Camino—the Gecko-based browser with native Cocoa interface and more seamless Mac OS X integration—has finally landed an official 2.0 release. The browser uses a much newer version of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine (the same one used in Firefox) along with updated tabs and improved security features. However, Camino still lags Firefox in support for Web fonts and advanced HTML5 features like <video> and offline storage.

Camino 2.0 has a number of new features over the 1.x series, which has been mostly in maintenance mode for the last couple of years. Tabbed browsing has been significantly improved, with support for drag-and-drop tab rearranging—though you can’t move tabs to a different window or “tear” them off to create a new window. Command-click now defaults to opening link in new tabs instead of new windows—I always change the preference to this behavior, but it might encourage more people to try tabbed browsing if they haven’t already.

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At Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09), the Microsoft Surface team announced the broad availability of the Microsoft Surface Software Development Kit (SDK) Workstation Edition. It has actually been available on the Microsoft Download Center (144.2MB) since earlier this month, but only now has it been made official. Developers interested in the Microsoft Surface can now easily access the software at no cost. While the actual Microsoft Surface is of course required to deploy an application, and many are already using Surface Developer units to create and test their applications directly on the device, the SDK still lets you use a PC to develop, and a PC-based simulator to test, applications for the Microsoft Surface.

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.

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Google announced Wednesday that Google Earth for iPhone has been updated to version 2.0. Though the major version number has incremented, the update is rather minor except for a new ability to connect to your saved Google Maps and view them overlaid on its virtual globe.

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The blogosphere is buzzing with the news that Apple is already hard at work on Mac OS X 10.7, the logical successor to the recently released Snow Leopard. The “news” should really come as a surprise to no one, though, as Apple was likely already working on 10.7 even before 10.6 entered the developer beta stage.

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The JJ Abrams re-imagined Star Trek has finally been released in HD on iTunes, much to the excitement of Star Trek fans and non-fans everywhere. Both Paramount and Apple are touting exclusive content that is available only via iTunes Extras, the new collection of additional content that movie studios can now include with movies sold on the iTunes Store. However, most of the content isn’t all that “exclusive,” and it seems the physical disc releases offer a much better value.

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Sales of iPhones through the official Chinese carrier—China Unicom—might not be breaking any records, but app sales seem to be doing quite well. Developers so far estimate that nearly $1 million worth of apps have been sold in just a few weeks, even though there are numerous hurdles that impede the pushing of apps through the Chinese App Store.

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You might think that Cray, the company whose name has practically been synonymous with “supercomputer” three decades, would be a regular fixture at the top of the Top 500 Supercomputer List. But you’d be mistaken. Today’s first-place win by Cray marks the company’s debut in the top slot—at long last, after 34 lists, Cray won.

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Apple has big on a big gaming push lately, specifically when it comes to the iPhone and iPod touch. Even Nintendo is at least acknowledging that the iPhone is a market force, even if the company doesn’t believe they are direct competitors. However, a recent job posting for a “Game/Media Software Engineer” suggests Apple may be taking gaming seriously enough to create new first-party titles—a strategy that Nintendo and other companies use to provide an advantage for their respective platforms.

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Microsoft has made the Windows Marketplace for Mobile available on Windows Mobile 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6.1 phones, in addition to Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. This means that all users with devices running Windows Mobile 6.x can now access Marketplace from their phone. Download instructions for these users are available at Microsoft.com/WindowsMobile, or they can simply navigate to mp.windowsphone.com on their phone’s Web browser.

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