible to pay for small things or even a tank of gas, by using your cell phone to pay.
Read MoreIf you like video and computer games, the years ahead could be good ones for you as there’ll be more and more folks working on ’em.
Approximately 300 American colleges, universities, art and trade schools will offer degrees in video game design, development, programming and art during the 2010-11 academic year, according to new research from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). The degrees offered at 300 institutions represent an almost 20% increase over 2009-10.
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By Cyndy Cashman
Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 (http://www.adobe.com) is an US399 Flash development tool for creating interactive applications. Geared toward designers, Flash Catalyst allows designers to turn static Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks files into interactive applications without writing code. At the core of Flash Catalyst are components such as buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, checkboxes, and data lists that are used to create interactions.
Read MoreShipments of “combo” chipsets for mobile devices that gather a variety of connectivity types in one small package are expected to approach 280 million worldwide by the end of 2010.
Integrating different radio technologies such as FM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS on a single chip may sometimes involve performance compromises, but saves money, space and power. ABI Research (http://www.abiresearch.com) forecasts that more than 979 million such chipsets will ship in 2015.
Read MoreGideon Softworks has updated Snard (http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/snard.html), the “the Swiss Army Knife of launcher programs” for Mac OS X, to version 2.6.4. It’s a maintenance update that fixes a problem with orphaned files/folders.
Snard can be used as a system menu or as a hot key activated pop-up menu. It also supports the use of hot keys. Snard provides many of the functionalities of the old Apple and Application menus, yet it can be customized.
Snard 2.6.4requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. It costs US$10 for new users.
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