Light Table for iPhone released

Lingon iKorg Software Creations has released Light Table for the iPhone and iPod touch. It's available for download from the App Store for $0.99.

Light Table helps you make collages of your photographs. It lets you import photos from your photo library, drag them around and rotate them until they fit. You can save a screenshot of your compilation once you've got them arranged how you like.

You can manipulate photos in Light Table by pinching them, rotating and zooming in and out using the multi-touch interface. It's designed for photographers, designers and other creatives who might want to lay out catalogs and other photo collections.

Light Table works with iPhones and iPod touches updated with iPhone 2.0 software or later.

Western Digital Reports Earning Triples in 1Q

Western Digital Corp., which makes hard drives for computers and digital video recorders, said Thursday that profit in its first fiscal quarter tripled over the same period last year, when the results were weighed down by big charges.

Shares of Western Digital fell 72 cents, or 5.2 percent, to $13.05 in regular trading. In extended trading after the financial results were released, the shares jumped $1.51, or 11.6 percent, to $14.56.

The company said it earned $211 million, or 93 cents per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 26.

Analysts were expecting the company to earn 81 cents per share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

In the same quarter last year, the company earned $69 million, or 31 cents per share, including $109 million in charges tied to taxes and an acquisition.

Revenue in the most recent quarter rose 19 percent to $2.11 billion from $1.77 billion a year ago, and unit shipments rose 34 percent.

Analysts were expecting sales of $2.07 billion.

Asustek Unveil's New Mini Laptop

Taiwan's Asustek Computer on Tuesday added a new member to its low-price "Eee PC" mini laptop family after achieving what the company said is a great success in the market.

Asustek's selling point for the slim "Eee PC," is its portability -- the computer weighs only a kilogramme (2.2 pounds) and 1.8 centimetres thick.

"This is the combination of an innovative industrial and arts design," Asustek chief executive officer Jerry Shen told reporters.

The new Eee PC S101, which is expected to hit the shelves later this month at a cost of 699 US dollars, comes with a choice of operating systems between Microsoft Windows or GNU Linux.

It is equipped with a 10.2-inch display, is powered by a battery with a lifespan of up to five hours and is less susceptible to shock damage, the company said. It has 1GB of memory and 30GB of storage.

The company has sold about four million Eee PC units since they were launched in October last year.

Mono 2.0 lets .Net apps run on Linux

Mono 2.0, an open-source runtime enabling .Net-based applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix, is being released Monday, featuring capabilities for a number of .Net technologies.

Considered a major upgrade, the open source Mono 2.0 runtime leverages Microsoft's .Net Framework 2.0 programming model. With Mono, developers can build desktop and server applications using Microsoft-based environments and deploy them across multiple platforms, including Windows. Novell is leading the Mono effort.

"The existing apps you build on Windows, you can now run those applications on Linux or MacOS 10. Different people have different reasons for doing so," such as platform consolidation, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell and Mono project maintainer.

Mono 2.0 supports the C# 3.0 language and LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for querying of data across databases, objects, and XML content, de Icaza said. Also, users can move over server applications built for .Net and client applications built with Windows Forms.

Version 2.0 of Mono, however, lacks support for key .Net 3.0 and .Net 3.5 APIs, specifically Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Presentation Foundation. These are not currently supported because they were not amongst the most requested technologies sought by early users of Mono, de Icaza said.

Also featured in Mono 2.0 is MoMA (Mono Migration Analyzer), a tool to assess the readiness of Linux environments for migration of .Net applications.