Microsoft's Antoine Leblond at the unveiling of the Windows Store app marketplace.

SAN FRANCISCO--In a bid to lure developers to its upcoming application store for Windows, Microsoft revealed a new pricing scheme designed to undercut rivals' marketplaces.

Microsoft will take 30 percent of application sales revenue from programs sold in the Windows Store, an app marketplace that will be build into Windows 8, similar to what rivals such as Apple take from app sales in their stores. But Microsoft will take only 20 percent once an app makes more than $25,000.

"We're going to give you a bigger bite of the apple," said Antoine Leblond, a corporate vice president of Windows Web Services.

Microsoft set the price point for apps in the store at $1.49 to $999.99.

The store will open when Microsoft launches the beta of Windows 8 in late February 2012. App submissions for the beta will be by invitation only.

Microsoft will also give developers tools to create a variety of pricing models, offering consumers free versions, as well as paid ones. They can even create versions of an app that end after specific periods of time. And newspapers, for example, can sell subscriptions from inside their app, something, Leblond said, couldn't be created on iT... [Read more]

Is your Mac's desktop horribly cluttered with various folders and files? If you can't be trusted to create a sensible folder hierarchy and then save files to appropriate folders, it's likely you default to saving file after file to your desktop. It's no way to live.

Thankfully, the Mac App Store has three apps that can help restore order to your desktop. Two are free and will sweep up files and folders on your desktop when you command or, in the case of one, as scheduled. The third simply hides them, presenting the illusion of a sparkling clean desktop but preserving your mess of files and folders.

Desktoday is accessed from your Mac's menu bar.

Desktoday is a free app that sits in the menu bar at the top of your desktop. To clean your desktop, click the Desktoday icon (a black file folder) and select Clear Desktop. It will move all of the folders and files on your desktop to a folder in your Documents folder with the current date.

You can set exceptions in Desktoday Preferences to leave certain folders and files on your desktop. Also in preferences, you can select a different destination for the moved folders a... [Read more]

Opera Mail gets a new wardrobe in 11.60.

The new Opera might be a minor-point update, but along with the interface changes, better HTML5 support, and faster handling of secure sites, Opera humorously has noted that it's a good thing that tween pop star Justin Bieber prefers Google Chrome. Debuting today, Opera 11.60 for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download) brings Opera a step closer to version 12 and its planned hardware acceleration update.

Hardware acceleration is currently one of the major features missing from Opera that its competitors offer. It allows the browser to leverage a computer's graphics processor to cut down on page rendering times, including the rendering of complicated in-site graphics such as found in games.

Although it's not in Opera 11.60, the new version of Opera remains quite usable. The built-in mail client has been refreshed so it fits in with Opera's tweaked look, and adding multiple e-mail accounts took about 10 seco... [Read more]