Google said Monday that it has stopped censoring its search services - Search, News and Images - on Google.cn, its site in China, and that users are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, its Hong Kong site, where it is “offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.”
Mozilla said on Tuesday that it is halting work on the creation of
Firefox for Windows Mobile. The company had been working on a version of Firefox that would run on Windows Mobile 6, part of a years-long effort to bring its browser to Windows CE. As for the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft has thus far said that applications for that operating system have to be written in either Silverlight or XNA, rather than in native code.
Adobe announced the immediate availability of Flash Builder4 and ColdFusion Builder software, next generation Flash Platform tooling for building multi-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs). In addition, Adobe added a new Social service to the recently introduced Adobe Flash Platform Services. The Social service streamlines integration between Web applications and 14 leading social networks using Facebook Connect, Sign-in with Twitter, MySpaceID and LinkedIn.
Apple is alerting developers that they have just over a week to prepare iPad apps and get them submitted for review if they want them to be in the App Store on April 3. Developers must build their apps using beta 5 of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK and submit them by 5pm PDT on March 27 to get an initial review by Apple, according to an e-mail sent to the developers.
Google, Intel, and Sony are working on a set-top box running Google's Android software called Google TV, according to a report from The New York Times. They are also collaborating on televisions with technology from the three companies, with Google software serving as the interface on the devices.
At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that's designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.
Microsoft Monday announced at its MIX 10 conference the immediate release of free versions of its core development tools, all designed to get developers off to a fast start building applications for Windows Phone 7 smartphones.
Last week CNET.com speculated that Opera Software would release the final versions of their latest beta Web browsers in time for the CTIA cell phone conference in late March. Instead, Opera released them a week earlier than they predicted. Tuesday morning, Opera turned its Mini 5 beta 2 and Mobile 10 beta into the company's latest stable versions of its mobile Web browsers.
Mozilla made public the first beta of Thunderbird 3. Code-named Lanikai and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the milestone makes few noticeable changes to the open-source and free desktop e-mail client. This is not surprising, though, as Mozilla Messaging announced that the goal of this release was to fix problems created by upgrading the Gecko engine that powers the program.
Google is bringing the app store concept to business cloud computing, giving software developers a storefront for Google Apps customers. The Google Apps Marketplace will allow Google Apps users to purchase third-party applications to run atop the Google Apps suite.