According to a recent study by IDC, the iPad has definitively dominated the tablet market, accounting for almost 90 percent of tablets shipped worldwide in the third quarter of 2010. It stands to reason that fourth-quarter results will probably be even higher after our big holiday season. Now that many of the early naysayers have come around to the larger iOS device, I have to think the launch of the iPad 2 in April will be leaps and bounds more successful right out of the gate.

I got the first-generation iPad when it came out for obvious reasons, and probably won't be buying the new iPad personally at launch time (though we will certainly have them here at CNET for testing). But what about you? Are you one of those who decided to wait for the second-generation iPad?

As usual, Apple is not telling us much about its shiny new device, but there have been plenty of rumors regarding a higher-resolution screen, front- and rear-facing cameras, and much more at the various rumor sites.

I'm interested to see who is planning to pull the trigger on the new iPad in April. Let us know your plans in the comments.

This week's apps include a strange interactive story-telling app and a shooting game that cleverly uses the iPhone 4's gyroscope technology.

Strange Rain is pretty hard to describe without actually playing with it, but it's so unique I couldn't help but talk about it here. The primary function of the app is to give you a break from your hectic life by displaying a mesmerizing scene of rain falling from the sky. The iPhone screen acts as a skylight so you're looking straight up as rain drops fall and hit the screen. You can slightly affect the raindrops as they fall by touching the screen and moving your iPhone, and tinkly music from a haunting melody plays amid soothing storm sounds, every time you touch it. As you can probably tell, there's a good reason why "Strange" is in the name of this app.

Strange Rain is not just a rain simulator, though. It has three different modes to play with, including the Wordless mode that simply displays the drops falling from the sky and lets you touch the screen and move your iPhone to affect their trajectory. Whisper Mode is mostly the same, but sometimes when you touch the screen you'll see rain-related words spelled out. The third and most interesting mode is Story Mode, in which a story plays out through the thoughts of a protagonist, which are printed onscreen in bits and pieces. The more you touch the screen, the more of the story you'll learn as the rain continues to fall from the sky.

The other interesting thing about Strange Rain is that it gets incrementally weirder after each play-through of the haunting melody--airplanes will fly overhead, clouds will change formations, and more. If ever you want to reset to the beginning, you can touch the screen repeatedly with all your fingers causing a falling-through-the-sky effect. Needless to say, this app is truly unique.

Overall, Strange Rain is a relaxing diversion even if it is a bit odd. I was quickly mesmerized by the Story Mode and I have to admit the rain sounds and droplets did have a relaxing effect. If you have any interest in a new way to tell an interactive story, this unique app might be right up your alley.

Clay Shooter Mania (99 cents) is a clay-pigeon shooting game that uses the iPhone 4 accelerometer and gyroscope features to make for a unique gaming experience, but you're going to need room to move around to play it.

One of the more amazing features of the iPhone 4 when it came out was the gyroscope feature that enabled users to move the device and view an object as though the iPhone screen were a window into a different world. There have only been a few apps so far at the iTunes App Store that take advantage of this feature (Eliminate: GunRange, for example).

Clay Shooter Mania lets you shoot clay pigeons with a shotgun and uses gyroscope technology to give you a window into its target-shooting world. When a clay pigeon is launched into the air (Pull!), use the 3D radar in the upper right to determine which way you'll need to turn the iPhone (and your body) to take the shot. As you progress through levels, you'll be challenged to hit more clay pigeons in one pull, and some variations fly faster than others. Fortunately, you can use a bullet-time-like option that slows down the action for particularly difficult shots. Later, you can unlock the machine gun, which lets you hit more targets faster.

Clay Shooter Mania is a fun game when you have some space to play, but is not a good game (for obvious reasons) during your commute or really anywhere you're in a tight space. If you'd like to try a game that makes great use of the iPhone 4's gyroscope features or if you are a skeet-shooting fan, you should definitely check out this game.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you fascinated by the possibilities of interactive storytelling like in Strange Rain? Are you the type of person who would stand in the middle of your bus commute shooting clay pigeons on your iPhone? Let me know in the comments!

As evidenced by the introduction of Unifi at CES 2011, there's a move to provide cloud storage services that focus specifically on media files. Of course, the problem one runs into with these types of files is that they tend to be a lot larger than things like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations--downright huge, in the case of video. A new software and service called Libox is aiming to tackle that problem.

Like Unifi, Libox serves to aggregate your media files from various drives and devices (though at this time, it doesn't bring in content you may have stored with other services such as Facebook). The difference with Libox is that it doesn't actually upload your media files to the cloud. Instead, the service sniffs out the content stored on your computer, designated networked drives, and connected devices and creates a marker to their location. So it doesn't actually move or copy any files; rather, it offers a path through which you can access media. There are three ways to do this: via the desktop software, by logging on to the Web portal, or by using the corresponding mobile app (currently available for iOS only, but coming to Android in the near future).

There are a few benefits to this method of media aggregation. For one, you don't have to wait through a lengthy uploading process. Although the initial scan will take some time--quite a bit if you have a ton of content--it's generally much quicker than uploading. Also, you don't have to select files for uploading because anything added to your computer or devices automatically shows up within the Libox interface. Finally, Libox is able to offer the service entirely for free, since there's no costly storage overhead on its end. And there are no ads for the user either (the company will generate revenue from partnerships rather than advertising).

So far, it's looking like Libox is doing pretty good job delivering on its promise of media accessed anywhere easily and for free. I gave all three methods a spin, starting with the desktop software. Indeed, you will be required to download the program in order scan--and then keep an eye on--the media on your drives. However, the mobile app isn't a necessity in order for your media to be added to the overall container; you simply must connect the device once. Also, you can access Libox through the Web portal on non-iOS phones (that is, those that don't have their own apps yet).

One thing I liked off the bat is the fact that the Widows software and the Web portal offer the same visually-appealing interface. Library navigation options are laid out clearly on the left, while large thumbnails dominate the main window. A nice touch with music is that Libox fills in some funky imagery for albums without cover art, so the whole space is a colorful mosaic. However, as much as the navigation looks good, it would be nice to have a way to browse content by a detailed list. Photos and music may be easy to navigate by thumbnail alone, but it's not ideal for video--as it stands, it's difficult to find the exact video you want to watch (although the search bar helps).

Unsurprisingly, Libox also offers a social element. Although your aggregated library is only accessible by you, you can select individual files or even folders and albums to share. For now, the social aspect is limited to other Libox users, so you'll have to convince your friends to sign up, too. However, it wouldn't surprise me if the software offered some Facebook or Twitter integration in the future.

As for the performance, there are some hiccups in certain cases. For one, Libox does not appear to recognize certain video types, particularly those with the AVI container. That said, this is a forgivable issue given the fact that Libox is doing extensive behind-the-scenes transcoding to get files to playback on all types of devices. Video formatting is particularly problematic, so the service gets some slack for now. Hopefully, this will be remedied in the near future.

Another issue I ran into was with the iPhone app, which seems to be more of a beta than the other two portals. I manually selected some photos to be uploaded, since the process did not happen automatically, and the action continually caused to app to crash. Also, it takes forever for a video to load for playback on the device. Again, these are issues that I expect will be addressed going forward.

Libox still has a few kinks to iron out before it hits a home run, but the service has the right idea. Obviously, if you're looking for something that actually backs up all of your media, Libox is not the answer. However, if the goal is to quickly and easily access and share your media from anywhere, it's worth giving this service a spin.

The Xiph.Org Foundation, creator of the royalty-free Vorbis audio encoding technology made suddenly relevant by Google's WebM project, is nearing completion of a next-generation codec called CELT and has resumed development of one due after that called Ghost.

"Ghost research was postponed until recently to devote more resources to improving video," said Monty Montgomery, who worked on Vorbis and CELT, in a blog post last week. "Ghost development now resumes where it left off in 2007."

Vorbis, CELT (Constrained Energy Lapped Transform), and Ghost all are audio codecs, meaning that they're designed to compress sound data for more compact storage and easier streaming over a network. Codecs must balance compression with quality and rely on a combination of mathematical processing techniques and tricks to discard data that a human audience won't notice is missing.

Vorbis, which competes with codecs such as MP3 and AAC that come with patent royalty fees, came to fruition in combination with the Theora video codec. The latter wasn't much of a success, but a more modern cousin called VP8 from Google has more potential. And Vorbis, combined with VP8, are part of the open-source, royalty-free WebM technology with which Google hopes to lower barriers to video on the Web.

The Google backing has helped move the largely overlooked Vorbis toward the mainstream. And it's possible that CELT and Ghost could follow in Vorbis' footsteps as a relevant technology.

CELT is getting closer to one critical step in completion, freezing the bitstream, which defines the sequences of data as it's streamed over a network.

"As of December 2010, CELT is nearing bitstream freeze and has been submitted to the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] codec working group as an input codec," Montgomery said in a December update. Specifically, he's hoping to freeze the bitstream in January.

CELT is designed to use less processing power than Vorbis to decode and to suffer less of a delay from when data starts arriving to when audio is decoded. With Vorbis, there's a lag of a tenth of a second, but CELT is designed to have a delay of only a twentieth that long--5 milliseconds.

Short delays are important for natural conversation to avoid the alternating problems of awkward pauses and speakers talking at the same time that afflict high-latency communications.

Ghost, in comparison, is designed with Vorbis' higher 100-millisecond latency. And it's far from completion.

"First and foremost, Ghost is vaporware," Montgomery said. "At present it is merely a collection of ideas and some early-stage research. Eventually, it is intended to be a codec that improves upon and supersedes Vorbis in its current niche."

A hiatus of more than three years may sound crippling in the fast-paced technology world, but codecs have a long lifespan. Vorbis was designed for a 20-year run, and it's halfway through.

One improvement planned for Ghost is a wider range of useful bitrates, meaning that the codec would make audio sound better low-bandwidth and add more quality on high-bandwidth connections. Another is elimination of "pre-echo," in which sound compression artifacts arrive before the actual sound is supposed to arrive.

And Ghost is intended to break from the past. Codec gurus might be interested in Montgomery's words:

Ghost will be a hybrid tone + noise codec that splits and separately encodes strong sinusoids [sine waves representing pure tones] from the time-domain 'toneless' signal [that's less regular]. It attempts to abandon the lapped transform techniques that have had a stranglehold on audio codec design for the past 20 years, beginning with MP3 and continuing on to AAC and Vorbis (and CELT).

The work is funded by Linux and open-source software specialist Red Hat, so it's no surprise Ghost continues with Vorbis' intellectual property freedoms: no licenses are necessary to use the technology.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google's effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force--but not so Google can standardize it.

VP8 is a Google codec used to convert video into a more compact form for tasks such as streaming across the Internet, broadcast over the airwaves, or storage on a camera. VP8 and the Vorbis audio codec are the basis for WebM, an open-source and royalty-free technology that Google hopes will lower barriers for using video on the Net and elsewhere. Although WebM's open-source, royalty-free nature eases adoption, so far it isn't a standard--something that could ease adoption further. Standards can let multiple companies influence a technology and can provide assurances that its features are stable enough to rely on.

Google representatives published the "VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide" at the IETF earlier this month, but that doesn't signal standardization, the company said in a statement. The document details the VP8 bitstream--the actual sequence of bytes into which video is encoded.

"We submitted the VP8 bitstream reference as an IETF Independent RFC [request for comments] to create a canonical public reference for the document," Google said. "This is independent from a standards track."

The IETF document could help allay one concern VP8 critics have raised: that VP8 is defined not by documentation of the bitstream but rather by the source code of the software Google released to implement VP8. But the IETF document still plays a subordinate role to that source code.

"If there are any conflicts between this document and the reference source code, the reference source code should be considered correct. The bitstream is defined by the reference source code and not this document," the IETF document said.

The document, though not a standard and not canonical, does indicate that Google is working to make VP8 and WebM something broader than an in-house Google project and something more approachable than thousands of lines of programming source code.

Google didn't comment on whether it plans to standardize VP8. But it's not hard to imagine it doing so, at least after it's had more time to marshal allies that could contribute politically and technologically. Candidates for such an alliance that spring to mind include Adobe Systems, which has pledged to include VP8 in its Flash Player, and Mozilla, which has built WebM support into its Firefox browser.

VP8 was developed by On2 Technologies, which Google acquired for about $123 million in early 2010. VP8's chief rival, H.264, is much more widely used in the industry, including Blu-ray players, editing software, smartphone decoding chips, video cameras, Apple's Safari browser, and Microsoft's upcoming IE9 browser. Using H.264 in a product requires licensing a pool of patents from a group called MPEG LA, (though free video streamed over the Internet with H.264 requires no royalty payments). Google wants a codec with no patent barriers.

MPEG LA cast a shadow over VP8 last year by publicly questioning VP8's patent pedigree and raising the prospect that those using VP8 might need to license patents from parties besides Google. "We assume virtually all codecs are based on patented technology," MPEG LA Chief Executive Larry Horn said in a May 2010 interview.

There are some signs VP8 sidesteps at least some patent concerns, said Barry Negrin, an intellectual property attorney at Pryor Cashman who previously worked on some On2 patent applications for two VP8 predecessors, VP6 and VP7. Specifically, some "sub-optimal" approaches used in VP8 "may have been intentional work-arounds to avoid patent claims," Negrin said. In addition, he's not aware of any MPEG LA suits against On2 Technologies for VP6 and VP7, which could work in Google's favor if a suit emerged.

But even though months have passed with no elaboration on MPEG LA's initial statements about VP8, there's no assurance yet that those implementing VP8 have nothing to worry about.

"It's definitely too soon to tell," he said, adding that the statute of limitations on patent infringement is six years in the United States. "Given the complexity of the VP8 code and the sheer number of patent claims that need to be reviewed by MPEG LA, it could be a couple of years before they themselves have sufficient certainty to mount litigation.

Controversially, Google announced it will remove H.264 support from its Chrome browser for playing HTML video, meaning that the browser will come only with built-in video support for VP8 and an earlier cousin called Theora. That announcement last week caused a backlash, in part because some feared it would hamper the arrival of HTML's nascent built-in video support.

But in practice, with Firefox and Opera supporting WebM and Safari and IE9 supporting H.264, built-in video in HTML already was suffering from a significant codec problem. An unrepentant Google defended the move, suggesting it's unlikely to reverse course.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Mozilla has barred a Skype extension for Firefox, accusing it of causing 40,000 browser crashes a week and of dramatically slowing page-load times.

"We believe that both of these items constitute a major, user-facing issue, and meet our established criteria for blocklisting an add-on," Mozilla said in a blog post yesterday. Because the extension is installed by default when Skype's main software is installed, a "large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly," Mozilla said.

Mozilla is in contact with Skype programmers and will restore the extension's privileges if the problems are addressed, the organization said.

In a statement, Skype said it's resolving the problem.

"Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users," the company said.

The Skype toolbar extension, bundled with the Skype software for making audio and video calls over the Internet, highlights phone numbers in Web pages to make it easier to call them with Skype. Those who really like it can still run the toolbar, Mozilla said: "The blocklist entry will be a 'soft block,' where the extension is disabled and the user is notified of the block and given the option to re-enable it if they choose. It's also important to note that the Skype application itself will continue to work as it always has; only the Skype Toolbar within Firefox is being disabled."

The extension has been the No. 1 or No. 2 cause of crashes for the current stable version of Firefox, according to comments in Mozilla's bug tracker. And the plug-in dramatically slows Firefox's processing of Web page elements through what's called the Document Object Model (DOM)--by a factor of 3 to 8 with a newer 5.x version and by a factor of 325 with the older 4.x version, Mozilla programmer Boris Zbarsky said. The effect of this is to make pages appear to load much more slowly.

Earlier in January, a Skype representative acknowledged that the company knows about the issue. "Look out for an update in the near future," the representative said.

Updated 6:57 a.m. PT with Skype comment.

Originally posted at Deep Tech