Since it was introduced in late 2008, VoxOx has tried to cut a name for itself in the competitive multi-protocol chat client market by providing users with an aggressive feature set. These include VoIP, a "personal assistant" for managing incoming calls with more than a simple redirect, and SMS and Web-based callback to cut down on the cost of long-distance, transnational calls. The latest improvement is a universal translator that translates all text-based messages in real time, and with a reasonable amount of accuracy, for both the Windows and Mac versions of the program. It will work with all supported instant messaging services, including Facebook IM, Twitter, and SMS messages.

To activate the translator, click the Universal Translator button to the right of the text box; it looks like a grayed-out globe. Check the "translate" box and choose whether you want all messages translated, only incoming, or only outgoing. Next, choose your languages, hit OK, and start typing. For both incoming and outgoing messages, you will only see them in your preferred language. Click on one to view its translation.

The feature supports 50 languages, from French, Spanish, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Hindi to more obscure languages such as Welsh, Icelandic, and Catalan. Some heavily-used languages, such as Tagalog, are not currently supported.

In tests performed with several colleagues at CNET, we discovered that the translator works well in general. It works best when the selected languages are set as the defaults for the system users. This means that if I'm translating into Chinese, the person I'm chatting with should have his or her chat program's default language set to Chinese. While this may seem frustrating to some, it's important to remember that the program only requires one user to be using VoxOx to take advantage of the translation feature.

Somewhat annoyingly, the translation feature also lacks any kind of "nuance engine" to help determine the context of the words as they're being used in the conversation. In other words, there's no support for slang. It translates what you type more or less literally, so expect some broken translations along the way.

For a free, on-the-fly text translation service that requires little effort from users, this seems like an acceptable trade-off and should be considered another feather in the VoxOx cap.

Before we get to this week's apps, a news item over at AppleInsider indicates we may be getting a change to the iPhone operating system that many have been talking about. According to one AppleInsider's more reliable sources, the iPhone OS 4.0 could add multitasking support in the next OS update. This means you'll be able to run apps simultaneously making it possible to switch between apps without closing them.

A lot of smartphones already have multitasking support, so it's been one of the bigger complaints for detractors of the iPhone. Frankly, I think it's a welcome change to the OS that might make it easier to do some tasks, but up until now I haven't really had any need for it. I'm sure there are plenty of readers who have been waiting for this rumored upgrade in the next iPhone OS, so please let us know in the comments how you think multitasking will change the way you use your iPhone.

This week's apps include a powerful clipboard manager to store information and media, and an enormously popular arcade fighting game that is now on the iPhone.

Pastebot Command Copy & Paste ($2.99) lets you take clips of information and save them for later in a slick-looking interface. When you're browsing the Web and come across interesting information or find an image you want to save, Pastebot lets you copy the image or information and save it to its own clipboard. Simply use the iPhone's copy tool to select the info or image you want to copy, hit copy, then launch Pastebot and the image or text will automatically show up in the app. From there you can edit text, give the clip a title, or run the clip through a filter to perform specific tasks such as converting all text to lowercase, straightening quotes, wrapping in HTML tags, and much more.

Pastebot lets you store up to 99 clips through the normal clipboards, but you can store items in folders for long-term storage. This makes creating titles for clips extremely important because it will enable you to search for them later. If you're using a Mac, you also can download the Pastebot preference pane from the developer's Web site that allows you to wirelessly transfer clips to your Mac over Wi-Fi (the Windows sync tool is still in development). Overall, if you have the need to collect information and images you find on the Web, or need a good way to transfer info and images from your iPhone to your Mac, Pastebot Command Copy & Paste is a good choice.

Street Fighter 4 ($9.99) is a 2D fighting game that needs little in the way of introduction, but is surprisingly fun even using the iPhone touch screen. In the iPhone version you can play with eight characters from the original game across seven environments. The graphics look great even on the iPhone 3G, and the touch-screen controls work surprisingly well with only a little bit of practice. There are a few different ways to play including a Tournament mode, where you fight multiple matches against each of the different characters; Dojo, which trains you on all of the different moves for your selected character; Free-Sparring, for when you want to fight a specific character to find his weaknesses; and a Training Room where you can practice your moves. You also can play against your friends in versus mode, but only over a Bluetooth connection.

I think the main question most people will have about Street Fighter 4 on the iPhone (before spending the money) is how well the controls work on a touch screen. You get a control pad on the left and buttons for Punch, Kick, and special moves on the right (though you can move the controls wherever you want using the settings). Capcom decided to leave out the low and medium punch/kick buttons, which may bother Street Fighter veterans, but even without them, the game offers an enormous amount of moves. When I first started playing, it was admittedly difficult to get used to the onscreen control pad and buttons to perform some of the more complex moves. But after a few fights, even the more difficult moves started to get much easier. Overall, if you're a fan of Street Fighter, the iPhone version is true to the original with great-looking graphics, surprisingly solid controls, and a challenging AI, making it easily worth the price tag.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you happy to hear about the rumored addition of multitasking support? Do you have a better clipboard manager than Pastebot? What do you think of the touch-screen controls of Street Fighter 4? Let me know in the comments!

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Earlier this week, Opera Software released Opera Mini 5 beta for Android, a vast improvement to the version 4.2 browser that had previously been available for Android. Opera Mini 5 beta isn't new to the scene--it's been out for some months on Java phones, BlackBerry, and interestingly, it just hopped on board Windows phones.

In this First Look video, we take you on a hands-on tour of Opera's slick-looking browser alternative for Android smartphones, which is available for free in the Android Market or by downloading it from www.opera.com/mini/next/.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic by very important element of cloud computing.

That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB.

Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today.

"Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability," said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla.

And standardization could come. Advocates have worked Indexed DB into the considerations of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium that standardizes HTML and other Web technologies. In the W3C discussions, Indexed DB got a warm reception from Opera, the fifth-ranked browser.

Microsoft comes to the table

The creation of the Indexed DB interface is notable for another reason: Microsoft.

For years, Microsoft essentially sat out a lot of HTML discussions. Now, though, become closely involved, for example through detailed feedback from Pablo Castro, a Microsoft software architect. Castro not only praised Indexed DB on his blog, but also said that Microsoft is hiring staff to work on Indexed DB.

Finally, Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: "Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web," said program manager Adrian Bateman.

Microsoft's praise is important. For one thing, the company maintains a dominant, though diminishing, share of browser usage, so even Web programmers who've scorned the company's earlier lack of interest in advancing Web technologies should pay attention to what it says. They should pay even more attention when Microsoft and its longtime arch-rival Mozilla agree on something. Microsoft's cooperation makes it more likely Indexed DB will be a real tool for Web programmers, not just an academic concept with little real-world relevance.

For another, Microsoft is working hard on the next generation of its browser, with IE 9 getting a starring role at the company's Mix conference next week. Though the company has been mostly mum about what new technologies will arrive in its updated browser, its activity signals that the company is very serious about the market.

Local or on the Net?

It may sound perverse, but the ability to store data locally on a computer turns out to be a very important part of the Web application era that's really just getting under way. The whole idea behind cloud computing is to put applications on the network, liberating them from being tied to a particular computer, but it turns out that the computer still matters, because the network is neither fast nor ubiquitous.

Local storage lets Web programmers save data onto computers where it's convenient for processors to access. That can mean, for example, that some aspects of Gmail and Google Docs can work while you're disconnected from the network. It also lets data be cached on the computer for quick access later. The overall state of the Web application is maintained on the server, but stashing data locally can make cloud computing faster and more reliable.

"Building a database to store a line of text is like hitting metal screws into wood with a very big hammer--it works, but it probably isn't the best way. But for managing large-scale data in Web applications and widgets, a real database is more valuable," said Charles McCathieNevile, Opera's chief standards officer. That enables offline e-mail, better management of bookmarks, dictionaries, synchronized contacts, and other sophisticated abilities, he said.

Web browsers have been able to store data locally for years in a primitive fashion through small text files called cookies. Browser makers have been casting about for a more powerful mechanism, though, resulting in a hodge-podge of possibilities.

One newer method, appropriately enough called LocalStorage, is supported in Firefox and IE 8. But even as it becomes formally standardized through the W3C as Web Storage, browser makers have recognized its limits for modern browser designs.

One problem is that LocalStorage stems from the days when browser computing took place in a single computing process, a design that meant programmers didn't have to worry about one browser task meddling with data that another browser task thought it was controlling. With multi-process browsers arriving--Chrome is an example today, and Firefox is moving in that direction--browsers get the ability to do more things in parallel, and LocalStorage can't keep up.

"Because more than one [browser] tab can access the same data, you have to make sure that what one tab does is seen by others at the same time," Blizzard said. "That's extra-hard with a browser that might have more than one process."

The rise and fall of Web SQL

Another local storage method from Apple, Web SQL and sometimes called Web DB, offers more sophistication and enjoyed a start in the HTML standards process. It employed an ages-old standard for storing and retrieving data called Structured Query Language.

Safari supports Web SQL, as does Chrome 4, and Opera is building support in since the technology is in use on the Web.

Web SQL ran into problems, though. SQL has as many variations as there are databases that support it, and Web SQL used one from software called SQLite. That interface isn't standardized, though.

Google, despite the fact that its Gears browser plug-in uses a SQL interface to provide offline access to Gmail and other services, shares the concern that "the dialect of SQL is currently not specified," spokesman Eitan Bencuya said. "There are ongoing conversations about specifying in greater detail the exact dialect of SQL that should be supported for this feature."

Maciej Stachowiak, an Apple programmer, pointed out that there will be multiple shipping versions of Web SQL in a W3C discussion of local storage technologies. But his argument didn't prevail.

"I don't want to work on a spec without five out of five implementations," said Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML5 specification and a Google employee, in the W3C meeting, referring to the lack of support from all the five top browser makers.

And indeed, the draft specification now includes these words: "This specification has reached an impasse," because it uses the SQLite interface. Somebody interested in an independent SQL interface can "please contact the editor so that he can write a specification for the dialect, thus allowing this specification to move forward."

Enter Indexed DB

Indexed DB brings the database approach to browsers, but keeps the interface at a very low level.

Microsoft and Mozilla are in agreement that this strategy is the right one. Programmers can choose to build a more sophisticated interface on top out of the raw materials of Indexed DB. They've done just that with browsers' JavaScript program technology, building libraries such as jQuery, Dojo, and YUI that are widely used to build sophisticated Web.

"What we've learned from the recent history of the Web is that putting out simple APIs [application programming interfaces] that push decisions and complexity to the edges is a strategy that works. The way that the Web works today is that programmers aren't using a lot of browser APIs directly. Instead they are using jQuery or Dojo or one of the other libraries that are out there for doing cross-browser and cross-version compatibility," Blizzard said. "We think that instead of delivering an API that's complicated and underspecified that will cause browser vendors and developers to have to struggle with incompatible APIs, that we can deliver something that is simple, well-specified and understood that developers and people building Web browsers can build on."

It's not clear yet what Opera will do, but McCathieNevile had words of praise in the W3C meeting. "We found Nikunj to be more to our liking," he said, according to the meeting notes, referring to Indexed DB, which was written by an Oracle employee, Nikunj Mehta.

Apple declined to comment about its support for IndexedDB.

However, if IE, Mozilla, and Chrome support Indexed DB, and it becomes a W3C standard, it's likely Apple won't have much choice, because programmers will begin to use it.

Happily for Apple, Google has detailed its approach in a Chrome design document and has begun checking Indexed DB code into WebKit, the open-source project that underlies both Safari and Chrome. That means Apple will be able to adopt a tested version of the technology relatively quickly.

Indexed DB isn't a sure thing yet, to be sure, and the drawn-out history of LocalStorage shows that being established in the standards process isn't everything.

But Indexed DB has powerful allies in the right places and is on its way to being technology Web developers can at least start trying. With time, it stands to become a key part of the Web application world.

Updated 3:34 p.m. PST with Google comment.

Originally posted at Deep Tech