The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Our Mac Chromium Updater: Stay Up To Date On The Best Versions Of Chrome For Mac
- Facebook 3.0 For iPhone Submitted. Now Let’s Count The Days Until It’s Available
- The 35 Best iPhone Apps Of The Year (So Far)
- NSFW: Two magicians, three cups and one lesson your boring product must learn from Penn and Teller
- Saturday Apple Rumors, Served Up Fresh
| Our Mac Chromium Updater: Stay Up To Date On The Best Versions Of Chrome For Mac Posted: 16 Aug 2009 03:33 AM PDT
Our Mac Chromium Updater was built with the help of Greg Rosen, who created a script to check your version of Chromium versus the latest build. Then one our our developers, Hunter, created an Automator process so you don’t have to deal with installing something like Wget on your machine. The end result is a simple app that you run and let it update Chromium for you. You can find it here. For those who aren’t aware, Chromium is the open source project behind Google’s web browser, Chrome. While there are pre-release versions of regular Chrome available for Mac as well, the Chromium builds get updated much more frequently, and as such, are the closest to a working version of Chrome on the Mac. For example, latest versions of Chromium include Flash support and bookmark support. Overall, the project is coming along very nicely. A couple quick notes about our app: First, when you run the app, depending on the speed of your connection, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to download the newest build of Chromium. So even if you don’t think the app is doing anything, let it run, and eventually you will see the latest build of Chromium open on your screen. Second, this has only been tested of OS X 10.5 Leopard, but Chromium will only run on Leopard, so there you go. Enjoy. We’ve included a read me file in the zip with a few more obvious disclaimers and a note of who to email with problems. Again, find it here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Facebook 3.0 For iPhone Submitted. Now Let’s Count The Days Until It’s Available Posted: 16 Aug 2009 01:06 AM PDT
Hewitt also says he’ll post screen shots and more detais on this Facebook page for the iPhone app next week, and that he’s looking forward to getting started on v. 3.1 tomorrow. We’ve been tracking 3.0 since details first became available in July. A list of some of the much needed improvements is here. And as a bonus, Hewitt said he’d be able to include video uploads to Facebook from iPhone 3Gs phones as well. And from our most recent post (yes, Hewitt has been teasing this out for weeks):
It’s likely Apple will approve this app in short order. Not only are they trying to avoid high profile app problems, there’s also not very much in the Facebook app that they or AT&T would take exception to. If you haven’t heard it, make sure to listen to our interview with Joe Hewitt two years ago when Facebook first launched a special browser-based version of Facebook for the iPhone.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| The 35 Best iPhone Apps Of The Year (So Far) Posted: 15 Aug 2009 09:13 PM PDT This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, founder of AppVee. We are just past of a year since the App Store launched and there are more than 60,000 applications released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. When we wrote our 2008 year-end app wrap-up, we had just surpassed the 10,000 app milestone. In early June 2009, the store reached 50,000 apps. At present, we are looking at a staggering 300 new applications being released every single day. How does the average iPhone user find the gems in this deluge? Unfortunately, the process is entirely overwhelming for the average iPhone user. The bulk of consumers use iTunes' Top and front page listings. Since placement on the top lists is derived entirely from unit sales, there is a disturbing skew towards the $.99 applications. This not only discourages big developers from putting high budgets and serious resources towards development of really useful applications and games, but also does a disservice to us, as iPhone users. If all we see are ninety-nine cent gimmicks and toys, how will we realize the true potential of our device? Apple attempts to offset this with editor's picks, but this simply isn't enough to make sense of the App Store. There are new third party services and tools coming onto the scene to help show how to best navigate the App Store. AppVee has been doing in-depth reviews of applications since the launch of the App Store and will soon celebrate our one-year anniversary with nearly 1,000 video reviews of the top applications. We're often asked if we are overwhelmed with the number of applications currently released and the number we are capable of covering. The answer is no. 90% of apps currently out there are of no use to anyone. There are a massive number of clones, one-off gimmicks, volumes of books and reference material, and a never-ending supply of uninteresting games. So, we try to act as a filter for consumers, directing them to what is worth their time and money. The following is a round-up of our top picks so far this year: Most practical A fantastic alternative to Pandora, which carries a larger catalog and offers Premium accounts that offers something we've always loathed about Pandora – unlimited song skips. (Similar: Pandora, WunderRadio, Last.fm) 2. Hey Where Are You 3. Textfree Unlimited 4. Bento 5. TweetDeck 6. Print and Share 7. Flight Tracker 8. Read It Later 9. iEmoji 10. Birthday Reminder 11. Mover 12. Simplify Music 2 13. Cell Minute Tracker 14. QuickOffice 15. Photogene 16. Skype 17. Kindle 18. Beejive IM 3.0 19. Redlaser Best Games 20. Real Racing 21. Sims 3 22. My Brute 23. Mecho Wars 24. Zenonia 25. Peggle 26. Marble Blast Mobile 27. Myst 28. Merlin's Legacy 29. Assassin's Creed 30. Oregon Trail 31. Rolando 2 Fun Timewasters 32. Doodle Jump 33. Mouth Off 34. Pocket God 35. Flight Control Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| NSFW: Two magicians, three cups and one lesson your boring product must learn from Penn and Teller Posted: 15 Aug 2009 03:31 PM PDT
As I typed the message to Arrington, I could barely contain my glee. For a few strange years, starting towards the end of my teens, I worked as a magician - making good money and impressing girls by turning card tricks at corporate dinners and in fancy restaurants. It’s a long story, but one strangely common among people who ended up working on or around the web. For some reason a youthful interest in magic often comes hand-in-hand with a career in technology. It’s probably something to do with being a geek. Arrington’s reply was both a confirmation and a warning: “Yes they are. And if you write anything that stops them coming, you’re fired.” So, it’s official: Penn and Teller - the magicians’ magicians - are coming to TechCrunch 50 next month. Your response to this news will probably depend on which part of the technology barrel you inhabit. For those scraping along at the bottom - the self-described ’social media consultants’, the me-too-rip-off app builders, the spammers, the search engine optimisation goons, the MySpace child groomers - it might be one of confusion. I mean, what could a couple of Las Vegas magicians possibly know about launching a technology product? But for anyone else: anyone who understands that technology can actually be an art form rather than just a way to fleece gullible punters, the pairing of tech and magic makes perfect sense. I mean, Penn and Teller at TechCrunch 50 is basically the physical manifestation of Arthur C Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s law, of course, was little more than a useful crutch; a maxim that - by his own admission - he bolted on to his previous two (“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.” / “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible”) because he decided three was a better number. Also, by likening the kind of super-advanced technologies he wrote about to ‘real’ magic Clarke could avoid Jules Verne’s problem of having to explain how his wonderful inventions worked, only for actual innovation to prove him wrong a few years later. Clarke’s point was that contemporary readers couldn’t possibly understand how his future technologies worked, they just did. Like magic. No further explanation required. But in fact Clarke’s basic premise - that, at a certain level, the line between magic and technology becomes invisible - is absolutely right, just maybe for different reasons than he described. Speak to any decent magician - one who has read his Professor Hoffman or at least his Mark Wilson - and he will tell you about the time he saw a trick (or ‘effect’) that absolutely blew his mind, despite knowing every one of the technical principles behind it. The one that stands out for me was the time - I was maybe 14 years old - that I watched an American magician called David Williamson instantly restore a piece of rope that he had previously cut in half, using his fingers as a pair of scissors. The cut and restored rope is an ancient classic of magic, and there’s really only one way to do it. And yet the way Williamson employed that method was so good - so mind-blowingly, knee-shakingly good - that it (literally) made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And so it should be with technology. I remember - just as vividly as I remember David Williamson’s rope trick - the first time I bought a laptop with WiFi. For ten minutes or more I carried that laptop around my house, up and down stairs; into different rooms; even into my back yard, streaming full-screen video from the BBC website as I went. Again, I knew exactly what was going on: there was the WiFi card jutting from the PCMCIA port and I’d just spent ten minutes configuring the wireless hub. And yet… the experience of watching full-screen video on my laptop, without wires, was as near to pure magic as watching that piece of rope mend itself two feet from my eyes. The comparisons between really good uses of the principles of magic and really good uses of technology are so numerous that they could fill a book. In the 1930’s, Charles Hoffman caused a sensation with a small brass tea-kettle that could - on command - pour any drink or cocktail that the audience requested. Today my iPhone, with its 3G connection and iTunes, can do the same for any piece of music ever recorded. Which one is more magical to watch, really? Or consider Kriss Angel who, using some invisible - but quite basic - method is able to tell a woman on Las Vegas Boulevard the precise date she was born, or what she does for a living. With Google I can summon any fact ever recorded, from wherever I happen to be in the world. Again, which is more impressive? Certainly neither is made less magical by knowing, broadly, how it works. The brilliance lies in how well the method is hidden, and how powerful the effect is. And so it is with every single brilliant piece of technology, or web app that has ever been created. From the cellphone, to the iPod; from webcams to the web to WiFi. From email to eBay to Twitter to Hotmail to Shazzam to GPS to Google Maps to the Kindle. Pick your favourite, and remember how you felt when you first used it. Now remember the best magic trick you ever saw. The feeling is exactly the same. Like all good rules, this one works the other way around as well. Remember the exact opposite of the best magic trick you ever saw. Your boring uncle’s card trick - the one where, through the most convoluted of methods, probably involving dividing the pack into piles and counting slowly through them - he triumphantly, and boringly, turned over the card you chose. Remember how he made you feel: you probably didn’t know what bizzare mathematics or slight of hand genius lead him to your card, but neither did you care. If he were a real magician, he’d have found the card straight away. The only person he impressed was himself. The same is true of the worst technology. I don’t care how technically sophisticated Wolfram Alpha is, or how many genius hours it took to build it - all I know is that it forced me to think too hard, and returned results that were of no use to man nor beast. The technological equivalent of a boring uncle; the method was more impressive than the effect, and so the hairs on the back of my neck remain unstood. Which brings me to Penn and Teller. Of all of the magicians working today, none more perfectly illustrates the rule that a magical effect must take precedence over technical brilliance. Their stage show is a spectacular of blood and gore and guns and showgirls and pyrotechnics - and yet for their signature piece, they clear all of that aside and perform the oldest and most widely-known effect in magic: the cups and balls. You’ve seen it before, of course. Three cups, three little balls. One by one the balls vanish and, one by one, they reappear under the cups. Then, by way of a kicker, the cups are lifted to reveal three limes, one under each. But there’s more! The cups are stacked and lifted one last time to reveal - a huge lemon. Four large pieces of fruit from under three cups: cue the applause. But while every magician since the ancient Egyptians has finished there, Penn and Teller announce that they are going to do the trick one more time: this time using transparent cups. It’s amazing to watch: every single load, every single sleight and steal is laid bare. You see the moment they put the limes under the cups. You even see the lemon go in. But such is the brilliance of their execution, that you’re still left both baffled and blown away. The method becomes irrelevant, the effect is everything. The audience is on their feet. And it’s for that reason that I’m so delighted that Penn and Teller will be at Techcrunch 50. Not for what they’re launching - although from what I’ve heard, it’s going be pretty damn cool - but rather for what their appearance will hopefully remind anyone getting ready to launch a product, either at the event or at any time in the future… It doesn’t matter how clever your technology - if the effect doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your audience’s neck stand up, you need to keep working until it does. But if you do manage to build something even half as impressive as that lemon appearing under that plastic cup, then fame, fortune and a well-deserved standing ovation will be yours for the taking. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Saturday Apple Rumors, Served Up Fresh Posted: 15 Aug 2009 01:30 PM PDT Good afternoon and welcome to Chez Apple Rumors. Your first lunch course will be an iPod Touch with a camera followed by the accidental insertion of something called the IPAD into a survey for Borders Books. Can I get anyone anything to drink? So we begin this Eng video of the iPod Touch with camera that we talked about this week. It’s apparently a prototype model that was ground to bits by Apple’s stress testers and then recycled. As you see from the video after the jump, the old fellow has a camera. Then, as you see from the above screenshot, we learn that Borders is talking up something called the iPad, a noble and befitting name for a device that is a Pad and is made by Apple. I did a trademark search and came up with bupkus, but that doesn’t mean they won’t assign it by January. The Borders survey asks if you’re planning to buy an Apple IPAD (Large Screen Reading Device),” which either suggest someone at Borders is taking the piss or they have horrible web designers never talk to legal. This is all well and good but of what are we certain? We know that upcoming iPods will have cameras come September 8 or so and that the iPad or whatever it will be called will drop in 2010. All the rest of these rumors and videos are just icing on the already delicious Apple future device cake. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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Facebook has submitted v. 3.0 of their iPhone application to Apple, 
“Are Penn and Teller really launching a product at TechCrunch 50?”
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