RIM May Have To Fight For BBX Operating System Name

RIM recently confirmed that the operating system, based on the QNX OS from the PlayBook, which will power the future of its BlackBerry lineup will be called BBX. The surprise had been ruined thanks to mention of the OS in a slide from an earlier QNX event, but it was still good to hear confirmed and learn of some of RIM's plans for system. The path to BBX might turn out to be a little more difficult than RIM was expecting, with news of some possible trademark issues arising.

The problem is, a company called BASIS International already has a product called BBx. Its BBx is a Java-based BASIC interpreter designed for business use – Business BASIC extended. If you're wondering who uses BASIC anymore, you won't be surprised to learn that BBx is a quite old product, and though it's still in production with newversions, BASIS International has been releasing it since 1985, getting a 26-year head start on RIM.

RIM seems to think this is no big deal, and that it won't take much to convince a judge that no one's going to confuse a programming tool with a smartphone OS, but even if BASIS can't win, it sure could make things difficult for RIM. So far, no legal action has been filed, and BASIS is waiting to see how RIM reacts to its demand to lose the name; it's given the company until the end of the month before it moves. 

Is Your Keyboard Disappearing Because of Background Agents?

After updating to Windows Phone 7.5, have you noticed the on-screen keyboard randomly collapsing itself as if you had pressed the back button? Some users (such as Branislav Hupka) believe that this is due to a specific line of code that may have made it into certain apps by accident. The code: "ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest" is used only for testing purposes and should not be included in the final release of your Mango-compatible app. A developer named Docteur G has posted the below video demonstrating how the keyboard disappears at exactly the time when a background agent starts to run. If you're noticing a lot of keyboard disappearing issues or miss-presses, try going to Settings > Applications > Background tasks and turning off the background agents for all of the apps you have installed. It may be that only certain background agents are causing the problem, so feel free to turn on one at a time to see if everything is okay.

This explanation certainly makes sense to me since I had been using Mango since June and haven't seen these issues until recently after installing apps with new background agents (since they didn't exist until recently). Hopefully 3rd party developers can easily fix this within their own apps and/or Microsoft can fix it in a quick update.

Swype Betas for Android Become a Whole Lot Easier to Update

If you been installing betas of Swype on your Android phone, you're well familiar with the update process. It's always been a big manual effort, with an installer app, having to log-in each time, and losing your settings. The good news is that's all becoming a thing of the past, thanks to the release of Swype Beta 3.26.

While you're stuck with the old installation process for this update, that will mark the last time you have to go through it all. Instead, future updates will come down through the app itself. You'll be notified when one's ready, and it will install while keeping all your old preferences.

That change alone should be reason enough to upgrade, but there are a few other changes arriving, as well. Now you can exclude language selections you won't be using, so that they don't continue to show up as options. On-screen key arrangement has been tweaked, and there are new characters being added to the selection of symbols. Finally, the appsettings screen and internal help function have been redesigned, with ease-of-use in mind. 

Microsoft Research is using Holographic Windows Phones

A lot of people think that what Apple is doing with capacitive touch screens and touch-based user interfaces is magical, but what if you could interact with a phone that was just a hologram? A team at Microsoft Research has put together a "Holodesk" which not only displays three dimensional holograms, but also lets you physically interact with them. It uses a Kinect sensor to see your hands or other physical objects within its view and models those objects in real time in order to calculate how they interact with the virtual holographic objects. Then there's another cameralooking at your face to see where you're eyes are so that it can adjust the perspective of the 3D holographic objects' display in order to compensate for your angle of view. Check out thevideo below and around the 2:40 mark you'll see the user interacting with a holographic Windows Phone.

Of course, I can't imagine you would cary around a holographic phone in the future, but you can see that Microsoft is well on their way to bringing some science-fiction to the real world.

Google Music MP3 Store To Let You Share Tracks With Friends?

Last week, we heard a rumor that Google wasn't content to live with Google Music as a storage-only solution for your MP3s, and was going to make anther stab at setting up an MP3 store of its own. This week, Andy Rubin confirmed the rumor, saying that the plan was to have the store up-and-running "soon". At the time, he teased that the service would have something special to it, distinguishing it from a simple iTunes knock-off, but didn't go into detail. Now, a new rumor may just nail-down what that feature is, suggesting that Google could allow users to share purchased tracks with friends.

Like that previous rumor, this one is sourced to an unnamed industry insider. Supposedly, under the terms of the licensing agreements Google is working out with the labels, you'll be able to send a copy of a track you just bought to friends. Those users would then have access to the song on a limited basis – whether that would be time-based or having it expire after a certain number of plays isn't yet clear.

This sounds like a fantastic arrangement for the record companies, and once they got past what we can only assume are their reservations towards giving anything away for free, they may have realized what a great advertising opportunity this system could be; how many times have you been introduced to an album you later purchased by having a friend play it for you?