As a huge fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, I'm overjoyed to pass on the news that GTA 5 has been announced by Rockstar Games! The surprise confirmation, made on Rockstar's Twitter feed, links to a teaser image on the developer's homepage. The image confirms that a trailer for the latest GTA will be available from November 2nd.

While the image itself doesn't seem to contain too many clues, it's worth noting that the typeface of the 'FIVE' text is lifted from a $5 bill. My expectation (shared with Jon and lots of other people, it seems) is that GTA V will take place in roughly the same setting as San Andreas (which covered fictional cities inspired by Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas). There is also some speculation that the 'new' number (moving to 'V' rather than continuing with 'IV') suggests a new engine might be used in the game.

What do you think? Where... and when... do you think the game will be set? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below. And if you're unfamiliar with GTA, you can still get the GTA IV screensaver here.

If you're into social media and tech, you can't have missed the news that Google has sort-of-launched a beta for its new social network, Google+.

Like Facebook, the system allows users to add friends and share updates, photos, videos and links. Unlike Facebook, Google+ also offers Hangouts (group video chat), Circles (a better way of grouping your contacts) and Sparks (a not very well integrated way of subscribing to topics).

Google+ was originally opened up to a select bunch of übergeeks, who in turn started to invite friends onto the service. Then Google closed the invites system. So now it seems you just have to wait....

...Or do you?

I tested this method found via a friend on Google+ and it worked. Firstly, you need to know someone who's already on Google+. Then, get them to create a new Circle - it doesn't matter what it's called. Next, have your friend add you to the Circle, which you can do by inserting an email address and then a name. Finally, send an update to that Circle, checking the 'Also email x people not yet using Google+' checkbox before sending the update.

If everything goes according to plan, you should get an email from Google+ that includes a link to view the new update. Clicking the link takes you to a page that allows you to join the service immediately.

Google is currently throttling the number of people who can join via this method. Therefore, it may not work all the time. But keep trying and you should get lucky soon.

If you don't know anyone who's already on Google+, leave a comment below and I'll do my best to invite you when Google relaxes invitation controls. I can't guarantee that everyone will get an invitation but I'll do what I can.

Last year, I finally switched my main browser from Firefox to Chrome. As I was already familiar with Chrome,  and because Chrome makes it easy to import bookmarks, settings and account info from other browsers, this switch was fairly easy. But I had one major problem: Location.

Living in Spain, but working and blogging in English, I'd rather not get Spanish Google results for every query. Once in a while, I find them useful. But on the whole, I need US market results which take me straight to English-language websites. Every single time I tried to switch to Google USA or Google NCR ('no country redirect'), Chrome would chuckle and send me to Google Spain. Without fail.

Fixing it is easy, but it took me a while to find the method that worked. If you're having a problem with non-English search results pages in Google Chrome, here's how to force Google to serve US English results instead. The instructions come courtesy of user 'eyeverve' on the Chrome support forums:

1. In Chrome, click the wrench icon. (upper-right)

2. Click 'Options' [This item is called 'Preferences' on Macs]

3. Under the 'Basic' tab, select 'Manage Search Engines' in the Search section

4. At the bottom of the list of search engines, you'll see three fields that allow you to add a new one. Add this info into the three fields in the correct order:

Name: Google US Search Keyword: google.com/ URL: http://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

(You should paste this link without any breaks or spaces)

5. Hit 'Enter' and your search engine should be saved. Finally, hover your mouse pointer over the newly added Google entry to see a button that reads 'Make default' - select this in order to change your default Google search.

Close the preferences tab and test your new Google search by typing a search term into the Omnibox (Chrome's address and search bar).

At long last, iOS 4.2 will be made available today for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Apart from bringing iOS 4 to the iPad (it's still stuck on 3.2 at the moment), this update also adds some fun new features to iPhone and iPod Touch. Here's a rundown of the key additions and changes in iOS 4.2.

iPad

• Multitasking now supported, allegedly not affecting battery life
• Folders added, letting users organize their apps
• Unified Inbox in the Mail app

iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

• AirPlay - stream media from your iThing to your Apple TV or AirPlay enabled speakers
• GameCenter - adds a social layer to gaming on iOS devices
• AirPrint - the incongruously popular/controversial printing solution
• Find my iThing - MobileMe subscribers can track down lost or stolen devices
• Various stability, functionality and security enhancements

Of course, Steve Jobs still doesn't want iOS device owners to use WiFi to sync their gadgets. Maybe that'll come in 5.0?

The popular P2P program which was finally shut down yesterday was a mine of pirated, illegal and malicious content.

LimeWire, the banned peer-to-peer file sharing application, was a pioneer in its field. Launched in May 2000, it enabled millions of users to download an unimaginable quantity of almost exclusively unlicensed content (I can't work it out but it's somewhere up there between an exabyte and a zettabyte). But few in the know are mourning its demise, even if it comes at the hands of the sometimes reviled RIAA.

LimeWire, you see, despite having the most complete feature set of any of the major Gnutella clients, was not a piece of software that engendered much love from software experts. Sure, it was hugely popular. But with network-specific software, popularity just breeds popularity: it is not a sign of real objective quality.

Apple's new FaceTime for Mac beta was one of the more popular announcements from yesterday's event. The only significant drawback with FaceTime for Mac is that it uses Address Book, your Mac's built-in contacts utility. This is OK if you also use Address Book. If, like me, you've studiously ignored it because you only ever use Gmail, however, then it's time to remedy that state of affairs.

It's really very easy to sync your Google Contacts with your Mac.

First, open Address Book.

Now open Preferences by hitting (⌘ ,) or selecting FaceTime and then Preferences from the menu bar.

Select Accounts and then check the Synchronize with Google checkbox.

We all love Facebook games, right? The dull machismo of Mafia Wars, bully-tips in Sorority Life and button-pushing-till-you-drop Farmville have rendered games consoles and high-end PCs dead, right?

Well, maybe not. But that doesn't mean that social gaming has to be annoying and rubbish. Facebook today announced some improvements to its gaming platform, basically aimed at getting more people to play Facebook games while simultaneously trying to irritate the rest of us less.

Over at the FB Developer blog, Jared Morgenstern said:

People who use Facebook either tend to tell us that they love playing games or hate them, and we haven’t had the right tools to enable developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user experience for non-gamers. We’re building more sophisticated tools that will allow us all to be more successful against those goals.

The improvements consist of recognizing who does and doesn't use games, targeting update info towards those who do, and finally grouping game invites under a new 'Games' section, rather than leaving them grouped with Application Requests.

Now, these changes don't sound huge. But anything that can make Facebook more fun but also less annoying has to be a good thing, right?

One of the innovations we expected to see from Google today was the introduction of Instant search. And Google hasn't disappointed us. You can already try Google Instant here.

The new interface, a marvel of modern engineering, was introduced in order to save users time. In the Instant FAQ, Google says:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

Google will be launching more new features for search this evening. To stay up to date with the search event live, check out Google's YouTube channel.

Firefox has been updated to version 3.6.9. The new version features various security fixes, the most important being the inclusion of support for an anti-clickjacking mechanism. From Mozilla:

Introduced support for the X-FRAME-OPTIONS HTTP response header. Site owners can use this to mitigate clickjacking attacks by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites. Fixed several security issues.

For users still running the 3.5 family of the browser, update 3.5.12 was released, with various security updates but not the X-FRAME-OPTIONS fix.

Your Firefox should detect and download the updated version automatically. Alternatively, grab the latest edition from Softonic here.

Oh, and don't forget to update Flash player while you're at it!

Yesterday, I deleted my Facebook profile. Assuming I don't relent within the next two weeks, it will then disappear, entirely. Forever. Upon announcing these glad tidings to James (he sits next to me) and on Twitter, the general response I got was "Why would you do that?".

It's true, removing oneself  from a network as huge and overarching as Facebook may at first look a little extreme. Perhaps even a tad sociopathic. But it needn't be that way. Just because I've stopped using Facebook, that doesn't mean I'm planning to relocate to the mountains and await the Mayan apocalypse in wide-eyed solitude.

There are plenty of reasons why deleting your Facebook profile might be a good idea. Here are five that convinced me:

1 - Getting Things Done

It's not like I was so hooked on Facebook that I never got anything else done. But Facebook is carefully designed so that it becomes practically the only website you ever use. And what that means is that sending a quick message to a friend via Facebook inevitably results in looking at photos of a colleague's summer holiday or getting involved in some water-cooler style discussion about the political issue of the day. Facebook's time consuming, distracting and doesn't really add any value to my life. I'll get more done without it.

Further rumors have appeared that seem to confirm beyond any doubt that Google is planning to launch a social network service to rival Facebook. In these latest stories, Google is reported to be in talks with various games developers, including Disney's Playdom and Zynga (a company in which Google has recently invested a large amount of money).

This news follows previous claims that Google is definitely working on a social network service to be called Google Me. Google hasn't exactly experienced huge success in the social realm thus far. It purchased Brazilian giant, Orkut in 2008 and has presided over a gentle slide in that network's traffic (Orkut remains #1 in Brazil, but Facebook is making inroads). The Socialstream project never came to much. Buzz and Wave haven't proven to be game changers and despite the company's great successes in other areas, like mobile OS Android, you get the feeling that its social networking efforts have been almost entirely unfocused.

But put a few of Google's more recent search tweaks may prove that the firm's involved in some pretty serious research. Recently, Google Profiles started to show up more in search results. Sharing items and subscribing to users' feeds has improved in Reader (after multiple tweaks) and last month Google even let users customize the classic front page of their search engine (a common criticism of Facebook is its lack of customization options).

Of course, this could all  just be pointing to Google launching something altogether easier and cheaper. A social games platform would fit that bill. But I reckon the clues point to a more unified alternative to Facebook that combines social games, Profiles, Buzz, Reader, Gmail, Wave, Docs and everything else into one central social hub.

Google seems to be testing a radically changed image search user interface. Reports on various websites say that it might have been around for up to a week... and that it looks a bit like Bing. I just got the new interface this afternoon. And I don't use Bing.

The new look page focuses entirely on images, removing all the additional data which was previously displayed under each result. That data isn't gone completely, though. It now displays when you mouseover an image. The page also automatically loads more results as you scroll, kind of like a Twitter app that loads older messages the further down you go. In all, it's an attractive new way of presenting image search results.

Clicking an image is a different matter, though. This action now loads the source website in an iframe, with a slightly opaque layer on top of it, and the image highlighted and expanded. There's also a section to the right of the page containing the relevant image's info. Clicking anywhere in the main part of this page forces the image source page to load. This part of the new UI experience is less positive - it feels like the user is expected to know how it works bef0ore using it.

Expect this interface to continue to evolve as Google continues its tests. The second-step page, which displays the image in its original location, is in particular need of work.

Before you jump straight to the comments section, yes I'm aware that Firefox 4 beta doesn't have to be compatible with pre-existing add-ons. The idea of my experiment was to see how much Firefox's new add-ons center changes the way browser extensions work. The answer is: a lot!

Hacking Firefox to make it run addons designed to run in previous versions of the browser is hardly an advanced job. Just add a couple of Boolean values to the advanced preferences and you can tell Minefield (the best name for a beta program ever!), not to check add-on compatibility. Generally, this can force compatibility when the version change is minor (e.g. 3.5 to 3.6). It doesn't usually work for most add-ons across major version updates.

And 4.0 is no exception! After telling Minefield (4.0b2Pre) to accept all my 3.6 add-ons and restarting, the extensions all appeared to  have loaded satisfactorily. FoxyTunes, Alexa, Google Wave, Tumblr Post, Firebug and Echofon all appear in the status bar where I'd expect to see them. But none of them do anything. Nor does Greasemonkey. In fact, except for the built-in extensions, the only add-on currently seems to function is the classic Tab Mix Plus.

So for those of you asking the question: 'how do I force an add-on to be compatible with Firefox 4.0?', the answer is: You can't. Be patient, Firefox 4 will be released soon and your favorite add-ons will be updated in no time.

Picture the scene: you go to your local supermarket and buy ten items. As the items are scanned by the shop assistant, each one is logged in a computer database. When you complete your purchase and leave the store, a record of what you bought remains. Although, it's not actually a record of what you bought at all. It's a record of what somebody bought.

Next week, you go back to the same store and buy 25 items. Three of these items match three items from last week's visit. Now the computer knows that you're likely to buy these three items together. Except that it doesn't know that: all it knows is that someone might like to buy these three items together.

That same computer receives similar purchase reports from the supermarket chain's 1,000 stores. Each store serves - say - a thousand shopping visits a day. So each week, one computer receives anonymous market reports on 7 million shopping visits. That data is vital to the supermarket for planning supply and for optimizing its service.

Very few people complain about stores collating this kind of data, and for good reason. The data is anonymous (assuming you eschew loyalty cards). So the focus of collecting this data must be understanding customers' shopping habits. Not you, singular, but you plural.

If you're anything like the Softonic team, you'll have a Google Reader account packed with important, interesting and at times esoteric RSS feeds that you like to stay up to date on. And given that you've got so many feeds, you like to be able to organize them with folders and tags. And given that up until now, folders and tags have been uneditable, you've been forced to resort to very useful guides like this in order to 'rename' folders.

Well, those days are over. At long, long last, Google has added a rename feature for folders and - yes - for tags. At last.

The feature is easy to use: simply select a folder, click the Folder settings menu and select Rename folder. A small dialog box will pop up where you can enter a new folder name. Alternatively, just access this settings page to see all your folders and tags.

And in case you're wondering, renaming a folder or tag with a name that already exists will merge the two tags/folders in question. Which is also really cool.

Thanks, Google! But don't take so long next time.

[Via: Google Reader blog]