Hardware acceleration hits Fennec for Android, aka Firefox for Mobile

by Samuel Gibbs on December 16, 2010 at 10:30 AM

Fennec for Android, aka Firefox for Mobile, is coming on strong and while still very much in beta, shows enormous potential. Now hardware acceleration support has hit Fennec nightlies with OpenGL-powered compositing. While this isn't the first mention of hardware acceleration for an Android browser -- Opera has promised it sometime later -- this is the first implementation for the Mozilla browser and marks good things to come.

It's off by default, but a quick blast over to about:config will reveal layers.accelerate-all, which should be set to true to enable OpenGL acceleration. After a restart of Fennec, you can check whether you've managed to successfully enable OpenGL by going to about:support and looking for 1/1 OpenGL in the 'Graphics' section.

The latest Fennec nightly builds can be downloaded from Mozilla, but hardware acceleration isn't supported on all devices at this stage. Users have reported mixed results in the comments, so proceed with caution. Tags: Android, apps, Browsers, cellphones, Fennec, Firefox, hardware acceleration, HardwareAcceleration, Mozilla, opengl

View the original article here

DanKam mobile app offers color correction for the colorblind on iPhone and Android

by Jay Hathaway on December 17, 2010 at 11:00 AM

Dan Kaminsky, famous for discovering a DNS bug that almost "broke the internet," has just released a side project that has nothing to do with security. It's DanKam, an augmented reality app that lets colorblind people get a color-corrected view of the world through an iPhone or Android camera. The app has only been out for a short time, but it's already getting positive feedback from colorblind users -- especially designers -- who didn't know this kind of real-time correction was possible.

The story of DanKam's development is pretty awesome, too. Kaminsky was inspired by a friend who didn't know that a green girl in the Star Trek movie was green (he thought she just had a tan!) and applied his knowledge of color systems to create a "clearer signal" that even colorblind people can see. Use cases include matching clothes, matching paint, reading system status LED correctly and more. It may not have saved the internet, but DanKam sure makes life easier for a lot of people.

You can find DanKam in the App Store for $2.99, and it should be in the Android Market soon.

Tags: android, apps, color, colorblind, colorblindness, dan kaminsky, dankam, DanKaminsky, health, ios, iphone, vision

View the original article here

Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS

Filed under: Office, Productivity, Google, iPhone, Mobile, Android

Google has just announced that it has started rolling out mobile editing support for Google Docs. The roll-out will take a few days and when it reaches you, you'll be able to edit documents in Google Docs by simply pointing your mobile browser to docs.google.com and clicking on Edit while viewing the document you wish to make changes to.

This feature will only be accessible for owners of devices running Android 2.2 or newer and iOS 3.0 or newer (including the iPad). The only language supported at first will be English, with more options to come in the future. A demo video of how the new feature works is waiting for you after the jump.
Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments


]]>

View the original article here