Filed under: Internet Tools, iPhone

One shining year — that’s how long the iPhone-optimized iGoogle search page hung around, and now we must tell it goodbye. Introduced in January 2008, the customized iGoogle UI for Mobile Safari provided a single-column view and easier navigation for iPhone users. As Christina noted earlier today on Download Squad, the sleek UI has been replaced with the unified mobile format for iGoogle that renders similarly on most mobile browsers, including Google’s own Webkit-based Android browser (which previously had benefited from the Webkit-tweaked front page for the iPhone).

The unification of the mobile iGoogle interface may simply be an effort by Google to level the playing field instead of having the iPhone as a most-favored-device, or it might be part and parcel of the big G’s shaving down on costs by eliminating offerings like Jaiku, Dodgeball and Google Notebook. Either way, if you’re mourning the loss of your custom iGoogle look, let us know below.

TUAWFarewell, iPhone-optimized iGoogle originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Belkin’s Business Development Representative, Mark Bayard, has reportedly been paying Internet surfers to post fake positive reviews or poorly selling Belkin products on Amazon.com, according to a Friday report. Bayard has posted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, which pays users to perform tasks computers cannot, paying them on a per-task basis. At the time, Bayard offered 65 cents for every p…

Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, iPod touch

Crayon Physics Deluxe (App Store) is an iPod Touch/iPhone 2.0 game highly similar to Touch Physics (App Store) in that you must move a ball to the goal (represented by the star on the right) by drawing various things on the screen. For instance, to move a ball across a gap, you would simply draw a line with your finger over the gap.

The game has 50 levels, and it includes a level editor so that you can make your own levels to increase replay value. You can play straight through the levels, or use the level chooser to jump around and play any levels (useful if you get stuck on a particular level). The music is calming and the graphics are good, but the levels initially draw very slowly.

Continue reading Crayon Physics Deluxe for iPhone

TUAWCrayon Physics Deluxe for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comcast is not treating VoIP traffic as fairly as the law demands, the FCC alleges. In a letter issued by general counsel Matthew Berry and wireless competition bureau chief Dana Shaffer, the FCC notes that whereas Comcast’s Digital Voice VoIP service is unimpeded, third-party VoIP technologies remain subject to supposedly “protocol agnostic” bandwidth throttling. The cable provider has an oblig…

Microsoft is poised to use February’s Mobile World Congress to unveil a set of online mobile services that would be its own equivalents to Apple’s Internet components for the iPhone. In addition to confirming the existence of SkyMarket, a dedicated app store for Windows Mobile devices, alleged sources for Neowin claim Microsoft will use the phone show to introduce SkyBox, a mobile sync service to…

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Productivity

The idea of tagging files as an organization and project management method has been around for some time now, and we’ve mentioned applications in the past (FileSpot, TagBot, Punakea … ) which touched on some useful applications for the tagging method. A truly seamless, system-wide implementation, however, has been hard to find. Back at WWDC, Gravity applications gave me a taste of a new application which takes the concept to a new level. Tags, finally released yesterday, provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows tagging and searching from a wide range of applications, including:

• Finder and Path Finder
• Mail
• Address Book
• iPhoto
• Safari
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.)
• Adobe Photoshop
• Xcode
• Rapidweaver
• Omnioutliner
• Pages and Keynote
• Quicktime

The list goes on. Basically, any application which can tell AppleScript what the current context is will work with Tags. Those that don’t can also have their items tagged from Finder, which is especially easy if they have a “Reveal in Finder” shortcut.

Tags uses Spotlight metadata instead of the old Spotlight comments method. Files tagged with Tags are immediately indexed in Spotlight, allowing for searches and Smart Folders outside of Tags, as well as integration with other Spotlight-enabled applications. Its keyword storage method is directly compatible with Ironic Software’s Deep, and the same method is planned for use in Leap, eventually. Ironic has actually just announced OpenMeta, an open source library for accessing and modifying this kind of metadata (more on that coming soon).

Read on for more on the concepts behind Tags.

Continue reading Tags takes organization to a new level

TUAWTags takes organization to a new level originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been renominated to serve on Disney’s board of directors, in spite of medical problems, according to the company’s 2009 proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Jobs is the largest individual shareholder in Disney, with 7.4 percent of stock, which came as a result of his former role in charge of Pixar. The Toy Story studio has since been absorbed by Disn…

ASUS is claiming a pair of firsts for notebooks with two new models and pairs the systems with a new network router. The F70 is the first notebook to have a 17.3-inch display and gives the desktop replacement-sized system a 16:9 ratio, 1600×900 display better-suited to movies. It accordingly gets a Blu-ray combo drive as an option which is unusually made external rather than built-in. ASUS give…