Obama at dinner with Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg

A photo released by the White House on Friday shows Apple CEO Steve Jobs, along with other tech luminaries, raising a toast with President Barack Obama at a dinner Thursday night in San Francisco.

The photo, of a private dinner during the President's visit to California, comes as tabloid reports, some featuring alleged photos of Jobs, have questioned the Apple leader's health.

In the photo, Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flank Obama during the toast. Wearing his trademark black mock turtleneck shirt, Jobs is photographed from behind.

Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. He took a six-month leave of absence in 2009, during which he was reported to have had a liver transplant.

He began an indefinite medical leave of absence on January 17.

This week, a supermarket tabloid and a gossip website ran unconfirmed reports suggesting that his health was declining.

Neither Apple nor Jobs, or anyone directly familiar with his health care, have commented publicly on the reason for his leave or the most recent rumors.

Jobs had kept a low profile since unveiling a new line of MacBook laptops in October.

Obama's meeting with the tech luminaries was intended to discuss innovation and spurring job growth.

Also worth noting: Zuckerberg appears to have shed his go-to hooded sweatshirt look for his dinner with the leader of the free world.

Others attending the dinner included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Also, Stanford University President John Hennessy, Genentech CEO Art Levinson, Steve Westly, founder of The Westly Group and John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Microsoft Kinect to PC apps

Software developers will be able to tap into the Kinect gaming system thanks to an application builder that Microsoft plans to release this spring, the company announced Monday.

With this new development kit, Microsoft is hoping its innovative, controller-free camera system will woo more developers to Windows. Many developers have shifted their focus from desktops toward mobile platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

Unlike current Kinect games, which can be played only on an Xbox 360 game console, these apps would run on Windows computers connected to the device.

Enterprising app makers hoping to get in early on some kind of Kinect app gold rush will have to wait, however.

This first version, slated to release by late June, is being offered only to volunteers willing to give their programs away for free. Microsoft has a name for this target audience: "enthusiasts and academic researchers."

Microsoft says it plans to release a version later for people who want to sell their apps but declined to provide a time frame. Company spokespeople also declined to make executives available for interviews.

Developers have been attracted to the Kinect technology because unlike normal webcams, Microsoft's gadget has a depth sensor, making it more useful as a controller.

Shortly after the Kinect's debut in November, developers quickly hacked the device to create unusual demonstrations of its power. Developers have created body-controlled versions of "Super Mario Bros.," a realistic "Star Wars" light saber simulator and an app that turns your digital reflection into a ghost.

Consumers have taken to Kinect as well. Microsoft sold 8 million units in its first two months on the market, which coincided with the crucial holiday shopping season.

At first, Microsoft was hot and cold about the swelling community of Kinect hackers. At the same time some spokespeople were discouraging tampering, executives were expressing excitement about bringing Kinect to computers.

With an official development kit, engineers will be able to build standardized apps that can be distributed and run more easily than unofficial ones. Currently, someone would have to hook up a Kinect unit to a PC and run code to unlock the device before being able to play hacked games.

Microsoft's research arm held an event Monday to discuss recent initiatives including Kinect development, a company spokesman said.

These apps will apply to Kinect units running on Windows PCs and won't work on Xbox 360 systems, the spokesman said. Console makers, including Microsoft, work out royalty deals with game developers that want to build on their platforms.

But Microsoft has used its popular camera-powered device to bridge gaps between the company's various platforms. CEO Steve Ballmer's "one more thing" during a recent presentation described an initiative to make Kinect and Windows Phone devices interoperable.

Google offers a Web-app boost

Google has passed a significant milestone with the release of its first version of Native Client, a software foundation designed to let Web-based applications tap into a person's computer chip.

The software, called Arctic Sea, is available built into Chrome 10, which entered beta testing yesterday. "A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications," product manager Christian Stefansen said of the Native Client release in a blog post today.

Native Client--NaCl for short--is an unusual approach to the challenge of letting people download software over the Web. Web applications today often use JavaScript, an increasingly powerful language but one that still limits a program's performance compared with those running natively on a computer--Skype or Photoshop, for example.

Google's NaCl project lets such native software be downloaded directly from a Web server but includes specific security mechanisms to keep out malicious code. Native Client modules must be written with specially modified tools to restrict use of potentially harmful instructions, and the browser examines the software in advance to ensure it executes only the safe operations. NaCl also confines software to a "sandbox" with limited privileges.

Native Client could let code libraries written in the C programming language be relatively easily adapted for browser-based applications. That could make it easier, for example, to build into Web applications the codecs Skype uses for compressing and decompressing video and audio or for the processor-intensive tasks used in Photoshop's image processing. One company that's committed to Native Client is Unity 3D, whose video-game engine can use NaCl for things like simulating physics.

Why is that important? Because Google is a huge believer in cloud computing, in which the state of an application is stored on a central server on the Internet and a browser acts as a vessel to run it. With Native Client, Google thinks it can get to within just a few percentage points of the performance of ordinary native applications, removing a major impediment to the cloud-computing technology.

That is, as long as Google can convince the rest of the world to adopt it. Fortunately for Google, it's got Chrome as a vehicle to deliver such technology into people's hands--and with more than 10 percent of people on the Net using Chrome, Google has a real foothold. With Native Client, Chrome OS could become significantly more capable, too, and with a variation called PNaCl still in the works, it works on the ARM processors that power virtually all smartphones today. Today Native Client works only on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors.

A major part of Google's recent NaCl work has been rebuilding it to use a new browser plug-in interface called Pepper, or PPAPI. (NaCl is the chemical abbreviation for sodium chloride--table salt--and is paired with Pepper. Get it?) With this release and Chrome 10, NaCl now uses Pepper.

Native Client remains turned off by default for now, since its own interface isn't quite finished, but it can be enabled through Chrome's about:flags mechanism.

One reason Google is pitching NaCl to developers is that it's finished some security work that had been incomplete. An outer sandbox, not just an inner one, is working for additional protection. And an auto-update mechanism lets Google more quickly replace a version if it's found to have a security problem, the company said.

How far NaCl will spread beyond Chrome remains to be seen. But to be truly useful, it needs programmers writing code.

That's quite possible, of course. One indicator of interest came in a draft Firefox road map for 2011. Regarding Native Client support, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's outgoing director of Firefox, had this to say: "Some vendor push here, mostly from Adobe."

Google still has some convincing to do. "I don't think Native Client is going to be a very big deal, but Google does, so we'll see how that plays out," Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said in a 2010 interview.

And to use NaCl, browsers need a design that isolates plug-ins into separate memory compartments. "We aim to support multiple browsers. However, a number of features that we consider requirements for a production-quality system are difficult to implement without help from the browser. Specific examples are an out-of-process plug-in architecture and appropriate interfaces for integrated 3D graphics. We have worked closely with Chromium developers to deliver these features and we would be eager to collaborate with developers from other browsers," Google said on a NaCl FAQ

Native Client has support now for computing, audio, and 2D graphics. In addition, Google reworked NaCl so that programmers need not worry so much about specifying which particular processor NaCl is running on.

For those who want to give it a try, Google offers a few NaCl demos.

Coming up will be support for 3D graphics, local file storage, the Web Sockets technology for fast server-to-browser communication, and peer-to-peer networking, Google said. Some of that doubtless will wait for the second-generation "Baltic Sea" release.

"We are excited to see Native Client progressively evolve into a developer-ready technology," Google said. Next up will be seeing if programmers share the excitement.

Google makes Web search more social

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results.

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results. The move is an expansion of "Google Social Search," which the Internet giant introduced in 2009.

Instead of featuring at the bottom of a page of search results, relevant posts from the social media accounts of a user's friends are now integrated into the list of results themselves.

A Google search for camping, for example, may bring up a Twitter post by a friend about hiking trails or a link to campsite pictures uploaded by a friend to Flickr.

"Relevance isn't just about pages -- it's also about relationships," Google product management director Mike Cassidy and product manager Matthew Kulick said in a blog post.

"Today we’re taking another step forward -- enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they're publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website," they said.

"This means you'll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they've shared or created," they added.

Social search will only be available to users who have a Google account.

Google account holders will also have the option of linking their social media accounts to their Google profiles.

Mindful of potential privacy concerns, Cassidy and Kulick said: "The new setting enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile."

Google said the new social search feature is only available in English for the moment.

It will also not display any input from the largest social network of them all -- Facebook -- which has previously declined to share data with Google.