I've been ragging on GNOME a little bit lately, so let's balance things out by talking about something I found quite fascinating: the Gtk+ HTML back-end. This will enable you to run any Gtk+-application inside Firefox 4.0 (only Firefox 4.0 is supported at the moment).

The past few days have seen a stink regarding web applications on iOS. El Reg ran a story about how web applications launched from iOS' homescreen ran significantly slower than when ran inside mobile Safari. As more details emerged, it became clear this wasn't a deliberate move by Apple - but rather an implementation issue.

Switzerland has the highest percentage of Mac users than any other with a 17.61% share. Luxembourg comes in second with a 15.79% share while the US occupies the third slot with a 15.36% share. Countries that just missed the top 10 include the UK, Japan, and France. Interestingly, Nordic countries seem to love their Macs as all five of them (Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) all made the top 20.

From the release announcement: "Almost a year ago we started building a set of Mono bindings for building native MacOS X applications. Our original goals were modest: bind enough of AppKit that you could build native desktop applications for OSX using C# or your favorite .NET language. We leveraged a lot of the code that we built for MonoTouch our binding to the CocoaTouch APIs."

Half the notebook computers and a growing number of desktops shipped in 2011 will run on graphics-enabled microprocessors as designers Intel and AMD increase competition for the units that raise multimedia speeds without add-ons. Processors with built-in graphics capabilities will be installed this year on 115 million notebooks, half of total shipments, and 63 million desktop PCs, or 45 percent of the total, according to analysts.

Writing about Debian is not a simple thing. You know it's the giant that has spawned pretty much every other distro out there. It's almost like a Roman Empire, almost a taboo. Furthermore, it's not a desktop distro per se. It's more sort of a template you use to build your platform. It's also a SOHO server distro, therefore it more fits into the business category, comparable to CentOS and similar.

"At Google we're constantly trying to make the web faster - not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we've been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages."

And so Sony's crusade against Playstation 3 hacker George "Geohot" Hotz continues. After Sony getting all of Geohot's computers and access to server logs and personal details from many of his websites and social media accounts, Sony has now been given access to Geohot's PayPal account, and all information within it - including of the people he has had financial dealings with.

InfoWorld's JR Raphael provides an in-depth comparison of Android productivity suites, including DataViz's Documents to Go, MobiSystems' OfficeSuite Pro, Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite, ThinkFree Office Mobile, and the Google Docs mobile Web app. Each tool is vetted for word processing, spreadsheet editing, and presentation management. Raphael also examines additional tools for accomplishing other basic office tasks, such as dealing with PDFs and Photoshop files, piecing together the best overall package for your Android smartphone at work.

When Microsoft and Nokia announced Nokia's move to Windows Phone 7, most people assumed the worst for Nokia's stewardship of the open source Qt, and indeed the company quickly sold its Qt licensing interests to Digia. But it looks like the company still has plans for Qt - and for the Symbian OS. Aaron Seigo, a Qt hacker employed by Nokia, told blogger Brian Proffitt that "Nokia is predicting over 150 million Symbian devices still to come" and "I think they've underestimated the longevity of Symbian".

Carlos Garnacho shows how you can use CSS to style GTK+ apps. There are four other articles in English and Spanish in the new edition of GNOME Journal, including an interview with GNOME cofounder Federico Mena Quintero. He answers the question, "what is GNOME badly missing?"

Linux 2.6.38 has been released. This release includes support for a automatic process grouping ("the patch that does wonders" ), significant scalability improvements in the VFS, Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots, support for the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol (which helps to provide network connectivity in the presence of natural disasters, military conflicts or Internet censorship), transparent Huge Page support (without using hugetblfs), support for the AMD Fusion APUs, many drivers and other changes. You can read the full changelog as well.

Two bits of news from Palm: first, the TouchPad will launch in June. Second, webOS for PCs will see its first beta at the end of the year, and will run... Inside a browser. This means we now have an idea of what Palm wants - no dual boot, but something that runs inside Windows. My guess is that webOS applications will eventually just run inside Windows like everything else.

"A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through 'three strikes' Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is 'better described as a global pricing problem'. And the only way to solve it is by changing the price."