BlackBerry applications finally become a real business
It may not really have the look and feel of a "world" just yet, but let's face it, Research In Motion is a late enough entry into this field that all the really good metaphors have already been taken. Today -- no fooling -- is the first day of BlackBerry App World, which is an application in itself that enables a market for other usable features, for a brand name that does find itself playing catch-up to its rivals these days.
The most appropriate word for the application shopping experience for BlackBerry up until yesterday has been "painful," but this is coming from someone who has built up quite a resistance to being impressed by software. Carriers prefer to set up users' browsers so that the application purchase process goes directly through them, often through their default home pages. So business relationships with major carriers such as Verizon Wireless, more than any other reason, have kept RIM from mounting a respectable challenge to Apple and others up to now.
Finally, Google delivers the search we BlackBerry users expected
I still like to take my wife on dates. Call me old-fashioned, or just call me old. We sometimes only manage to get away on the spur-of-the-moment, and if we can get a table at one of our favorite places, we're lucky.
Anyway, in low-light situations, I can't exactly maintain whatever fleeting resemblance I may have had to a debonair man-on-the-town if I'm fidgeting with the BlackBerry's default browser trying to locate movie times. I could keep my cool if I could just say, "Movies," into the little speaker that comes as standard equipment with these new phones nowadays, and get a list.
MixTape.me heads once more into the user-playlist breach
A brand-new site for mixtapes (or the virtual equivalent) has a charming interface, a fair database of tracks, and the ability for visitors to either play other members' playlists or search out individual songs. So does MixTape.me have a hope in hell of surviving where the legendary Muxtape ran afoul of the music industry?
Hard to say, but practical folk will check it out before much time elapses. Adam Pash, who daylights as editor of Lifehacker, pulled the site together from a raft of sources -- artist bios from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki, videos from YouTube, and so on.
Mozilla experiments more with 'New Tab' in Firefox 3.1
The engineer behind the ambitious Ubiquity project, Mozilla Labs' Aza Raskin, is already on record as not being too keen on the completely blank "New Tab" feature in current production editions of Firefox 3.0.
"Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen," Raskin wrote on his laboratory's blog last August. "While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be. While it's good to not intimidate with an explosion of information, we can get a much more streamlined workflow -- thereby saving huge amounts of aggregate time-- by showing something. The question is, 'What?'"
New Internet Explorer 8 secures, slices, smokes
Download Internet Explorer 8.0 for Windows Vista from Fileforum now.
As suspected, Microsoft used this week's MIX09 conference to unleash Internet Explorer 8, downloadable as of noon today (EDT). Our initial tests on the final release indicate that Microsoft's promises of better performance and security are realized, and that the team goal of creating "a better way to waste time on the Internet" has been realized too -- in the good sense.
Zoho spiffs up its 2.0 version of Writer
The vast Zoho online applications suite is on the march to tab heaven, and the word processor is leading the pack. Version 2.0 of Zoho Writer, unveiled Thursday, throws over its previous chock-full-o'-icons interface for a menu-and-tabs look that's eventually be integrated into all of Zoho's offerings.
Those familiar with previous versions of Zoho Writer are apt to remember the three-row-deep mass of icons at the top of the browser, and may also call some of the more oblique commands in the menus (Name-Name, anyone?). That's gone. The icon stack is replaced by six tab-shaped buttons in the toolbar, each of which clicks into a well-organized menu of choices. At the bottom of the screen, at last, word and character counts join the usual authoring and page count information.
Mufin music-recommendation engine heads for your desktop
Mufin on Friday announced the beta release of its new music player, billed as the first ever to sort tracks and recommend other tunes by analyzing the songs themselves.
Betanews took a look at MAGIX AG's Mufin, a spinoff from the legendary Fraunhofer Institute (home of the MP3 codec!), late last year. At that time, the company was showing off the song-sorting technology itself. Mufin's designed to examine tracks strictly by sound fingerprint -- not by artist, not by track title, solely by what the tune presents the ears.
My first day with Kindle 2: I'm finally ready to drop the paperback
I've always been a fan of technology that makes it easier for me to consume media. I bought the Diamond Rio PMP-300 the day it came out in 1998, was an early customer of TiVo, and can't imagine renting movies from a physical store after being a Netflix subscriber for over 8 years.
That's why I pre-ordered the first Kindle the moment it was announced in 2007. I had previously tried out electronic book readers from companies such as Sony, but they all lacked the complete ecosystem that makes it actually worthwhile to switch to digital books. The Kindle seemed to have it all: a fairly slim form factor, great screen, and a huge library of books easily downloadable with a single click.
A Google Chrome user's opinion of Safari 4 Beta
Download Safari for Windows 4.28.16.0 Beta from Fileforum now.
After writing for Betanews for a couple of years, there's something you may not know about me. If there is one company that I approach with favoritism (but never fanboyism!), it's Google. Yes, Google's omnipresence is enough to make you want to don a tin foil hat, but it's hard to argue with a company that gives everyone such powerful research tools at no cost.
Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades: Difficult, but not impossible
It shouldn't surprise many testers that Microsoft has shrewdly closed the upgrade channel for users who will -- probably sooner this year than later -- be making the switch to Windows 7. Many who had chosen to steer clear of Windows Vista and hang on to Windows XP -- by all rights, a decent operating system, at least for Service Pack 3 users -- are pondering the nightmare scenario of having to upgrade to and validate (which usually means, pay for) both Vista and Windows 7, if it so happens that Windows 7 proves to be desirable or simply necessary.
This led us to thinking: Windows Vista can run without being purchased and activated, albeit for a limited time (usually 30 days). During that time, it behaves as though it were a fully operational trial edition (except for the Ultimate SKU, where several of the "Extras" aren't available except after validating). But it doesn't take a month to install an operating system; so what if a valid XP user could simply borrow the promotional edition of Vista, if you will, to make the skip over to Windows 7?
AOL makes a move on Craigslist's classified territory
AOL Classifieds, which launches today in the US and Canada, allows sellers to post listings free, just as Craigslist does. (The service makes money from selling increased-visibility ads, sort of the way eBay makes money from the featured-auction option.) A UK version of the service will launch in the near future.
The service is powered by Oodle and aggregates listings from over 80,000 sources and 250 partner sites, many of them intensely local in orientation. Higher-profile members of the Oodle network include the Washington Post Express, Military.com Classified, MySpace Classifieds, Etsy, LiveDeal, and Local.com Classifieds.
Moonlight 1.0 means more Silverlight apps run smoothly on Linux
Microsoft had always promised interoperability as one of its key goals for Silverlight. The way it's accomplishing this on the Linux side of the scale is by empowering Miguel de Icaza to take the project and run with it.
This week marked an important milestone in a genuine effort to take a pretty good graphical Web applications platform and make it workable for Linux. The Mono Project, a team backed by Novell and Microsoft whose goal is to make the .NET Framework workable on other platforms, including Linux (and even, if you can believe it, Windows) has released its first non-beta version of the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in.
YouMail: Free visual voice mail for BlackBerry, with some kinks
While visual voicemail through Verizon carries an additional charge, and is only offered on select devices through others, YouMail today launched its carrier-agnostic free visual voicemail app for BlackBerry. Betanews took a look.
The YouMail application is available directly through the native browser on handsets running BlackBerry OS version 4.3 and up. Only T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T Wireless subscribers can currently use YouMail's new utility after first signing up for a YouMail account. That is best done through the YouMail Web site, as the application is still rough around the edges.
In praise of Windows Media Center
Microsoft showed off developments on Windows Media Center last week at CES. Despite the Ballmer bluster, despite the inexorable march of Microsoft to seize control of all your screens, something important needs to be said.
Specifically: Not bad, Microsoft.
Google Earth delivers miracle on 34th Street, and 65th Street, and...
It may not cover all of the good boys and girls in Manhattan, but Google Earth's 3-D option has bulked up enough to make a virtual traveler feel a little like an airborne Santa.
The 3-D-layer option in Google Earth is old news, but it wasn't very thickly populated in its early incarnation. However, a data increase earlier this month adds thousands of photo-textured buildings to the original set, which included pretty landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but not more prosaic locales such as, say, the intersection of First Avenue and 65th Street.
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