Applications

With Safari 3, I admired Apple's chutzpah for bringing its browser to Windows. With the new Safari 4 beta, I'm actually starting to admire the browser, too.

A big user interface overhaul makes Safari look polished rather than clunky on Windows, builds in better search abilities, and makes good use of the fact that people often visit the same sites over and over.

However, the lack of something like the extensions architecture that Firefox pioneered still means Safari 4 (download for Windows and Mac OS X) is better only than Safari 3, not the competition. … Read more

Apple on Tuesday announced the release of a public beta Safari 4 for Windows and Mac, promising a much faster browser with improved navigation and searching.

The company said the newest edition of Apple's browser for both Mac OS X and Windows will run JavaScript commands 4.2 times faster than Safari 3, and also claims to deliver better JavaScript and HTML page loading than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla's FireFox 3. Apple also added the Cover Flow interface now found in almost every piece of its software to let users scroll backwards through browsing history … Read more

An application that did nothing beyond showing a person was willing to spend gobs of money for it didn't last long on Apple's App Store, but now we'll begin to see if Google lives up to its more laissez-faire approach to its rival Android Market.

Apple banned Armin Heinrich's "I Am Rich", which cost $1,000 and only showed a red ruby, from its App Store last August. Now the conceptually similar "I Am Richer" has arrived on the Android Market from Mike DG.

Perhaps owners of T-Mobile's G1 phone are … Read more

I've now crossed into my eighth page of apps on the iPhone. Frankly, the time is quickly approaching when I'm going to have to delete good apps from my iPhone just so I can download more. To make matters worse, the apps keep on coming at the iTunes Store, as more developers figure out ways to utilize this unique platform--and they keep getting better! I haven't deleted an app that I've paid for yet, but I believe that the time might be coming when money spent will not be enough of a reason to keep an … Read more

iPhone users have very short attention spans.

Just 30 percent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media, which analyzed over 30 million downloads from Apple's App Store. And the numbers plunge from there: after 20 days, less than 5 percent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it. The drop-off is worse for free applications.

Those are amazing numbers. It's not a new pattern--GigaOm and TechCrunch noticed this last August--but back then, with the App Store just a month old, it was … Read more

Apple solved one problem of presenting with Keynote which is a part of iWork 09 by releasing the app Keynote Remote for iPhone and iPod Touch (iTunes Link) for $.99.

We found one thing a bit ironic and that was that the app wasn't free like the iTunes and Apple TV remote application. Especially when you have already paid $79 for iWork 09. Sometimes we just don't know if we'll ever understand Apple's logic behind these decisions.

The app lets you control your Keynote slide presentation that you present from our Apple computer using your iPhone … Read more

Face recognition technology isn't perfect yet.

That's certainly clear when using the "Faces" feature that is built into the recently released iPhoto '09.

Sure, the product does reasonably well at finding your friends and family in your photo collection. Tag a few photos by name and iPhoto comes up with other suggestions, often recognizing photos that are taken years apart and with vastly different looks. Heck, iPhoto even spotted me when I was a different gender.

The science behind face recognition is complex and still evolving. In general, face recognition software looks for predictable patterns--characteristics and proportions that stay constant from one photograph to another, things like the distance between the eyes or from the eyes to the mouth.

Even with things where the science is today, having help--any help--with the tedious task of tagging photos is welcome. And iPhoto can certainly find plenty of matches in your library, even if it won't spot them all.

But the real genius part is how Apple has made the process fun, even when the results aren't perfect.

Early speech recognition was also hit or miss, but it was painful to have to scream at a computer while it constantly misunderstood what you were trying to say. With face recognition, at least as built into iPhoto, the goofs are what make it fun.

The software frequently suggested that my contemporary friends and family were actually my 80-something cousin, my 90-something great aunt, or both. iPhoto also confused Bill Gates with our friend's 3-year-old. And among the suggestions for former CNET colleague Joris Evers was a shot of Wayne Gretzky that I had taken at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. … Read more

Showing that its Web application priorities extend to the mobile world, Google on Wednesday demonstrated a version of Gmail for the iPhone that could be used even when the phone had no network connection.

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, showed off at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona what he called a "technical concept" of Gmail even when the iPhone was offline. In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail for desktops and laptops, and like it, the mobile phone incarnation runs in a Web browser, not as a native application.

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network. To watch a demonstration, check the demo video on iPhone Buzz.

Offline applications can't of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, e-mail is stored in a local database on the phone, even when online.

"You'll note that it's very, very fast because it's using that local database," Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his in-box. … Read more

The iPhone farting app market is starting to get pretty noisy.

iFart Mobile, maker of an app that simulates farting noises, asked a court on Friday to rule that it can use the term "pull my finger" without risking trademark infringement claims by another iPhone fart app named, you guessed it, Pull My Finger.

InfoMedia, which developed iFart Mobile, filed a complaint for declaratory judgment in Colorado District Court and named rival Air-O-Matic as defendant.

In a blog posting, InfoMedia said it filed the complaint after an attorney for Air-O-Matic asked the company to pay $50,000 to … Read more