Norton launches its Online Family To Go app for iOS devices

Norton announced today that it’s launching a mobile companion to its Online Family parental control software. The Online Family To Go app lets parents view their kids’ online activities, including their web browsing history, search history and chat logs. Parents can also manage their “House Rules” directly from this iOS device and change each child’s settings for web browsing, time limits, chat logging and personal information sharing. The app will be available for free from the App Store and requires a subscription to the Norton Online Family service.

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Norton Everywhere’s First Anniversary Brings
New Partnerships, Technology

Mountain View, Calif. – June 1, 2011 – Norton by Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) is marking the one year anniversary of its Norton Everywhere “Beyond-the-PC” initiative, introducing new partnerships and product updates that help deliver Norton protection across locations, devices and digital experiences. Today, Norton is announcing partners including OneWifi, Hi-Tech Sound, The WiFi Company, KDDI Corporation and T-Mobile Austria, all of which are leveraging Norton mobile solutions to protect their customers wherever they go. Additionally, Norton is announcing updates to Norton Mobile Security and a new mobile application for Norton Online Family users.

“Launching Norton Everywhere a year ago has been an important investment in the future of our Consumer Business,” said Janice Chaffin, group president, Consumer Business Unit, Symantec. “We’ve taken a unique approach to developing a post-PC era Norton that includes introducing new mobile products, expanding our current products with mobile apps and combining our technology with mainstream consumer brands to protect more people in more places. The market reception has been highly positive and in the coming year we’ll continue creating partnerships and technologies that will bring the most trusted name in PC security to mobile and Wi-Fi users all over the world.”

New Partnerships
· OneWifi, Hi-Tech Sound and The WiFi Company – Norton has entered an agreement with OneWifi, Hi-Tech Sound and The WiFi Company to provide Norton DNS to customers using the in-store Wi-Fi for a major food and beverage retail chain in the U.S. Norton DNS protects users who click on unsafe or inappropriate websites and provides a safer, more reliable, and faster Internet experience by using Norton Safe Web technology to deliver a variety of basic protection services like blocking phishing sites as well as known infected websites to prevent accidental downloads of malware and spyware.
· KDDI Corporation – KDDI is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Japan and has begun offering Norton Mobile Security along with the sale of Android tablet offerings.
·T-Mobile Austria – T-Mobile Austria is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with around 128 million mobile customers, 36 million fixed-network lines and approximately 17 million broadband lines (as of March 31, 2011). The Group provides products and services for the fixed network, mobile communications, the Internet and IPTV for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in over 50 countries and has around 244,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 62.4 billion in the 2010 financial year – more than half of it outside Germany (as of December 31, 2010).

“As Android devices become increasingly popular, there is a greater chance they could be targeted by cybercriminals or more commonly, lost or stolen,” said Maria Zesch, Marketing Director T-Mobile Austria. “We are delighted to now offer T-Mobile Austria customers the ability to secure their smart phones or tablets from physical and online crime with the powerful protection of Norton security.”

In addition to these new global partnerships, Norton Mobile Security is available at select retailers worldwide, including a significant presence in Japan with 17 of the country’s major retail chains offering the product.

Product and Technology Updates
· Norton Mobile Security for Android 2.0 Beta – Now features antiphishing technology to protect users who access email on their smartphone. Phishing occurs when hackers pretending to be legitimate companies use email to request personal information and direct recipients to respond through malicious web sites. Phishing is an equal opportunity scam, taking place just as easily over a phone or tablet as on a PC or Mac, so having built-in protection is essential. Norton Mobile Security also features remote locate functionality in addition to remote wipe and lock. Following a quick initial set-up, users can locate, lock or wipe their Android device with a simple text message in the event of loss or theft. Additionally, users can block unwanted calls and texts – all from a product that boasts Norton-strength antimalware protection. Norton Mobile Security has more than 300,000 downloads and a 4 out of 5 star rating on the Android Market.

· Norton Online Family To Go Beta – With more than one million new worldwide customer registrations since 2010, Norton Online Family is giving parents more freedom and ease to stay connected to their children, anytime, anywhere. Norton Online Family To Go is a new mobile application that allows parents using Norton Online Family to view their children’s online activities and manage each child’s “House Rules” from their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, with other OS support planned this year. This new mobile application enables parents to:
o Receive Norton Online Family alerts
o See what websites their children have visited, what they’ve searched for, and who they’ve chatted with
o Configure and manage the “house rules” for each child including web browsing, time monitoring, IM chat monitoring and sharing personal information

Pricing and Availability
Norton Mobile Security 2.0 Beta is now available as a free 21-day trial download on the Android marketplace.

Norton Online Family To Go Beta is now available as a free download on iTunes or the App Store. Availability on the Android Market is also planned in the coming weeks.

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About Norton by Symantec
Symantec’s Norton products protect consumers from cybercrime with technologies like antivirus, anti-spyware and phishing protection — while also being light on system resources. The company also provides services such as online backup, PC tuneup, and family online safety. Like Norton on Facebook at www.facebook.com/norton and follow @NortonOnline on Twitter.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

Norton launches its Online Family To Go app for iOS devices originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Zoom Q3HD Handy Video Recorder: Review and comparison with iPhone 4 video

Podcasters and broadcasters have used the Zoom H2 and H4n digital audio recorders from Samson Technologies with great success for a few years. These very portable recorders are perfect for capturing high quality stereo sound in digital formats that can be easily edited by a variety of Mac audio apps. Now they’ve added HD video capture to a small handheld device, the Zoom Q3HD Handy Video Recorder (available through online retailers for about US$299). Since it’s the beginning of the Northern Hemisphere summer vacation season, I thought it would be a good time to review this new device and compare its audio and video quality with another compact video recorder a lot of you may own: an iPhone 4

For many people who might want to capture HD video on the run, the iPhone 4 is perfect. You have it with you all the time, and you can edit the video on the device using iMovie. Zoom appears to be marketing the Q3HD to Mac owners who are looking for better video and audio quality than the iPhone 4 can offer. How does it do compared to the video capture capabilities of the iPhone 4? Read on for a full review and actual video clips for your comparison.

Continue reading Zoom Q3HD Handy Video Recorder: Review and comparison with iPhone 4 video

Zoom Q3HD Handy Video Recorder: Review and comparison with iPhone 4 video originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to: Share iCal calendars without MobileMe

This how-to over at Gearz.de will help you share your iCal calendar around even if you don’t have a subscription to Apple’s online MobileMe service (a very forgivable offense, especially since its expected replacement iCloud service is now just a week away). Unfortunately, the writeup is a little technical, as you’ll need to actually configure your local web server to share out and broadcast the calendar to anyone who needs to read it. That means you’ll need to do a little console typing and config file editing, but as long as you follow directions, it should work just fine.

A simpler solution might be to use an app like BusyCal to do the syncing for you, or even just use a service that’s already in the cloud, like Google Calendar (which is what I actually do). But if you’re already tied to iCal, either because you’ve got a calendar on there or just because you like the app, following those steps should help you get sharing to anyone up and running.

How to: Share iCal calendars without MobileMe originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Player piano rolls made on a Mac… and an Apple II

sciencechannel.jpgI’m a big fan of the Canadian TV series How It’s Made, shown in the USA on the Science Channel. There’s something hypnotic and soothing about all those lathes, molds, conveyors and such, producing the things that we all take for granted.

One of the older episodes was on this weekend, featuring the manufacturing process for player piano rolls (yes, they still make player piano rolls). I was pleased to see the pianist recording his score on what appeared to be a PowerPC Mac running some vintage of Mac OS X — and then quite stunned to see the next sequence, showing the roll punch codes being loaded onto an Apple II used to control the punching machine.

Goodness gracious, as my grandma used to say. It’s nice to see such persistence and reliability from this bit of Jurassic technology in a control system. Read on for the video.

Continue reading Player piano rolls made on a Mac… and an Apple II

Player piano rolls made on a Mac… and an Apple II originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Report indicates iOS users stick with platform due to ‘lock-in effect’

Citing a report from research2guidance, GigaOM notes that Apple’s market share of app downloads reversed the backward slide that began in 2009 and recently increased by 2 percent. This is a far cry from the doom n’ gloom predictions many pundits have been espousing for Apple’s platform, and it shows that Google’s Android Marketplace still has a long way to go before unseating Apple’s App Store.

The report speculates that a “lock-in effect” is partially responsible for users sticking with Apple’s platform. iOS users, whether they’re iPhone, iPod touch or iPad owners, tend to download a large number of apps, with a fairly high percentage of those apps being paid versions. The higher number of paid apps a user downloads, the more likely it is that user will stick with the same platform. This makes perfect sense; if you’re like me and you’ve got a couple hundred bucks worth of apps on your various devices, that’s a lot of inertia to overcome if you decide you want to switch platforms.

When you flip it around and look at things from the Android perspective, things don’t look as rosy. GigaOM recently cited research from Distimo that showed paid downloads represent a truly minuscule proportion of total app downloads from the Android Market. 79.3 percent of paid apps on the Android platform have been downloaded less than 100 times, and only 4.6 percent of paid apps were downloaded more than 1000 times. A 2010 Distimo report (again cited from GigaOM) noted that Android users download a disproportionately large number of free apps compared to the iOS platform, and that trend doesn’t appear to be reversing.

The end result is that for all we hear from various tech pundits about Android’s ascending smartphone market share being the only metric that matters, other numbers are showing that not only are users more likely to stick with iOS due to app ‘lock-in,’ Apple’s App Store also remains a more attractive market for app developers who actually want to make money with paid apps. CNNMoney’s analysis of the same Distimo report paints a very stark picture: of 72,000 paid apps on the Android platform, only two have sold more than 500,000 (but less than one million) copies over the history of the platform. Contrast that with six paid applications generating 500,000 or more downloads just in the US version of the iPhone’s App Store in March and April alone.

How many paid apps have you downloaded for your iOS device, and do you consider that an impediment to switching platforms? Let us know in the comments.

Report indicates iOS users stick with platform due to ‘lock-in effect’ originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple renews Google partnership, Google Maps still in iOS 5

According to Engadget, in an interview at the D9 Conference Google’s Eric Schmidt confirmed that Apple and Google will maintain their partnership in maps and search functionality in iOS. “We just renewed our map and search agreements with Apple, and we hope those continue for a long time.”

This may mean that Apple has put a hold on plans to institute its own mapping service, or that the service was never close to deployment to begin with. Whatever the case may be, it looks like Google Maps will be the default mapping service for iOS 5 at the very least, and possibly for some time to come.

Apple renews Google partnership, Google Maps still in iOS 5 originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spriteloq helps Flash game developers move assets to Corona

Spriteloq is a new tool for Flash developers looking to make iOS games with the Corona SDK, now available on the project’s website. The Corona SDK is a third-party software development kit used to put together iOS games and apps (we’ve covered it and spoken with the creators before). It allows devs to not only develop iOS apps, but also spread them across various other platforms, including Android and even platforms like the Nook and Kindle. Spriteloq is a brand new plug-in for that SDK that allows developers of Flash animations to simply pull them in, whole hog, without having to rebuild from scratch at all.

You can watch a video of how it works on the website. You can simply export .SWF files from Flash, convert them using Spriteloq, then quickly bring them back into Corona to use in an actual app. It seems like a really quick and easy way to take a lot of work already done in the Flash environment and bring it over to a much more portable system.

Spriteloq and Corona are both free downloads, though you’ll need a license for each to actually produce a game or app with them. For the rest of us, this simply means we’ll see even more Flash apps making their way over to the iOS platform.

Spriteloq helps Flash game developers move assets to Corona originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone 5 Rumors: Reported to be SIM-less with 8MP camera

There is a rumor going around that the 5th generation iPhone will be released in July or August and will have the same form factor as the iPhone 4 with an 8MP camera and no SIM.

Citing an anonymous source, Macotakara reported Monday that the next iPhone will have the same form factor as the iPhone 4, and will use an ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The report said it is “not confirmed” whether the new processor will have a single CPU or is dual-core.

The report also said the handset will have an 8-megapixel camera, and a SIM-less design along with 3-4 internal antennas that will allow the device to serve as a “world phone” compatible with both GSM and CDMA networks. That would allow the same hardware to run on both AT&T and Verizon networks in the U.S.

The report claims that the device, which will include a Qualcomm chipset, will be released at the end of July or in early August. While later than usual, that release date would be sooner than the fiscal 2012 claim the same site made back in March.

You can read more about the iPhone 5 on AppleInsider.

Open Source: Windows Azure Toolkit For iOS

Not too long ago I mentioned that Microsoft had released a Bing Maps framework for iOS devices, and they have continued to support the iOS platform releasing an open source Windows Azure toolkit for iOS devices.

For those unfamiliar with Windows Azure, Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing you to host applications and data.

What the toolkit currently allows you to do is easily utilize the table and blob storage provided by Windows Azure within your iOS apps.  Features such as push notifications, and access control are being added.

You can find the toolkit along with samples and documentation on Github here:
https://github.com/microsoft-dpe

You can also find a writeup on getting started with the toolkit here:
http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/

If you ever have the need to support Windows Azure within an app be sure to keep this in mind.

 

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Tutorial: Use Photoshop To Create Levels For Your Corona SDK Games

Photoshop is an amazing program, filled with so many features one of those being the ability to execute customized scripts.

I found a very interesting tutorial along with a customized Photoshop script enabling the creation of game levels using Photoshop, and automatically generating the code for display and collisions.  This tutorial is great as it uncovers the whole process step-by-step, and while there aren’t a ton of features in the levels you can look through the script, and get an idea on how to use Photoshop as a tool for game programming.

The tutorial is from Rocket5 studios and can be found here:
Photoshop As A Level Editor For Corona SDK

Check it out, and be sure to share your feedback with the author, hopefully he will expand the tutorial and show the creation of a complete game with Photoshop.

 

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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SpriteLoq helps Flash game developers move assets to Corona

SpriteLoq is a new tool for Flash developers looking to make iOS games with the Corona SDK, now available on the project’s website. The Corona SDK is a third-party software development kit used to put together iOS games and apps (we’ve covered it and spoken with the creators before). It allows devs to not only develop iOS apps, but also spread them across various other platforms, including Android and even platforms like the Nook and Kindle. SpriteLoq is a brand new plug-in for that SDK that allows developers of Flash animations to simply pull them in, whole hog, without having to rebuild from scratch at all.

You can watch a video of how it works on the website. You can simply export .SWF files from Flash, convert them using SpriteLoq, then quickly bring them back in to Corona to use in an actual app. It seems like a really quick and easy way to take a lot of work already done in the Flash environment and bring it over to a much more portable system.

SpriteLoq and Corona are both free downloads, though you’ll need a license for each to actually produce a game or app with them. For the rest of us, this simply means we’ll see even more Flash apps making their way over to the iOS platform.

SpriteLoq helps Flash game developers move assets to Corona originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Responding to Security Update 2011-003 in verse

What is it about viruses and security concerns that automatically lend themselves to verse? TUAW doesn’t analyze these things. It merely moves with the flow.

Here is our “Burma Shave” style overview of the Mac Defender/Apple Security Update crisis.

When those Macs caught ‘la grippe
Apple responded; its bud they nipped
Security Update waits for you
Bid MacDefender an unfond ‘adieu’
…Burma Shave

Think you can do better? Leave your rhymes in the comments.

Responding to Security Update 2011-003 in verse originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 31 May 2011 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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