Microsoft has released a consumer preview for Office 2013. Highlighting the age-old internal tug-of-war between the Office and Windows divisions within Microsoft, it's just a desktop application, no Metro, and the only nod to that whole touch/tablet-thing is a special mode that does very little. So, Windows 8 is just around the corner, and still not a single serious Metro application. Not even Microsoft's own flagship suite - heck, not even a single application within that suite - could be adapted to Metro in time. Serious vote of confidence from the Office division there.

"We have been keeping a little secret.... The kind that is so much fun to share when the time comes. Today we announce XBMC for Android. Not a remote, not a thin client; the real deal. No root or jailbreak required. XBMC can be launched as an application on your set-top-box, tablet, phone, or wherever else Android may be found." So, this just made Google TV useful, right?

"The nation's top patent court has stopped a lower court from throwing out four patents on financial software, used to sue a bank dealing in foreign currency exchanges. The controversial opinion, countered by a blistering dissent by one member of the three-judge panel, shows that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is in disarray about just what is patentable. An 'abstract idea' can't win a patent, but the judges on the court are in disagreement about just what that is." It seems that US judges are getting more and more vocal about the US Patent Mess. Interesting.

A fascinating difference in smartphone buying behaviour got highlighted today. In the US, Apple has double the market share of its nearest competitor, Samsung. However, in The Netherlands, the swamp I call home, the situation is completely reversed; Apple sits at 10% of the smartphone market, Samsung at 19.6%. Is this indicative of Europe as a whole? Could German, French, Polish, British, Spanish, Italian, etc. readers give local information from their own countries? I'm intrigued.

"It's never good to scare away your customers. It's even worse if you don't realize you're doing it. That was me. Like most folks in the developer community, it's been years since I last used Internet Explorer as my daily browser. Oh sure, we all keep copies around for web development work, but Firefox, Chrome, and Safari now rule the web roost. Unfortunately, that was not the case with the Blurity userbase." Wise lesson from Jeff Keacher.

"If we then use comScore's figure for total smartphone users (110 million) then the data would suggest that there are 330k Lumias in use in the US. This would have been accumulated over a sales period of about four months." Ouch. For a phone with such a huge marketing push, this is quite painful.

Good news for Raspberry Pi owners (ha!): the RISC OS port is progressing along nicely. So much so, in fact, that a Raspberry Pi-based RISC OS machine is in the works. Stable beta release of RISC OS for the Pi planned for September!

Gartner has its figures for PC sales. Worldwide, Asus and Lenovo seeing lots of growth, Dell and HP losing lots of sales, Apple doesn't register in the top 5. Overall, the market remained flat. If you take a narrow view of the world and only focus on the US, things look different. In the US, everybody loses, and only Apple sees minor growth. All this excludes tablet sales, but considering people are hammering on and on and on about how it's a post-PC device, I think it makes sense to exclude it. You can't have your cake, and eat it too. Then again, who cares.

Ars Technica is reporting that certain 64bit Mac models won't be able to run Mountain Lion. The problem is the graphic card drivers; these are still 32bit, and Apple is unwilling to update them to 64bit. A 64bit kernel can't load 32bit drivers, so that's that. Apple has a list of supported models on their Mountain Lion upgrade page, so you can easily check if your computer is capable of running Mountain Lion.

"If you're eagerly awaiting Microsoft's Windows 8 Metro interface, due in late October, then you might be interested in obtaining it a little earlier for an iPhone or iPod Touch. Metroon, a Dreamboard theme for jailbroken iOS devices, does just that - providing a near-perfect replica of Microsoft's Metro interface." Up until 4-5 years ago, one of the most popular skinning activities was to make Windows look like Mac OS X. These days, people are putting loads of effort into bringing Metro to iOS (or Android). Subtle, but telling, shift. A few weeks ago, I upgraded my dad's iMac to Lion. His first response when opening the Address Book: "god that's tacky. Yuck!" The sooner this anachronistic skeuomorphism dies, the better.

Andrew Binstock interviews Alan Kay, and there are just so many fantastic quotes and insights in there I have no idea what to pick as the OSNews item. This one? "Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future - it's living in the present," Kay argues, "I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where - and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." What about this gem? "I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages." Or, my personal favourite: "My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults." Read this. Now. That's an order.

"Conventional wisdom suggests that, just like Gingerbread in 2010 and ICS in 2011, the next version of Android could make an appearance sometime in the fourth quarter of 2012. But the current state of the Android ecosystem indicates that this might not be the best course of action for Google, its OEMs or their customers. In this article, we'll take a brief look at why Google should stick with Android 4.1 until 2013, and push Android forward with hardware, not software later in the year." Fully agreed. Give the ecosystem some time to catch its breath. I mean, it's not as if the competition has anything groundbreaking up its sleeve - iOS and Android are so close these days.

I've been flashing CyanogenMod 9 nightlies for months now, and the process to do so has become pretty much muscle memory at this point (if cwm ever changes its menu order I'm screwed). One step of this process has always fascinated me simply because I have no idea what exactly it does and why I have to do it: clearing Dalvik cache.