Google Wave, a web app which allowed for real-time communication and collaboration, is no longer being developed as of today by Google. On a blog post, Google said, “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

The long wait for an iPhone 4 jailbreak is now officially over and it came with beneficial effects for other iDevices too. This new jailbreak works on any iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad and is done directly on the device, with no need to use a device on the computer. The process is really easy and simple too. All you have to do is visit this website on your device and “Slide to Jailbreak”. It is recommended that you sync with iTunes, but I had no issue just performing the jailbreak and then returning to my springboard to a Cydia icon.

David – Senior Editor

Bloatware is a issue that is overlooked by some developers. It’s when a program has too much features that the purpose of the program is difficult to find. Take the program I made in the image for example (I would never release a program like this), can you really find the main purpose of the program? I made this program for word processing. The problem is that this program does so many other things that it really isn’t a word processor anymore, it’s now a word processor that browses the web, shows resource usage, displays photos, etc.. It really can’t do anything perfectly. Now why would you want a program that does so many things badly over a program that does one thing well?

Bloatware is much more common in desktop applications than mobile applications. The thing is that with mobile applications, there really isn’t much room to make a program that does multiple things. On my iPod, I have a separate application for web browsing, viewing photos, listening to music, etc.. simply because the screen is too small to have other functions besides the main function. But on a desktop program such as Firefox, I can have multiple functions using add-ons and extensions, simply because there’s space for those functions. But there are times when desktop applications only perform one function; take Tweetie for Mac by atebits for example , it only lets you post to and read your Twitter.

David – Senior Editor

The hype of the 3-D movie age is only getting larger and larger with new technologies like Digital 3-D and stereoscopic 3-D which requires no glasses, but is this hype really worth it?

3-D movies have never really seemed to amaze me. I mean, I just can’t seem to find two blurred images that make an illusion like they’re popping out of the screen interesting. The movie industry is really focusing on making 3-D movies now that they really can’t seem to make a decent 2-D movie. It’s like having a nice-looking video game that fails when it comes to playability. What’s the point? Also, movie theaters have to invest in new projectors to display some newer movies. Is this really fair?

3-D movies have always seemed to annoy me because they make me dizzy and I can never seemed to focus on the whole picture because the foreground object always seems to be standing out too much. Isn’t the whole point of a movie to enjoy it in its entirety, not to just focus on the frontmost object.

I think that with this 3-D age, the movie industry can’t focus on other technologies that could be cool like 360-degree movies or movies which make the viewer feel like he/she is in the environment using elements such as wind and temperature. I think that 3-D is just an on-going fad that’s taking away from the good part of the movie industry; the movies, and  I hope it gets out-dated soon.

David – Senior Editor

Even though HP recently bought Palm, there hasn’t really been much hints of them trying to develop a device that uses Palm’s WebOS operating system. HP has just recently registered the “Palmpad” trademark. This is a possible hint that HP is developing a new tablet that uses Palm’s WebOS. After seeing the Windows 7 tablet HP had been working on, I think that this will have a similar design, but at the same time much lower specs. I’d probably expect it to have a 1GHz Snapdragon and 256MB RAM, but we’ll have to see what HP has in store.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed the Boxee HTPC application, but news just came in yesterday that the Boxee Box is now being produced and should be available in November. The Boxee Box is a little box that runs the Boxee application without any need for a computer. The hardware is being produced by D-Link, a networking company that has never seemed to satisfy me with their routers (that’s just me of course). It was first announced at CES 2010, and the box has gone through much changes since then. Some of the differences include weight changes, nicer plastic, and a smudge-free surface. I think that this is starting to look very promising and I’m waiting to get some video of the actual performance of the thing. If I’m going to consider getting it, it must perform faster than my netbook when in the application. It doesn’t necessarily have to have better specifications since it’s actually going to be running the Boxee software natively and it should run well. Here’s a video that explains the Boxee Box in full detail:

The first Boxee Box arrived from the D-Link Factory from Zach Klein on Vimeo.

David – Senior Editor

Image Credit: Kotaku

The dashboard (home screen) of the Xbox 360 has only been redesigned once, but that one redesign was very significant. The NXE (New Xbox 360 Experience) was a big change in terms of interface though in terms of displaying content, it wasn’t so great. The original dashboard featured a series of controls on a page, which is owned by a tab that the user can flip through with their controller. It was very clean and efficient and you can get what you want to quickly. The next image shows the issues with the new NXE dashboard.

The red lines show the alignment of the elements, the faded white color shows wasted whitespace and the blue shows elements hidden behind other elements. This is a very inefficient way of displaying content. It is very clear that you can only get complete information out of elements 1 and 2. The rest are hidden behind other elements, hiding a lot of the content. Though it does look appealing, the perspective of which the elements are viewed at just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and it just makes it harder to get to the content you want.

The new rumored dashboard, on the other hand, takes a similar approach on displaying content to the original Xbox 360 dashboard. It doesn’t look much like it, but it is just the original design but with tabs sorted vertically and content displayed horizontally. I hope Microsoft releases this new dashboard because it looks very promising.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed Apple’s new Mac Mini before and we included some information about what kind of performance we are getting out of this machine, in terms of gaming, but I thought that instead of telling our readers what gaming is like on this computer, we should show them.

I then found my World of Warcraft discs (sitting in a closet) and installed them on the Mac Mini. The video shown below was recorded using the in-game recorder on the Mac version of World of Warcraft and I must say that using the recorder didn’t exactly add to the game’s performance. It did drop the framerate by about 15fps, but the video will give you a basic idea of what you should be expecting out of this computer. The game was played with all the settings on Ultra and at 1920×1080. The reason the video is only 720p is because the in-game recorder sacrifices a lot of game performance, so I had to use these settings: 720p, medium quality, H.264 recording. The actual compression only took about 2 minutes on the 40 second clip. I did not stop the recording, the recorder actually stopped itself, probably because the video file was getting too large.

David – Senior Editor

The Pandigital Novel is an Android-powered e-reader. It features a 7″ screen, ARM 11 processor, 1GB of internal storage (expandable up to 32GB), and WiFi, all for the low price of $200. The iPad features a 9.7″ screen, Apple A4 processor, 16GB of storage (non-expandable, but also in 32GB and 64GB), and WiFi (and 3G on some models), but it costs $500 (or higher for 3G and/or higher storage). Now, here’s when the real deal comes in; the iPad runs iOS 3.2 and the Novel runs Android. Novel’s version of Android is device-specific and limited, but reports of some hacking have just surface and it appears as though the Novel has been fully rooted and running the stock version of Android 2.1. Though I can’t really say much about performance, judging from the processor, this is still a major breakthrough.

I truly believe that if this is in fact, 100% working and fast, for that matter, this could really stir up some competition with the iPad. It’s $300 cheaper, so you really are going to be paying a lot less for it anyway.

David – Senior Editor

Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector (often referred to as OSC) has been long known to let you connect your Outlook contacts with social networks such as LinkedIn and MySpace. They have just added Windows Live and Facebook support. Just recently, Microsoft teamed up with Facebook to allow people with contacts on Outlook connect them to their Facebook profiles. And it works pretty well. By selecting an email, I was able to click on a contact in Outlook 2010 to connect to a social network. It the only social network available on the wizard should be “My Site” until you download some from here. On the site, you can download social network connectors, which now include Facebook and Windows Live. Then, on the wizard, all you have to do is enter your credentials and look the person up in the social network of your choice. Though I haven’t really played with it much, I did notice that the email you are trying to add has to already have a Facebook account to add them, so if the person has multiple emails, you may have to ask which one they use for their Facebook, which isn’t always the most comfortable thing to do. I know that Outlook itself is a very solid email client, and this just adds to its already socially-connected features.

David – Senior Editor