SSD Market to Put a Good Show in 2H12, SanDisk Says

The storage industry hasn't exactly been flourishing lately, as a whole, but when PC sales slump, so does everything else on the IT front, so it's not a shock.

Either way, since I haven't heard of any company going bankrupt lately, I can only surmise they have been doing as well as they could under the circumstances.

SanDisk is one of the names I write more often about. As it happens, the company VP for Asia Pacific Gavin Wu has recently expressed his expectations for the second half of 2013.

According to what he told Digitimes, the PC DIY market and the ultrabook segment will encourage SSD sales.

That way, while HDDs slide down in terms of shipments, SSDs will rise over the course of the rest of the year.

SanDisk will work together with Toshiba to develop new memory chips.

Read More

ViStart Button Running on Windows 8.1 Preview – Photo Gallery

ViStart is yet another third-party Start button supposed to bring back the utterly-popular feature on Windows 8 machines, but the app works quite fine on 8.1 Preview too.

Even though some optimizations are still needed to perfectly align the Start button on the Taskbar, ViStart comes with the essential features that should prove handy to many users out there.

It doesn’t provide the same feature-rich package as some of its rivals and the available UI customization options aren’t quite impressive, but it deserves a try especially because it’s offered free of charge.

In addition, it also packs a boot to desktop option specifically aimed at Windows 8 users, but given the fact that such a setting was already implemented in 8.1 Preview, it’s pretty useless right now.

Download ViStart 8.1 Build 5132

Read More

GNOME 3.9.4 Is Now Available for Testing

The great Matthias Clasen from the GNOME development team was proud to announce a few hours ago, July 12, that the fourth development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment is ready for download and testing from the usual places. 
GNOME 3.9.4 brings numerous updated core components and libraries, as well as several improvements to basic applications (see below for a detailed list). This fourth development release towards GNOME 3.10 also squashed many bugs found in the GNOME 3.9.3 version, and updates several important translations.

At this moment, the GNOME developers are preparing for the upcoming GUADEC – The GNOME Conference event, which will take place in Brno, Czech Republic, August 1-8.

 More details can be found here.

Therefore, the GNOME 3.9.4 updates the following main applications: Anjuta, Bijiben, Cheese, Devhelp, Evolution, File Roller, Gedit, GNOME Chess, GNOME Documents, Orca, and Vinagre.

The following core components were updated in GNOME 3.9.4: GTK+, Glib2, Gvfs, Clutter, Mutter, Glib Networking, GNOME Calculator, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Disk Utility, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Shell, GNOME Terminal, Vino, VTE, Cogl, Folks, GJS, Gmime, Pango, GtkSourceView, and GObject introspection.

Many of the aforementioned packages have detailed articles on Softpedia, so read them if you want to know what's new in each one. Also, you can read the entire GNOME 3.9.4 raw changelogs, here andhere.

The next development release will be GNOME 3.9.5, which should be available for testing sometime at the end of the month, followed by the first Beta release at the end of August, 2013. The final version of GNOME 3.10 will be officially released on September 25, 2013.

Download GNOME 3.9.4 sources right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only

Read More