Is Apple really the next big gaming-hardware company? I mean, sure, I'm aware there are thousands upon thousands of games in the app store and that the iPhone and iPad are changing the way we think of touch-screen games, but I never would have guessed Apple would be in the same conversation with Sony's PS3, Microsoft's XBox 360, or the Nintendo Wii.

Apparently, Apple is making a much bigger splash in the gaming market than I thought because now, according to the Times Online UK, Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, is calling Apple the "enemy of the future." Having decided they already beat Sony in sales last Christmas with the Wii and dominated the handheld gaming industry with the Nintendo DS, Satoru Iwata now views Apple's foray into the gaming market as the next big thing to beat.

Obviously, I'm a huge fan of gaming on the iPhone and iPad, but is this really where we are? Are these games we're playing now really eating up that much of the market? Have a look at the story and let me know what you think because I'm curious how people feel about the iPhone and iPad strictly as gaming devices. I think Apple might be well on its way to being considered a serious gaming platform, but I think it's a little soon to say so now. What do you think?

This week's apps include a note taking app with unique multimedia tools and a motocross racing game that feels like one of my favorite arcade classics.

Moe's Notes ($1.99) lets you make more of everyday notes by adding multimedia tools and extras to turn a simple note into a more complete experience. The slick-looking dark gray interface offers icons for each action including inputting text, adding an image or video, including an audio clip, adding tags, and marking the location. Each of these actions offer additional useful tools to refine your information. The image capture screen lets you crop and resize your image using onscreen controls and you can adjust brightness in all or part of your image. Its audio tools let you strip out silent portions, trim to get the exact clip you want, change volume, and even play the clip backward. Once your multimedia is in order, you can add tags to group notes together, pinpoint the location of a note using your iPhone's GPS, or set an alert to notify you to check a note later.

Moe's Notes offers up all these tools so you can use the app as a way to have a location to keep a more complete set of info for various projects. Perhaps your looking for an apartment, for example, and you might take a picture or video at each location, record your comments as audio as you walk through, add location information so you can find it later, and tag your apartment notes so you can easily find your list of apartments visited. Really, the possibilities are endless depending on what your specific hobbies or needs are. Overall, if you want to create notes with attached multimedia and location info, Moe's notes has excellent tools to keep your notes organized and extras to make every note just the way you want it.

Motocross Challenge ($2.99) is a 2D motocross arcade racing game that reminds me of Excite Bike, and old classic I used to play in the arcade. Instead of an onscreen overlay for controls, the developers of Motocross Challenge went with a simulated control pad on the outside of the screen, with the actual racing taking place in a window. You have buttons for acceleration and short nitro bursts for extra speed along with directional buttons to pull off tricks. Use the accelerometer to adjust the tilt of your bike while in the air to do flips and to make sure you get soft landings to keep your speed.

Motocross Challenge won't dazzle you with fancy graphics, but I think this sort of game fits better with the 16-bit style of old gaming classics, and the gameplay more than makes up for the older graphics. There are a few different game types including Beat the Clock, to try to get your best times on 10 different tracks; The World Tour, where you'll race against the computer in several different cups and trick contests; Trick attack, to pull of tricks for points; and Vs mode where you can play against a friend locally or race against other players online (via Open Feint). For the most part, Motocross Challenge lives up to the popular Excite Bike game, but the decision to use a control pad outside of the gameplay area seems like a bad choice on the smallish iPhone or iPod Touch screen. Still, with challenging gameplay, quick online matching for multiplayer, several single player challenges to play through, 8 bikes, and 10 tracks, Motocross Challenge is worth the price for those who like arcade racing.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Do you think Apple is moving in on big-name gaming console territory? What uses do you envision for an app like Moe's Notes? Is Motocross Challenge just right as it is or does it need something beyond an onscreen overlay? Let me know in the comments!

Google has partly scrapped a browser plug-in project called O3D, instead throwing its full weight behind a 3D Web graphics technology called WebGL that got its start at Mozilla.

The move, first reported by CNET, has the potential to simplify the effort to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, an idea that has appeal to those trying to refashion it as a foundation for applications such as games. However, it also means the functioning--if experimental--O3D technology is going back to the drawing board for a while.

The overall idea of O3D, a higher-level interface than the 3D nuts and bolts provided by WebGL, will live on, though. Google is rebuilding it as a library of pre-build software others can use on top of a WebGL foundation, Engineering Director Matt Papakipos and programmer Vangelis Kokkevis announced the move on the final O3D blog post Friday.

One of the big changes with the O3D rebirth is that instead of running as a fast, compiled C++ program, the library instead will use the relatively slow JavaScript used in Web applications. Fortunately for the project, the top five browser makers--Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera--all are making significant improvements in JavaScript execution speed.

Another tricky issue is that WebGL is a variant of the 3D graphics interface called OpenGL, which is used on Mac OS X and Linux as well as the iPhone and Android phones. On Windows, though, it's second fiddle to Microsoft's Direct3D interface. Google hopes to bridge that gap with its ANGLE project to translate OpenGL commands into Direct3D parlance.

Said Papakipos and Kokkevis:

We did not take this decision lightly. In initial discussions we had about WebGL, we were concerned that JavaScript would be too slow to drive a low-level API like OpenGL and we were convinced that a higher level approach like the O3D scene graph would yield better results. We were also cognizant of the lack of installed OpenGL drivers on many Windows machines, and that this could hamper WebGL's adoption.

Since then, JavaScript has become a lot faster. We've been very impressed by the demos that developers have created with WebGL, and with the ANGLE project, we believe that Chromium will be able to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on installed OpenGL drivers.

There's another obstacle yet, though: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Google are working on WebGL support, but Microsoft, despite its IE9 browser overhaul, appears to have little enthusiasm.

Asked in an interview this week about Microsoft's WebGL stance, Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said, "I think it's different markup," meaning something not universally supported on browsers. "You're telling developers, 'Go write something else.'"

Google's answer: Chrome Frame, a plug-in that sneaks a copy of Chrome into Internet Explorer, an idea Microsoft scorns.

Said Henry Bridge, another Google programmer involved in the effort:

As for IE, we could have gone down the route of making the O3D plug-in also ship WebGL for IE, but we realized that then developers would be lacking other APIs [application programming interfaces] that they need for their apps, like Audio or WebSockets. If we then added those APIs to the O3D plug-in also, well, it starts to look a lot like ChromeFrame: a plug-in implementation of Web APIs for IE. We're confident that ChromeFrame will be as easy if not easier to install than O3D, so it seemed better to focus the team's graphics expertise on making WebGL great in Chrome/ChromeFrame and on making the O3D library useful to developers.

Canceling O3D also ruffled some feathers.

"I spent a lot of time learning and developing for O3D and now I got stabbed in the back. Very disappointing," said one O3D programmer, Angelo Franco, in a mailing list message. He did back down a bit, though, adding later, "Please keep up the good work with the JavaScript library. For sure, I'll continue to use it, despite the WebGL."

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Unless you're south of the equator, in which case you're closing in on winter, spring's here and so it's time to clear out the deadwood from last season. That means it's time once again for CNET TV's worst downloads of the past three months.

As always, we call out some especially silly software, but I reserved a special place for Internet Explorer toolbars. There's not one IE toolbar that's worse than the other. Instead, the entire category is so rife with disaster that even Microsoft has called them out as the single largest contributor to IE's instability. We're talking 70 percent, folks. That's insane. Ditch those toolbars, STAT.

However, the single worst program uploaded to Download.com since the beginning of the year is one that's designed for men, and those who want to make fun of them. Watch the video to find out which one it is, and let me know in the comments if you're man enough to try it.

Google goes "Incognito," Microsoft's is "InPrivate," the other browsers call it "Private Mode," and colloquially it's known as "porn mode." Whatever you call the tracks-free way to browse, watch this how-to video to force your favorite browser to always start with its privacy protocols activated.

On the heels of a worm that was installing backdoors on Windows systems via Yahoo Instant Messenger comes a new worm that is even more sophisticated in its social engineering and payload, security firm Bkis said on Friday.

The malware arrives via instant message through Yahoo or Skype with any one of a number of messages, including "Does my new hair style look good? bad? perfect?" or "My printer is about to be thrown through a window if this pic won't come out right. You see anything wrong with it?" Bkis wrote in a blog post.

The message includes a link to a Web page that looks like it leads to a JPEG, or image file. When the link is clicked on, the browser displays an interface that looks like the RapidShare Web hosting site and offers up a ZIP file for download. The extracted file is actually an executable file with a .com extension.

The malware, which Bkis has detected as "W32.Skyhoo.Worm," disappears if the computer does not have Skype or Yahoo Messenger installed. It automatically sends messages with varying content and malicious links to contacts in the victim's IM list and automatically injects a malicious link in e-mail messages and Word or Excel files that the user is composing, Bkis said.

The worm also connects to an IRC server to receive remote commands, blocks antivirus software, uses a rootkit technique to hide its files and processes and automatically copies itself onto USB drives to spread, according to Bkis.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

StoryCorps is a terrific nonprofit organization dedicated to recording, sharing, and preserving stories told by friends and family members. If you listen to NPR's Morning Edition, you've almost certainly heard some clips.

The StoryCorps app for iPhone lets you listen to some of these stories, then learn how to record and share interviews of your own. Unfortunately, the app falls short in one key area: it can't actually record.

The Stories tab is pretty straightforward: scroll through the list of available stories, tap one that sounds interesting, then listen to the streaming audio. If you like it, you can tap Share to disseminate a link via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

I'm not sure why, but most of these stories are just abbreviated clips, usually no more than 2 to 3 minutes. It's the same on the StoryCorps site, whatever the reason.

The How To tab offers a four-step tutorial on creating a story of your own: selecting a partner, creating a question list, choosing recording equipment and location, and preserving and sharing the story.

Next, the Questions tab lets you build a list of great interview questions from a roster of about 10 categories (Friends, Growing Up, Working, etc.). Once you've finished your list, you can e-mail it to yourself.

Finally, there's the Interview tab, which is where the app should allow you to record right on your iPhone using the list of questions you just created. Alas, it merely tells you to switch to the built-in Voice Memos app or developer Bottle Rocket's $1.99 Voxie Pro Recorder (which has lots more features).

Either way, there's absolutely no integration with StoryCorps. Whatever app you use to record your interview, you won't have access to your list of questions (unless you've printed it beforehand). So much for spontaneous interviews with friends and relatives. (OS 4's multitasking will no doubt help with this, but it's still not the ideal solution.)

What's more, any interviews you do record on your iPhone can't be added to the StoryCorps archive. For that you have to visit a StoryCorps recording studio or rent a StoryKit. I understand that the organization wants top-quality audio for its archives, but why not have a section for "amateur" recordings or the like?

In any case, as much as I love the idea of the StoryCorps, the app really misses the mark by not offering a built-in recording option. On the other hand, it's a freebie, so I can't complain too much.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Microsoft has re-engaged with others in the computing industry in the area of Web standards--but its return is not without friction.

A number of allies--notably Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Google--have been working for years to refashion Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and a host of associated technologies to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications and more sophisticated sites. Microsoft now has joined in the effort, but it doesn't always see eye to eye when hashing out details of the upcoming HTML5 with Mozilla and a central individual in the standards process.

One point of debate is the fact that two organizations are involved: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Another is the process by which new Web technologies move from concept to standardization and support in browsers.

Fundamentally, Microsoft prefers a more formal, buttoned-down process that's somewhat at odds with today's free-wheeling Web standards practice. Existing players and Microsoft are still getting used to each other.

Standardization views
Organizations often jockey for influence through standards groups, and HTML is no exception. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, didn't call for an end to the WHATWG, but he did make it clear Microsoft believes the W3C's working group is the center of activity.

"The W3C is the HTML5 standards body," Hachamovitch said, pointing to WHATWG's absence from Wikipedia's entry for standards groups as evidence that it's not one.

Hachamovitch's view, though, is somewhat at odds with that of Ian Hickson, who is the editor of the W3C's HTML5 specification, a WHATWG participant, and a former Opera employee who now works for Google. Hickson sees a continuing role for WHATWG, a group that came into being after the W3C's earlier--and now rescinded--decision against advancing HTML in favor of an incompatible technology called XHTML 2.0.

"So long as the W3C doesn't screw up again, I expect the WHATWG to just continue happily working with the W3C," Hickson said. "There's no WHATWG vs. W3C here. In fact the two groups share channels; for example the WHATWG version of the spec has a 'submit review comments' tool that actually submits comments to the W3C bug database."

"The WHATWG will continue to be attractive to a lot of developers (and non-developers, like content authors) as a place to participate because of the relatively low barriers to entry," added Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering for Firefox backer Mozilla. "Web developers have a long memory: many will want to see the W3C bring HTML5 to a successful completion before they are confident that a Web-focused W3C and an engaged Microsoft are here to stay."

In April, employees from Google, Opera, Mozilla, and Apple met and concluded "the WHATWG still served a valuable role", according to Hickson's account of the meeting. Specifically, WHATWG provides "a lightweight process for experimentation" and "an established 'escape hatch' in the hopefully unlikely event of a failure in the W3C's HTML working group," he said.

There's no formal interaction mechanism between the W3C and WHATWG, Hickson said, but the two groups are linked. "In practice, most of the people heavily involved in the WHATWG are also heavily involved in the W3C HTML Working Group," Hickson said.

New technology views
Another area of some tension concerns how new standards should arrive in the real world. Today, browsers build in new technologies before there's agreement on how to best design them, or even whether they should be a standard at all. Microsoft prefers standardization to happen earlier in this process so developers don't have to worry about coding different versions of the same pages to accommodate different browsers.

Microsoft is agitating for "same markup," described this way: "Web browsers should render the same markup--the same HTML, same CSS, and same script--the same way. That's simply not the case today. Enabling the same markup to work the same across different browsers is as crucial for HTML5's success as performance."

But today's practice, while messy and plagued with incompatibilities, reflects the notion that it's a good idea to test new technologies in the real world before solidifying them as a real standard.

One example Hachamovitch showed to illustrate developer hardship is Mozilla's decision to hold off on supporting Web Sockets, a Web technology designed to improve communications between Web browsers and servers.

"Unfortunately, the spec itself is still under revision. WebSockets did ship in Chrome with version 4 and I'm told by Chrome developers that it's going to be included in Chrome 5, without changes. Unfortunately, the version that Google included in Chrome doesn't reflect the current draft," said Mozilla Director of Evangelism Chris Blizzard. "We want to ship it because the promise of WebSockets is great, but we'll have to see if it's stable and safe enough to do so."

Shaver defended the process. "As long as Chrome tracks the evolution of the standard, we don't all have to decide to ship it at the same time. We have patches under way as well, and they've led to spec feedback, so as far as I can see the system works," he said.

Shaver had some advice for Microsoft, too, in bringing new Web standards to fruition in a way that would help developers.

"It's been great to see Microsoft back at the table on this stuff. I'd love to see them share more information about the parts of HTML5 and related specifications that are interesting to them, and their intent to implement, since I think that would lend a lot of weight to their commitment to HTML5 and the Web in general as a platform," Shaver said.

Canvas kumbaya
One example is Canvas, an element of HTML5 that lets the browser draw 2D graphics. "Canvas is a tremendously valuable part of the modern Web platform, so having support for it in IE would be great," Shaver said.

Microsoft isn't committing to that particular technology, but the company hinted it's likely.

"Canvas is one of a few different Web graphics technologies. All of Internet Explorer 9's graphics and text and rendering will be hardware accelerated. We've demonstrated support for many parts of HTML5 to date, and will have more to announce as we update the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview," the company said in a statement. That language is suspiciously similar to what it said about SVG support before that actually arrived in the IE9 platform preview.

That platform preview is one of the biggest changes in Microsoft's behavior. Earlier versions of IE were developed farther behind closed doors, but Microsoft is releasing prototype software much earlier and is explicitly seeking feedback from Web developers. That engagement gives it much more clout in standards discussions: it's doing more than just paying lip service to the new Web standards.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

With a new version of Chrome, Google has taken a second crack at shielding users from a technical detail that browsers traditionally show: the "http://" in the browser's Web address bar.

Did Google just do us a favor and free up a few pixels in the ever-more-crowded area around a browser's viewing area? Or did it hide some genuinely useful information?

I'm inclined to think the former. Many people don't know that HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and that there could even be something else there, such as "ftp://" for File Transfer Protocol.

The "http://" is a useful label to help one's brain realize the text immediately afterward is a Web address, to be sure. But in the context of a browser's Web address bar, I suspect it's redundant. Sound off in the comment section if you disagree.

Here's where Google got into trouble, though. In its first try at removing the http:// text, it went too far. Specifically, when you copied the Web address from Chrome then pasted it in some destinations such as Google Docs and TweetDeck, the "http://" wouldn't be pasted along with the rest of the address. And outside the browser address box, that http:// label is useful and often necessary.

Because of the problem, Google reversed the change to its address bar, which is called the omnibox.

With the new Chrome developer release, version 5.0.396.0, issued Thursday for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the "http://" is hidden again, but this time it copies.

Update 4:32 a.m. PDT: If you visit an secure site using secure HTTP technology, Chrome doesn't hide the "https://" from the address bar, and it adds a green lock icon as well. Chrome also shows "ftp://" and "file:///" when using FTP or opening a local file stored on your computer.

Google releases its developer preview version of Chrome relatively frequently--roughly once a week. The better-tested Chrome beta versions emerge less often, and the stable versions intended for mainstream use less often still.

Originally posted at Deep Tech