rendering

Tools for creating PDF documents tend to fall somewhere between do-it-all packages with big names (and price tags to match) and freeware stripped down to the basics. But simple is good, which is why PDF tools that install themselves as print drivers may be our favorite of all. That's how PDFCreator from Pdforge works, though that's not all it does.

PDFCreator's optional server installation mode can act as a network printer, but we chose the standard installation, which includes some optional downloads such as Images2PDF and PDFArchitect, plus some sample files and our choice of language and … Read more

Apple took lots of flack for the design of the iPhone 5. The company's decision to go taller instead of wider even spawned a meme or two. Would the company -- quite literally -- take that design to the next level?

The latest rumor says Apple is, in fact, eyeing an even larger screen for the iPhone, one that's close to 5-inches in size, up big from the current 4-inch model.

Despite an earlier report today saying such a device wouldn't see the light of day until 2014, Russian Apple news site Apple Digger has lovingly put together … Read more

If your Twitter feed suddenly looks a bit squirrely, it's not your eyes or computer.

The microblogging site announced on its support account that engineers are working to solve rendering issues.

Although Twitter referred to the situation as "intermittent problems," the issue appears to be pretty persistent; a hard reload sometimes succeeds at summoning a normal-looking page.

We are experiencing intermittent problems with twitter.com rendering properly. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

CNET has contacted Twitter for more information about the issue and will update this report when we … Read more

Safari has been Apple's Web browser for many years, and the company keeps making improvements to it at regular intervals. Originally designed to be a Web browser with the Mac OS look and feel, Safari has been part of the Apple family a long time. Apple support isn't the only reason to use it, though; it has other strengths.

With the latest releases, you can do many tasks that used to require multiple apps or a lot of keystrokes. For example, you can send a tweet or post content to Facebook from within Safari. If you visit a … Read more

Previously showcased as the ZTE Orbit during this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the ZTE Render is a Windows Phone 7.5 Tango handset available from U.S. Cellular.

The phone sports a 4-inch WVGA display, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, and 4GB of onboard memory.

It's also powered by a 1,600mAh lithium ion battery and a 1GHz processor.

In addition, as a Windows Phone device, the Render features Xbox Live, Zune music and video portals, Microsoft Office, and 7GB of SkyDrive cloud computing storage.

Interested users can nab the device for $80, after … Read more

Kickstarter has been barraged by questions regarding its responsibility to people who fund projects on its platform, and today it addressed many of these concerns.

The crowd-sourced funding platform announced that project creators must now address the risks and challenges of their projects, can no longer use renderings of their proposals, and cannot give mass quantities of their finished products to funders.

"It's hard to know how many people feel like they're shopping at a store when they're backing projects on Kickstarter, but we want to make sure that it's no one," the company'… Read more

Twitter announced today that its Web site is getting new enhancements geared toward being "optimized for speed." Besides getting rid of the hashbang (#!) in URLs, the social network is also focusing on reducing the "time to first Tweet" and ensuring only what's necessary will load with each Web page.

"To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server," Twitter engineering manager Dan Webb wrote in a blog post. "This has allowed us to drop … Read more

Google is preparing some important changes to Chrome's browsing behavior, with predictive powers and better download scanning protocol landing in the latest beta update.

Released today, Google Chrome 17 beta for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame.

Of the multiple improvements and fixes noted in Google's Chrome 17 beta changelog, these two have the potential to affect users the most. The change in security behavior expands Chrome's safe browsing technology to scan not only Web sites visited, but downloads as well. It will analyze installation files downloaded with the browser, starting with Windows-based EXE and MSI. Google … Read more

Real or not? That's the question we always ask when we see design schematics, drawings, or mockups of upcoming cases for upcoming Apple products. But in the past, a few of those schematics have proved to be reliable previews of the design of next iPhone or iPad.

In this instance, the source of the alleged CAD drawing for a new case design for the iPhone 5 comes from a U.K. blog, Mobile Fun, which says a Chinese case manufacturer passed it on. Then Mobile Fun separately received a mockup (below) from another case manufacturer.