Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve probably heard that Apple has released iTunes 7.7 bringing with it the much anticipated App Store as well as the 2.0 software update for the iPhone and iPod touch. This also happs to be the day that the iPhone 3G is released. Pretty big day for Apple.

I’m in the process of updating my phone right now. It’s take about 20 minutes so far, and looks like it has another 20 or so to go. It did warn that it’d take a while. Word of warning, some people are experiencing issue with the update turning their precious iPhone into an iBrick because they couldn’t connect to the App Store (down due to traffic). I was able to browse the App Store, so I figured things should be safe now… we’ll see.

Aside from all the new games and applications, my favorite thing with this update is the ability to sync Google Contacts from GMail to iTunes. This is one of the things I’ve hated not being able to do since pretty much all of my email travels through GMail.

Here’s a roundup of iPhone related news for the past few days…

- How the iPhone App Store Will Kill iPhone Web Apps
- Battle of the iPhone Apps: MySpace vs Facebook
- iPhone App Store Is Live. So, What’s On The Menu?
- The Native iPhone 3G Apps We’ll See This Week (and Some We Won’t)
- Before the App Store “Opens”, it has already made Apple $55,000
- WordPress and TypePad Spawn Mobile Blogging
- That Didn’t Take Long…iPhone 2.0 OS Unlocked
- iPhone App Store: The Early List of Top Downloads
- iPhone Application Overview And Demo Videos

Enjoy the links!

Yesterday a new Trillian Astra build was released. This time around it’s mainly just a piss load of bug fixes, though they did muck with the ICQ / AIM plugin. Now if you use either of these services, you’ll need to enable the OSCAR plugin.

Do you use Google’s GMail service? I do, and love it. However a few weeks ago a “dot” appeared in the top left corner of the page. I didn’t think much about it at the time, as it looked like they were trying to make it look like a folded corner. As the days went on, I started to find the 10×10 pixel spot annoying. I constantly find my focus shifting to it.

On the 4th, someone posted a picture of the problematic pixels to Flickr, which in turn made it to Digg. Apparently there are many other people who find the spot annoying, and have their own theory as to what it is. Something to track page load speeds, tracking your activity, or as I though just a failed styling attempt. A number of people have also posted to Google Groups about it.

Even TechCrunch via TechCrunchIT is trying to figure out what this is. They’re even offering a free Tee-shirt (whoopie) to whoever comes up with the best, most entertaining, or most accurate theory.

Opera 9.51 was released yesterday. According to the Opera Desktop Team Blog, this addresses a few security and stability issues and it is recomended that everyone install this update.

It’s official, Firefox has entered the Guinness World Record for being downloaded over 8 million times in one day. That easily smashed their goal over 5 million downloads. No doubt that this shows the dedication and loyalty that Firefox users have for the software.

Source: Mozilla Blog via ReadWriteWeb

The Plurk team has released a new widget customizable widget that can be placed on your blog, personal website, or forehead. Ok, maybe not the last one.

The blog entry also points out that another widget will soon be released that will allow you to add your Plurks to MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks.

Social Networking… who would have ever thought it’d be as big as it is today. Everyone and their brother is in the game. And while I have an account on just about everyone of them, there are only a few that I log into on a regular basis.

Of course, I don’t count sites like Twitter, Plurk, or Pownce as a “Social Network”. Other people do, but I still consider these blogging services… or if you’d prefer micro-blog. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about a few services, and here are my thoughts…

Continue reading »

Just saw an interesting item over on Neowin.net. Stardock has launched a new platform called Impulse. It allows users to assign software (applications, games, utilities, etc) to a single account for easy updating and installation.

I’m in the process of downloading the setup file right now. If you’ve used Steam from Valve, it’s like that, but with a much broader focus.

Source: Neowin.net

Another pre-release build for Trillian Astra was released on Tuesday. Apparently they felt it was necessary to tell everyone that the emots are being renovated, “Hundreds have been completed and there are still hundreds to be added in the builds to follow!”

Aside from that, there were a number of entries in the changelog.

Firefox wasn’t the only browser to see a major update last week. Opera actually released a new version of few days prior to the Fx 3 release.

While I’ve not been able to give O9.5 much of a run yet, I will say that I’m digging the new default theme. Very cool! For details on what exactly is new with Opera 9.5, I’ll point you over to Opera Watch for all of the details.

Opera Watch also pointed out that as of June 17th (5 days after Opera 9.5 was released), over 5 Million people had downloaded the new version of the broswer. Sweet!