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NFC News

This month I noticed three NFC related stories which confirm some of the ideas and projections made in my August 2010 Micro Mart magazine feature article on Near Field Communication.

The first story strongly suggests the iPhone 5 will have NFC technology. Interestingly, an earlier article also mentions Apple's patent filings on iPay, iBuy and iCoupons, in connection with their NFC device triggering filings.

The second is an interesting story about NFC enabled toys from Silicon Valley start-up Nukotoys. Not likely to make much of a showing this Christmas - but maybe something to look out for late 2011.

The third is a pre-announcement regarding the next Android OS version - namely Android Gingerbread 2.3. Gingerbread has NFC support to read RFID tags as well as communicate with other phones, payment systems and other possible applications. It's due out well before Apple's regular iPhone mid-year product update, as I suggested in the article.

Read more analysis posts.

Appcelerator Titanium review

Today's Micro Mart magazine, issue 1134, published my Appcelerator Titanium product review.

Titanium is an open source platform to facilitate development of cross-platform desktop applications (namely Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), plus apps for both Apple and Android mobile devices. Crucially it uses only open web standards and languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I've found it such an interesting product, I'm working working on a mini series covering both desktop and Android smartphone development using the Titanium SDK.

To see the review in full visit my Sample PDFs page.

An End to Malware article

Today Micro Mart magazine published my An End to Malware? feature article in issue 1132.

Over six page I investigate the modern curse that is malware. How did we get into this mess? What's wrong with our current PC approach? How might operating system evolution provide a solution? What limitations and loss or computing freedom might a new solution impose? These and many other question are raised and discussed in the article.

I also explain the browser problem, Intel's new approach as defined by CEO Paul S Otellini at IDF 2010 and today's mobile device solutions, including Apple's iOS. And highlight the issues surrounding taking responsibility and possibility of a security guarantee.

Click to read more analysis articles and posts.

Abobe Acrobat X Pro review

Today Micro Mart magazine published my Adobe Acrobat X Pro product review in issue 1131.

It's been well over two years since Acrobat 9 appeared, so I was interested to see what had changed in the new version. I certainly found plenty of new and enhanced Acrobat X Pro features to write about, but unfortunately the price still remains pretty steep.

Difficult to justify for personal use, I feel, in the light of products like Nitro PDF.