Comixology's Comics 3.0 for Android.

A new interface designed to emphasize creators and book discoverability arrived today in Comixology's Comics app (download).

Comics 3.0 brings to Android the changes that people with iPhones and iPads got last fall. Chief among these is a redesign that allows Comixology to make the app more usable, but in fact the app has been entirely re-coded.

The new layout, download speeds, and searchability are a key part of Comixology's "download once, read anywhere" strategy, co-founder and CEO David Steinberger said in a statement. The app loads noticeably faster than before, offers expanded categories for new books, storyline, and series listings, and creates a Purchases tab separate from My Comics. This allows you to more easily manage the books that you store locally, and those that you want to keep on Comixology's servers.

Two features now available on iPads that haven't made it to the Android version are high-resolution comics and social network sharing. The resolution issue is a factor entirely related to hardware and the new iPad's Retina technology. Sharing, ... [Read more]

Dolphin Sonar on the iPhone.

Barely a month after the mobile browser Dolphin debuted Sonar for Android, a feature for browsing by voice command, it has introduced the feature to iPhones without the help of Siri.

Dolphin representative Darren Weiss explained that the Dolphin Sonar (download) partnership arose out of a limitation of developing for the iPhone. "Since there is no native voice API available for iOS, we decided to partner up with Nuance, leaders in the the voice-recognition space." Nuance is best-known for making Dragon Dictate, a PC-based speech recognition program. It also now owns several Android apps including Vlingo and Swype, and it contributed the main framework to Siri.

The app works just like the Android version. Long-press the gesture hand icon in the bottom left corner of the screen, then tap the microphone icon, or shake the phone while Dolphin is running. That will pull up the microphone icon. From there, speak the name of th... [Read more]

Internet Explorer users accustomed to working with Favorites will find life a bit different in the new Windows 8 Metro version of the browser.

The desktop flavor of IE10 still lets you create Favorites to manage your Web sites, but the Metro edition does away with such legacy options. Instead, you're given the option of pinning often-used Web sites, as described in a new Microsoft blog. Pinning a site places a tile for it on both the Metro Start screen and in the browser when you click in the address bar.

That process sounds convenient in theory. No more dealing with folders or menus to keep track of your favorite Web sites. The tiles for such sites are clearly visible right off the bat.

But heavy-duty IE users are likely to bump into trouble trying to manage and access all of their pinned sites. I don't know how typical I am, but I house close to 100 individual Web sites as Favorites, all organized into folders and a few sub-folders. Since I know where each site is stored, I can easily drill to the right folder to open that site.

Pinning Web sites allows for no such organization. You can't neatly tuck Web sites into specific folders, since the Metro UI doesn't allow for folders. Each pinned site is simply added to the list of tiles on the Start screen.

Relate... [Read more]