At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Steve Ballmer announced Microsoft would ship the Kinect for Windows on February 1st. The company has delivered on its promise and on Wednesday, version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime were made available for download. The software giant’s distribution partners across the globe have also begun to ship Kinect for Windows hardware. The device will retail for $249, with a special discounted academic price of $149 for “Qualified Educational ...

Windows developers around the world had cause for excitement Thursday afternoon as Microsoft finally released a beta version of its Kinect for Windows software development kit. As the name might imply, this new SDK will allow developers to build Windows software that makes use of Microsoft’s popular motion-based controller as a peripheral. The SDK obviously opens the door for Kinect-controlled Windows PC games, but we’re sure Windows developers will find plenty of creative ways to make use of the ...

The brood over at PreCentral have managed to acquire a leaked copy of HP’s webOS 3.0 beta 1 software development kit (SDK). Why is this a good thing? Because contained within said SDK rests a TouchPad, webOS 3.0 emulator, of course. While emulators only provide 50% of the TouchPad story — the other half being hardware — it is useful to get a high-level overview of what user interface will look like. If you want to whet your appetite for this summers TouchPad release, hit the jump. There’s an...

Adobe on Monday unveiled the latest version of its Creative Suite software, version 5.5, which includes a new SDK for building smartphone and tablet applications that can interact with its famous Photoshop desktop software. To showcase some of the possibilities brought about by its new SDK, Adobe also introduced three new apps for Apple’s iPad. Adobe Eazel is a finger painting app with enhanced controls and nifty multitouch support, and creations can be stored locally or beamed over Wi-Fi to Photoshop C...

During its webOS CONNECT event in London on Wednesday, HP announced that webOS 3.0 beta is now available for developers taking part in its Early Access program. The SDK includes full support for HP’s new Enyo apps framework, which offers hardware acceleration, browser-based development, better performance, support for HTML 5 standards, and more. PreCentral says the Early Access program should be relatively easy to get into, provided that you’re actually a webOS developer. The webOS 3.0 operating ...

Research In Motion on Wednesday announced a new version of its on-device software store for BlackBerry smartphones, BlackBerry App World. Version 2.1 brings several changes to RIM’s app store — the most notable of which is the introduction of an in-app payment mechanism. BlackBerry app developers will now be able to offer digital and virtual goods to users from within their apps, and payments will be taken and processed by RIM’s new payment service. A related SDK has been released to develop...

Back in July, Google introduced its App Inventor; a dead-simple, drag and drop application creator for the Android operating system. In a press release today, the company announced that due to an “overwhelming” amount of interest it is launching the application as a beta service, available to all those who have a Google account. “We are so impressed with the great things people have done with App Inventor, we want to allow more people the opportunity to do great things,” writes Google....

Over the past 24-hours, electronic archeologists — of sorts — have been sifting through the Android 2.3 SDK looking for little nuggets of information that could indicate future features destined to drop on Google’s mobile OS. It hasn’t taken the software sleuths very long, as they have found several interesting artifacts under the SDK’s hood: video chat icons and API calls for a PlayStation-like controller.The presence video chat icons are pretty self explanatory. We don’t...

When it rains it pours in Android-land! Earlier this morning, Google published an Android 2.3 video for developers. While the video focuses mainly on development, the developer website includes new APIs available in the new code, including: SIP-based VoIP support, NFC (Near Field Communication) support, support for gyroscope, rotation vector, linear acceleration, gravity, and barometer, and multiple camera support. Other improvements include UI refinements, faster keyboard input, better power management, and...

If you have been waiting to see what a 3rd party developer has in store for RIM’s upcoming Playbook tablet launch, this is the first significant video demo we have found — and it looks great. From Universal Mind, they write on their blog about the development experience:It was entirely built using Adobe Flash Builder and the BlackBerry SDK. The workflow allowed us to deploy a working tablet application in days with full touch and gesture interactions that you would expect in a tablet device.The f...

If you’re anxious to see just what the new, QNX-based operating system on the BlackBerry Playbook is going to look like, listen up. The company has just released the Playbook OS simulator — along with the Adobe Air SDK — for both Mac OS X and Windows on its developer site. The simulator does not reveal any juicy secrets hiding in the PlayBook’s OS, and, for the most part, is pretty basic. Still, if you’re jazzed about the PB, and want to do a little spelunking around RIM’...

If you’re an iPhone 3GS owner, and feel shafted by your phone’s inability to take HDR photos, there still may be hope. 9to5Mac is reporting that resources in the latest iteration of the Apple’s iPhone SDK may indicate that support could be coming to the aging 3GS. The blog writes:The iPhone 3GS is the only iPhone that is physically (hardware capabilities) able to capture HDR shots so we figure that non-Retina icon is for the 3GS not the original or 3G model. How do we know the other icon is...

Finally! Palm has announced that they will begin to roll out the webOS 2.0 SDK — in a limited capacity — to developers starting today. The company isn’t talking about what webOS 2.0 will bring to consumers, but they are touting some of the major overhauls and additions that developers can look forward to. Some of those improvements include:Exhibition for Touchstone– Exhibition will allow developers to code their applications to perform custom actions when your webOS device is plugged ...

Do Android developers outnumber iPhone developers? If you believe this survey of 401 mobile developers than yes, yes they do. Vision Mobile, a “market analysis and strategy firm delivering market know-how to the mobile industry,” have a poll that indicates that more mobile application developers have experience with Google’s Android platform than with any other mobile platform, including Apple’s iOS. Developers polled cited: large market penetration, speed of development, potential to...