Better sync lined up in Chrome for Android

An update to Chrome for Android delivers some features it's been lacking, including password and autofill sync.
 Chrome on desktops has been able to sync personal data like passwords and online form fields for ages, but the features just landed in the Android version of the browser today.

Chrome 26 for Android (download) brings automatic form filling and password synchonrization to the mobile browser, as well as unnamed performance and stability fixes. The new version of the browser also repairs a problem where a blank page would be shown instead of loading the correct URL.

Some features that made it into the beta version of Chrome 26 for Android don't appear to be in today's stable release. These include server-accelerated browsing using a proxy, Google's SPDY technology, and rudimentary support for Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC).

Unlike many other browsers for Android, including Firefox, Dolphin, and Opera, Chrome is limited to running on Android 4.0 and above. If you've got Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean, you can install it.

In other related Chrome news, Google has released a Canary version of Chrome OS, which has existed for Chrome-the-browser for some time. Canary is analogous to Firefox's Nightly build -- it's highly experimental and unstable, and subject to near-daily changes.

Microsoft Outlook ready to run on Windows RT?

The RT version of Windows 8 lacks the popular Outlook e-mail client, but that may change in the coming months.

A fresh rumor out today holds that Microsoft Outlook is coming to Windows RT.

The popular e-mail application is conspicuously absent on Windows RT devices. That is, RT devices -- which run a limited version of Wind

Today there's word that Outlook has been seen running on Surface RT tablets.

And that's not all. SuperSite for Windows claims that an ARM-related firmware issue was causing Outlook to crash. Possibly offering at least one reason for its exclusion until now. 

ows 8 on the ARM chip platform -- come with Microsoft Office sans Outlook.

Adding Outlook certainly wouldn't hurt, said Craig Stice, an analyst at IHS iSuppli. "Consumers can find this frustrating. They think they're getting a Windows 8 system but there's no Outlook," he said. 

 "They don't know what they're getting into when they buy an RT device," he said. Consumers buy an RT device because it's less expensive than a full-blown Windows 8 system but miss the fact that it's incompatible with older "legacy" Windows software, Stice explained.

Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, whose ARM chip powers the Microsoft Surface RT tablet, said in no uncertain terms last month that Outlook is necessary for RT's success. "Outlook god, please," Huang said at that time, pleading for Microsoft to add Outlook.

(Note that RT products come preloaded with Word 2013 RT, Excel 2013 RT, PowerPoint 2013 RT and OneNote 2013 RT.) 

Adobe issues emergency update for Flash

 Adobe issued an emergency update to its Flash Player to fix two zero-day threats, the company announced yesterday. The updates affect all versions of Flash on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

The vulnerabilities currently are being exploited "in the wild," says Adobe's blog on the patches. According to the Kaspersky ThreatPost blog on the pair of zero-days, one attack targets "aerospace and other manufacturing companies" by tricking people into opening a Microsoft Word document with malicious Flash content embedded in it. The second zero-day targets Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X by tricking you into visiting Web sites hosting malicious Flash content, and it aims at Windows users by way of a Microsoft Word attachment delivered via e-mail.

Adobe listed on its blog the affected versions of Flash, and it recommended actions to take. Apple iOS is not affected, since it has never been compatible with Flash.

HP wants to help developers make apps faster

There's a new wave of application development tools on the market dubbed "agile" that aim to speed the delivery of applications and provide for a more collaborative environment. Today, HP took a big step toward making sure it is a relevant player in that market.

Agile software development is already used by up to one-third of development shops, according to Forrester, replacing the "waterfall" approach, which could take weeks or months to develop the software. In an agile world, code is written and deployed quickly, iterated on, market-tested and adjusted. That requires a whole new set of tools to manage these products.

Today, HP released two cloud-based agile application management tools -- HP Agile Manager to facilitate agile software development, and HP Performance Anywhere, which will help monitor and test applications post-launch.


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Agile Manager works in conjunction with HP's existing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, including Quality Center, and allows tasks to be assigned to individual developers while allowing code to be created, shared and edited.

One of the key tenants of an agile development model is that code should be created quickly and changed frequently. Performance Anywhere helps app owners know what changes need to be made after the app has been launched. Users create points of presence all around the world, either within their own WAN or on public cloud resources, which test how the application is running. If an error occurs, Performance Anywhere creates a flag, alerting the managers to the issue. Analytics tools even point to the potential cause of an issue -- be it an individual line of code, hardware issues, networking problems or any other variety of problems that could arise.

Both HP offerings are delivered as software as a service (SaaS), accessed through a Web portal. HP's Agile Manage is available today for $39 per user per month, with a three-month term. Performance Anywhere is not yet available, but is expected to cost $39 per application transaction per month plus $199 per server that runs the analytics software.