Icebreaker Hockey (99 cents) hit the iTunes App Store recently, adding another sport to the challenging 3D tilt-to-control sports arcade franchise from developer NaturalMotion. Now you'll be able to take to the ice and work your way around defenders until it's your turn to take a shot at the goal.

Many iOS gamers will remember Backbreaker Football, one of the early great iPhone games at the iTunes App Store. Taking advantage of the iPhone's accelerometer, Backbreaker Football let you tilt and touch buttons to maneuver a football player downfield to score a touchdown. Later, Backbreaker Football 2: Vengeance expanded on the original, adding obstacles to jump over and a new game mode that let you play as a defender. The genre was such a hit that there have even been copycat games from other developers, like Bonecruncher Soccer, which uses many of the same concepts, but lets you dribble a soccer ball downfield to try to take a shot at the goal.

Icebreaker Hockey, from NaturalMotion, now lets you tilt to control a hockey player as you guide a puck down the ice past defenders. This game shares many of the same concepts as the earlier versions, but offers enough variation to keep it exciting--especially for hockey fans. As in the earlier games, you start by picking from unlicensed teams that have remarkably similar colors to NHL teams. You also can put your name on the jersey and choose a number.

Immediately upon starting the game, we were extremely impressed with the opening visuals on the iPhone 4 Retina Display as the camera panned around the arena showing a laser light show and almost true-to-life reflections on the ice. The control scheme is much like the Backbreaker games: you tilt to turn your skater, and each side of the screen there are buttons for spin and juke dodges. You also get a button for turbo boost and, if you simply touch the screen, it makes your skater come to a hard stop--great for making a defender miss when he tries to hit you from the side. Once you get close to the goal, your player will wind up to shoot a slap shot into the goal.

As in the other games in this genre, scoring a point is not really the goal of the game; Icebreaker Hockey is about the route and moves it takes to get to the goal. Along with trying to stay out of the way of multiple defenders, you'll want to skate over bonus areas to add to your overall score. We found that mapping out a route as the game gives you a preview of the round was the best method for scoring the most points.

Icebreaker Hockey comes with tons of gameplay across two modes. In Challenge mode you'll face 50 waves of action across 10 progressively more difficult challenges. Endurance mode takes it one step further, letting you face increasingly challenging waves to see just how far you can go.

Overall, Icebreaker Hockey is definitely a worthy addition to the franchise, offering plenty of fun and variation to keep you coming back for more. Online leader boards and in-game achievements only add to the fun.

A security firm raised new concerns today about WebGL--but Microsoft piled on with an opinion that's likely more damaging to fans' hopes for a universal 3D Web graphics standard.

"We believe that WebGL will likely become an ongoing source of hard-to-fix vulnerabilities," Microsoft said today in a security blog post flatly titled "WebGL Considered Harmful." "In its current form, WebGL is not a technology Microsoft can endorse from a security perspective."

The move effectively kills WebGL fans' hopes, at least for now, that WebGL could become a standard Web programmers could count on finding in modern browsers. And that means one hot area of programming, games development, won't have an easy, unified way to tackle Web-based software.

WebGL was created initially at Mozilla, standardized by the Khronos Group, and supported by Google. It's built into Chrome and Firefox right now, giving those browsers a way to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics useful for games and other visually rich tasks.

As with many technologies, though, the security scrutiny picks up once the technology leaves the labs and enters the real world. Today, Context Information Security, which issued a WebGL warning in May, issued another caution.

Specifically, Context publicized a problem that could let a Web site capture a screenshot of a Firefox user's computer, the company said in a blog post. It found the problem by checking Firefox with Khronos' WebGL conformance tests, which it said Firefox and Chrome don't pass. It also called insufficient Khronos' response to the earlier concern, employing a feature called GL_ARB_robustness.

"Context therefore recommends that users and system administrators disable WebGL," Context concluded.

Khronos downplayed the concerns in a statement from spokesman Jonathan Hirshon:

1. All browser vendors are still working toward passing the WebGL conformance suite. Only once they have successfully done so can they claim support of Canvas.getContext("webgl") instead of Canvas.getContext("experimental-webgl").

2. The issue of theft of arbitrary windows on the desktop is due to a bug in Firefox's WebGL implementation, and cannot be generalized across other browsers' WebGL implementations. Moreover, that bug was addressed May 26 and is resolved in Firefox 5, slated for release June 21.

3. Browser vendors are still in the process of supporting the GL_ARB_robustness extension, so it is expected that the previously reported denial-of-service issues are still present. It is expected that the reported denial-of-service issues will be solved with the integration of this extension.

Context's warnings are reinforced by the practical reality that Microsoft just wrote it off. The company has been frosty toward WebGL, but today it publicized Context's findings and explained why it views WebGL as unsafe.

Microsoft concluded that WebGL "would have difficulty passing Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle requirements," a stance that seems likely to doom hopes at least for now that WebGL would become a standard supported by all major browsers. Universal support means that Web developers could count on WebGL being available and therefore could use it; its absence means that some Web sites and Web apps--Angry Birds for Chrome, for example--will require compatibility checks and fallbacks.

Among Microsoft's views on WebGL's security problems are the following:

The security of WebGL as a whole depends on lower levels of the system, including OEM [original equipment manufacturer] drivers, upholding security guarantees they never really [needed] to worry about before. Attacks that may have previously resulted only in local elevation of privilege may now result in remote compromise. While it may be possible to mitigate these risks to some extent, the large attack surface exposed by WebGL remains a concern...

As WebGL vulnerabilities are uncovered, they will not always manifest in the WebGL API itself. The problems may exist in the various OEM and system components delivered by IHVs [independent hardware vendors such as video card makers]. While it has been suggested that WebGL implementations may block the use of affected hardware configurations, this strategy does not seem to have been successfully put into use to address existing vulnerabilities. It is our belief that as configurations are blocked, increasing levels of customer disruption may occur...

Modern operating systems and graphics infrastructure were never designed to fully defend against attacker-supplied shaders and geometry [software that run on a graphics chip]. Although mitigations such as ARB_robustness and the forthcoming ARB_robustness_2 may help, they have not proven themselves capable of comprehensively addressing the DoS [denial of service] threat... If this problem is not addressed holistically it will be possible for any web site to freeze or reboot systems at will.

Don't expect WebGL to vanish, though. The movement toward Web apps is powerful, with notable allies. And some of Microsoft's concerns, such as the difficulties of assigning responsibility for plugging holes, aren't as bad outside the Windows PC world. Windows PCs use a vast array of hardware combinations, but Apple computers, Google Chromebooks, and new-generation smartphones don't.

And companies selling that technology are used to not having Microsoft on their side.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

I have mad love for Dropbox, the Web-based storage service that syncs your files across multiple devices and makes them available for sharing with others.

QuickShot with Dropbox (99 cents) automatically uploads new snapshots from your iPhone, iPod, or iPad to your Dropbox account. In other words, it effectively turns your iDevice into a "Dropbox camera."

After installing the app, you link it to your account. By default, uploaded photos will land in your eponymous Dropbox folder, though you can choose a different folder if you want (assuming you know its name; the app doesn't let you browse available folders).

QuickShot also lets you choose photos to upload from your camera roll or library, though you must tick them individually; there's no "select all" option. (The same is true of the actual Dropbox app, which, it should be noted, is free.)

For taking new photos, the app works almost exactly like the stock Camera app. You can tap to focus, swap between the front or back camera, and turn geotagging on or off. The only thing missing is support for HDR, which might prove limiting for some shutterbugs.

The beauty of QuickShot is its speed: newly snapped photos are immediately uploaded to Dropbox (unless you've enabled "confirm upload," in which case you choose whether you want each snapshot to go).

Bottom line: If you're a Dropbox user and want a fast, effortless way to archive (and/or share) your iDevice photos, QuickShot with Dropbox gets the job done. It's a great little app.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Concluding that its priorities should be on iOS and Android, Adobe Systems has stopped releasing its own version of its AIR programming foundation for Linux.

AIR combines Flash and a Web browser to let programmers build standalone software that runs on any system with the underlying AIR "runtime" that executes the software. It's cross-platform technology, meaning for example that separate versions of TweetDeck--a prominent AIR app--don't need to be rewritten for Mac OS and Windows.

But starting with AIR 2.7, released this week, Adobe won't build a Linux version of AIR anymore, making the cross-platform technology a bit less cross-platform. Instead, it's relying on partners to do so on their own.

"We will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux, but expect that one or more of our partners will do so," Adobe said in a blog post.

The move contrasts sharply with Adobe's bitter and public fight last year objecting to an Apple move that barred AIR-based apps from iOS devices. Apple eventually relented for AIR-derived apps, though it still won't let Flash Player itself onto iOS devices.

In an FAQ (a PDF file no good reason that I can imagine), Adobe said Linux just isn't where the AIR action is taking place now.

"Our customers are focusing on creating applications for smartphones and tablets, and we are aligning our investment towards new features and platform support for the device market," Adobe said.

One of the main features of AIR 2.7 is better performance on iOS devices--four times faster in some cases, according to Adobe developer evangelist Renaun Erickson. Also in 2.7 are several features from Flash Player 10.3, such as microphone noise cancelation, and the ability to move the AIR runtime to the SD card on Android.

Linux on PCs has failed to take off widely, and only 1 in 200 AIR downloads are for Linux, added Dave McAllister, who spearheads Adobe's open-source work.

"With desktop Linux, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 1 percent," citing Net Applications' NetMarketshare statistics. "And since the release of AIR, we've seen only a 0.5 percent download share for desktop Linux."

Adobe is putting a priority on work that will let those partners port AIR to Linux, it said. "Source code for the Adobe runtimes is available to qualified partners under the terms of the Open Screen Project," the company said.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Although it's only been around for three months, don't get too comfortable with Firefox 4.

Today, Mozilla has updated the Firefox 5 beta to release candidate status (download for Windows | Mac | Linux), which includes improves support for "future-Web" technology, speeds up the browser, and makes multiple smaller tweaks to the browser.

Following the path cut by Google with Chrome's rapid-release program, the changes to Firefox 5 are several orders of magnitude smaller than those made in Firefox 4 yet are not insignificant. Most importantly, Firefox 5 release candidate makes multiple under-the-hood tweaks to improve performance. Memory management, JavaScript rendering, canvas, and networking performance have been enhanced, and background tabs will load faster thanks to locking down the setTimeout and setInterval timeouts to 1000 milliseconds. Standards support has also been updated for coding languages like HTML5, SMIL, and MathML, and the browser now supports CSS animations.

Firefox 5 also disables cross-domain elements as the source for WebGL textures as a response to security concerns involving hardware acceleration. This will break some Web sites and prevent them from resolving properly, although Mozilla says that it is discussing solutions with WebGL developers.

In a minor interface change, Mozilla's Do Not Track header preference has been moved in an effort by the company to make it easier for users to find. Do Not Track is an effort spearheaded by multiple browser makers to get advertisers to respect the desire of people who don't want ads to track them as they browse around the Internet. It works by adding a line to a Web site's meta tags.

Also, the development channel switcher that had been introduced to the About Firefox window has been removed. This was because Mozilla discovered that most of the people using the beta and Aurora channels were running multiple installs of the browser concurrently, Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, said in a blog post. You can change Firefox development channels at will by downloading and installing each build separately, but you won't be able to change them on the fly from within an already-installed version of Firefox.

The full release notes for Firefox 5 are available here.

Available for Android and iPhone as of today, Yahoo AppSpot (download: Android | iPhone) recommends new apps to download based on the apps you already have and the apps you've searched for in the past. It's a great way to discover new downloads when you don't necessarily want to peruse the hundreds of thousands of listings in the Android Market or the Apple App Store.

For each user, AppSpot provides a personalized daily serving of app recommendations. Trending apps on the Web have the most weight in determining what it serves up, while installed apps and any app-related queries made through mobile Yahoo search or through AppSpot itself factor in as well. And to avoid returning irrelevant results, AppSpot also uses your geo-location as yet another input. It covers 20 categories including News, Sports, Entertainment, and Productivity. And for each of its recommendations, it provides the app's name, description, ratings, price, screenshots, and a link to the download page. There's also a built-in search function, which gives you instant results as you type. It's a nice touch, considering we don't always know exactly what we're searching for.

Overall, we like the idea behind Yahoo AppSpot and found it to be a nice tool for discovering interesting and personally relevant apps. However, it is worth mentioning that AppSpot's user interface needs some work. The browsing experience can get tiresome. With a Home screen that displays only three columns at once, it's a bit of a pain to swipe through to see all 20 categories. Also, within each column, only three out of AppSpot's four recommendations can be seen above the fold, which means you must swipe up to see the fourth. And doing so for 20 different columns can get annoying, to say the least. That said, we'll be waiting for the next iteration.

Side note: Yahoo also released a desktop tool called App Search, which essentially does the same thing, but without the daily recommendations.