Software | featured news

As unlimited data plans fade away, services and applications are being designed to help users manage their consumption.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview was downloaded a million times in its first day of availability.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 for public testing on Wednesday in the hope that it will help the brand win back some of the ground it has been losing to Apple and Google.

Microsoft has unveiled its Windows 8 logo, and explained its design in detail on Friday. The company wanted to incorporate parts of its new Metro design principles while retaining some classic aspects.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

Apple's got a new big cat on the prowl. Its name is Mountain Lion, and it's the next major release of Mac OS X. The software is being released as a preview to Apple developers today, with a commercial release to follow sometime this summer through the company's Mac App Store. Like Lion before it, Apple has imbued the new software with many of the top-billed features from the iPhone and iPad, all with the intent of making its computers more useful and approachable to the millions that have snatched up an iOS device in recent years. It's also a direct response to recently-added features on those devices that--for better or worse--make the Mac a less essential piece of the puzzle.

Google has beefed up security on its Android mobile-device software to better prevent "malicious" software from residing in its app store.

Google, seeking to reboot its flagging efforts in television, said consumers will soon have a broader choice of TVs using its software--with lower prices also a likely outcome.

Britain's government says experts are considering developing a bespoke iPad app that would deliver key data straight to Prime Minister David Cameron's tablet computer....

There have been some newsworthy failures over the last couple of years in the photo-sharing field. Facebook has pretty much replaced the need for stand-alone apps because it does everything that most people want, allowing sharing to be relatively seamless between smartphone and profile. After years of searching, I've finally found an app worth using.