TheWatchWorks

I pay the cab driver, pick up my suitcase, and step outside. The background's filled with the notes from Dean Martin's rendition of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!", and as I walk away from the cab the sounds of the city drive away the memories from the war, back in Sicily. It's February 8, 1945, Empire Bay, and the war is drawing to a close. Welcome to Mafia II. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Clemens Zeidler, one of the spearheads for the Stack & Tile implementation on Haiku, has let the Haiku development mailing list know that a new and improved (and refactored) version of the feature has been committed to the Haiku source tree. This new version is no longer a hack into Haiku's app server itself, but is it's own decorator, in Haiku/Be parlance.

We don't do a whole lot of gaming news (a few reviews every now and then, just for my own personal fun), but in this case, I'd like to make an exception. Iconic and legendary, Duke Nukem is going to really really really return to the main stage of gaming. Borderlands developer Gearbox has announced that Duke Nukem Forever will be released early next year, for both consoles and PC. A playable demo is now being trotted around PAX. Instant update: VIDEO! VIDEO!

"By now, most iTunes users have already downloaded and installed iTunes 10. We've already given you the low-down on the biggest addition to the new version of iTunes - the Ping social network - but we also wanted to give our impressions on two 'improvements' promised in the release notes: look-and-feel and performance. While we agree that iTunes is 'faster and more responsive', we're not sold on the revised user interface." Vertical window titlebar widgets? Can't we just take this thing 'round back and put a bullet between its eyes? We'd be doing everyone a favour.

Ping would have been a great thing for Apple to have done about 3-4 years ago, but at this point, the Social Networking thing has pretty much played itself out, picked its winners, and we've all moved on. Apple went to all the trouble to make a deal with a golf company, and all we got was a third rate social network? First of all, in what is probably just a temporary setback, Ping is choked with spam, but more importantly, it's just a sucky social network.

Well, this is an interesting double standard. Remember Apple's reaction to Palm trying to tap into iTunes? They were pretty pissed, right? Well, it seems that in Apple's world, it's not okay to access their services unauthorised, but when Apple needs to do the same to someone else's services, it's suddenly not a problem. As it turns out, Apple violated Facebook's terms of service, knowingly, and willingly.

"Google is celebrating Chrome's second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines."

The iPad pretty much has the tablet market all to itself at this point, since no serious competitor has yet been released. We've been teased to death with the first real competitor, a device from Samsung called the Galaxy Tab. It has been officially unveiled today, and it indeed looks like the first serious competition to the iPad. It runs Android, naturally.

It's been only a mere six months since its first unveiling, but Microsoft has already announced that Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing. This means device makers can start tuning the software to their hardware, leaving plenty of time to release devices before the holiday season.

Well, this was rather unexpected. As it turns out, Commodore USA's CEO Barry Altman isn't particularly pleased about the article I wrote earlier today in which I placed a considerable amount of scepticism with regards to Commodore USA and its business (and website). He (not his lawyer) sent us a threatening email demanding we take down the article, post a new correction article, the whole shebang. The entire email - as an image, you'll want the original formatting - after the break. Our reply? We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

A whole lot of Apple news of course, but we've never really done music players or streaming devices, so let's skip the barrage of new iPods and the new Apple TV (streaming-only? Fail). The real meat is of course iOS 4.1 and 4.2, both of which were detailed during today's press event.

Well, this is kind of funny. Steve Wozniak, still an Apple employee, has defended Paul Allen and patent trolls in general. "I'm not at all against the idea of patent trolls cause I've had friends who just got forced into bankruptcy by bigger people who had more money and could have a lawsuit against them, forced them to be their own lawyers, and in the end, sometimes they're victorious. But it's a real hard way to do it. So if you're going to have a patent and say 'It's worth some money, I'll sell it', well, even if Paul Allen makes a fortune off of it, I think he had the insights to recognize which patents were valuable." Apple is one of the companies Allen is suing.

Just when you thought the Amiga world was finally getting its act together, finally making things a little less obtuse for outsiders, this happens. So, we have the AmigaOne X1000 coming up, a brand-new PowerPC computer, running the real deal - AmigaOS 4. In the meantime, Commodore USA - the one with the sketchy website - has apparently secured rights to the Amiga hardware brand, and is planning to release Amiga-branded computers running AROS. In the meantime, Hyperion, the Belgium company behind AmigaOS, who is working with A-eon on the AmigaOne X1000, claims this is a clear violation of the settlement between them and Amiga Inc., and has notified its US lawyers.

"KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the first in a series of stabilization updates to 4.5.0, coming every month, as if delivered by a cronjob. 4.5.1 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5.0."

"When it comes to Apple products, the iPad and the iPhone get all the headlines. But in recent years, the company's Macintosh line of computers has enjoyed a remarkable revival that has been vital to Apple's emergence as the most valued technology company on Wall Street. In the latest sign of that comeback, Autodesk plans to announce on Tuesday that it is bringing its flagship AutoCAD design and engineering software to the Mac for the first time in nearly two decades."

Despite doing what I think are some great things for the American people, the Obama administration has a dark side. Joe Biden and many others on staff come straight from the RIAA camp, and it shows. Today, the Obama administration disregarded every US law relating to theft and copyright by stating that piracy is "flat, unadulterated theft".

Highly innovative but remarkably illusive - that's how I describe the webOS. The operating system never made its way to The Netherlands, and as such, I never got to try it. Now that Palm is part of HP, development on webOS continues, and the company has just detailed what's coming for developers in version 2.0.

Since interesting news that I'm actually knowledgeable about is still a little hard to come by, I have to work a little harder. This is something interesting to discuss: John Gruber, rather famous Apple blogger, is now arguing that Apple is in fact not fighting the jailbreaking community. Wait, what? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

"Mozilla has announced a new alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for Android and the Nokia N900. Fennec offers support for add-ons and has tight integration with Firefox Sync, a browser synchronization service that was formerly called Weave. The support for Firefox Sync is arguably Fennec's killer feature, especially because Mozilla is planing to include the synchronization features out-of-the-box in Firefox 4. Users will be able to have access to the their bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs across all of their computers and supported mobile devices."

"Intel Corp.'s $1.4 billion acquisition of Infineon Technologies AG's wireless unit marks another step by the chip maker to expand in the wireless device market, an area where it has struggled in the past. Intel's need to push further into wireless was highlighted Friday by the company's surprising warning that third-quarter revenue would fall short of its previous expectations because of weaker-than-expected demand for consumer PCs. Smartphones and other mobile devices have long been a faster-growing segment than the PC market."