A look at gadget, game and geek happenings in the week ahead.
Google is planning to democratise the mobile app development industry with Google App Inventor for Android, a software tool that aims to make it easy for anyone to create an Android app.
The tool has been in testing for the past year amongst users, including sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.
How bad are social-networking and social media sites for you, really? Some studies will claim they are time wasting and shorten the attention span, but according to Fox News the Chinese government is making some different assertions as to the negative repercussions of sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Apparently, a Chinese government-backed think tank has a new status update – “US government – j’accuse” – because it alleges the States uses these sites to create political unrest.
Fox News quotes the report as saying: “We must pay attention to the potential risks and threats to state security as the popularity of social-networking sites continues to grow. We must immediately step up supervision of social-networking sites.”
And now onto our weekly dose of Apple rumours: what do you get when you mix the iPod touch with the iPod nano? Yup, apparently an iPod touch nano is on the cards for Apple.
Images of the screen on Taiwanese site Apple Pro show a fairly small touch screen that may or may not be a touch nano or a more unlikely scenario is that Apple Pro is suggesting this is an iPod wristwatch with FaceTime. Hmm.
