Google+ games on iSwifter's iPad app

Following the launch of games on Google+ last month, Adobe Flash streaming app iSwifter today is adding compatibility to work with those games, giving iPad users a way to play them on Apple's tablet.

The functionality is being added to iSwifter's existing application (iTunes) as a free update today, and will join iSwifter's catalog of games on Facebook.

The first thing you're probably wondering is if this means you can play Google+'s social version of Angry Birds. The short answer to that is no. It's one of the only titles I couldn't get working in a pre-release version of the software, something that's due to that version of Angry Birds being written in HTML5. iSwifter founder Rajat Gupta told me the software's back-end technology is not yet set up to run HTML5, but will eventually. In the meantime, the iPad's built-in Safari browser simply redirects users to download the native version of Angry Birds in app form when trying to access the Google+ game page.

iSwifter runs Flash games and ... [Read more]

Apple leads the browser market when it comes to real-world usage on mobile devices.

New statistics released today show a competitive volatility in the the mobile browser market absent from the slower-moving personal computer browser market.

Net Applications has long shown the total browser usage worldwide based on visits to a collection of Web sites using its analytics software. Now, though, it's separated PC browsing on desktops and laptops from mobile browsing on phones and tablets. With PCs, the story remains largely unchanged: Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues its gradual slide while Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari gradually rise.

But in the mobile market, there's a lot more jitter in the statistics. Apple's Safari, used on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, is the dominant browser, rising from 44.3 percent of usage in October 2010 to 53.0 percent in August 2011. And although the overall ranking of the top five browsers hasn't changed in the last year, it appears likely Google's unbranded Android browser will take the No. 2 spot from Opera Mini in coming months.

From October 2010 to August 2011, Opera Mini dropped in usage from 32.4 percent to 20.8 percent. Android's browser rose from 9.2 to 15.7 percent, according to the Net Applications statistics. [Read more]

Apple today quietly rolled out a new section in its Mac App Store that features applications that have been made to work with the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system.

Dubbed "Apps enhanced for OS X Lion," the collection of 48 applications ranges from Apple's first-party software to third-party productivity tools and games. The vast majority are paid applications, as opposed to freebies.

Apple released Lion in late July as an update to Snow Leopard, the previous version of Mac OS X. As part of the newer version of the system software that powers the company's Mac computers, Apple added additional support for multitouch gestures, auto-saving and resuming, along with full-screen capabilities. However, not all developers have gotten their apps ready to work with those new APIs. The new collection of apps represents the ones that do.

While AVG has made some important security improvements in its latest major release, including important protection against fake antivirus and ransomware, how the suite impacts your PC is the focus of AVG 2012. Available at no cost as AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 (download), or as a paid upgrade to AVG Anti-Virus 2012 (download) or AVG Internet Security 2012 (download), AVG's 2012 offerings hang their hats on major performance gains.

Faster and lighter land in AVG Free 2012

Specifically, the company says that it has reduced by 40 percent the size on your hard drive of the virus signature database. That database is a major component of how the program recognizes threats. AVG also stated that the number of running processes that run suite has been reduced from 16 to 11, that it uses 20 percent less memory overall than previous versions, and that it ought to impact your computer's boot time less.

CNET Labs found that, on the whole, it is a faster program than last year's. However, we can't directly compare this year's results to last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1. We can report ... [Read more]

Making the switch from Windows to Mac isn't as hard as you might think. That's because there are great options for using Windows software on your Mac through Apple's Boot Camp and other third-party virtualization software. Today, Parallels Desktop got a major update adding features to make switching to a different operating system even more seamless. There's also an upgraded mobile version for iOS you can use to remotely control your virtual environments from your phone.

Parallels Desktop makes it feel as though you are running Internet Explorer 9 seamlessly on your Mac desktop.

Parallels Desktop has always been a great way to switch seamlessly between operating systems without the need to reboot your Mac. But with this new version, regardless of which system you're running at the time, when you open a file type that's for another operating system, Parallels Desktop automatically recognizes the file type and launches it in its native OS for you. Parallels says changes like these improve your switching experience by making it feel as though Windows software just works on your Mac, rather than needing to feel like it's working as part of a virtual machine. Windows apps like Quicken, Office, and other applications important to Windows switchers will run as though they're launching... [Read more]