The iPhone is a wholly remarkable device, but like most cellphones, it has a major weakness: you can't rely on it for heavy writing. You can't exactly write your thesis on the thing. One developer addressed this weakness by developing RemoteNote, which allows you to remotely edit notes on your iPhone (or even your iPod Touch) from your PC - or any device with a web browser. Details in the full article.

iPhone Homebrew developer edgecrush3r has released a web-based streaming webclient for the iPhone called Crossfire 0.5.0. To find out more about this application and see a video of it in action, head on over to the full article.

Download: Crossfire v0.5.0

For those of you who are sick of seeing those broken video embed links littering your iPhone, then you'll be glad to know that homebrew developer joe maller has just the solution to your problem. He's created a nifty bookmarklet called iTransmogrify, which transforms embedded Flash content into direct links to natively supported formats on your iPhone.

For more information, check out the full article!

"We've never ever at Mozilla said that we care about Firefox market share at the expense of our more important goal: to keep the web open and a public resource. The web belongs to people, not companies." These were the words of Mozilla's COO John Lilly in a recent blog post of his. What prompted this statement though, is the real story.

For those who have been keeping up with the WWDC, Steve Jobs delivered his keynote speech and unveiled Safari for Windows. Now, this is a big thing because the Apple iPhone will be running web applications, and this is the manner that it will be interfacing with the PC. The simple fact that PC users will be getting another browser option for their systems is really great. So what's the problem?
 
Steve Jobs presented the way he wanted the market to look eventually and it showed a view that's, as Lilly put it, "out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking." A duopoly (a market controlled by two organizations) cuts out everyone else and leaves everyone at the mercy of the companies running it. Everyone saw the ruckus that was caused with the Microsoft anti-trust issue, adding in another big company to control the rest of the market may not be in the public's interest.

Lilly may have a point with this although there is no arguing Apple's success. It may precisely be that outlook that's driving them to the top. Still, we have to consider the consequences of a possible duopoly on the net and how it will affect the internet community as a whole. If you want to read the entire blog post, be sure to click on our read link. Keep checking back here for more updates on this issue.

As most Apple fans know, the Apple WWDC is going pretty strong. A lot of people have their own thoughts about the iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard, but no amount of speculating beat first hand information.

Mac Rumors was lucky enough to get some details from those who attended the WWDC and were able to get some details about the Leopard. In addition, they also gave some of their impressions on the product which were quite insightful. Consistently, the people who saw it have been raving about the new mail system that Apple implemented.

Another thing that was pointed out by one of the attendees is the fact that Spotlight has been tweaked so that it has become "much more responsive." Another thing that was pointed out was that "Safari seems faster and now has that styled text editor as in Firefox." For those who are worried about the requirements of the said OS, don't fret, the readme on the copies handed out clarified everything (it's no Vista in terms of memory requirements).

System Requirements:

• an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor
• a DVD drive
• built-in FireWire
• at least 256 MB of RAM for a Power-PC based Mac and 512 MB for an Intel-based Mac (additional RAM is recommended for development purposes)
• a built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
• at least 6 GB of disk space available, or 8 GB if you install the developer tools

That said, it looks like the Mac OS X Leopard is primed and ready to hit the ground running. Hopefully it will be everything and more Mac users wish it to be. Keep checking back here for more updates on the WWDC and the products featured there.

 

Some of you technically-minded folks may laugh at the title and say that you knew how to do this already, or that there is a Firefox plugin out there that can help you do something similar.

However, the reason that warrant's the posting of Go Squared's little mini tutorial on how do download "any" file using Safari, is that not a lot of people know to maximize the potential of the stuff they've got on their Macs (Yes even if it's on the menu bar. You should hear the horror stories that tech support people run into on a daily basis).

Anyhow, their tutorial focuses on Safari's (Apple's web browser on the Mac) tool called the Activity Window. Access it by going to “Window > Activity” (shortcut: alt + apple + a) and from there you'll be able to see every website that you're viewing.

Double clicking on any one of the listed things that show up on the Activity Window lets you download it. For example, if you were surfing through YouTube, you could look for it on the activity window and download that video really quick.

Now, Other technical folks have noted that saying "ANY file" is quite inaccurate. They say that password protect files in a password protected dir, or files that are not accessible thanks to .htaccess can't be downloaded. But who cares if you can't get them all? For one thing if you're uninitiated enough to find this useful, then you're probably not the type who'd be trying to download password protected files... right?

MacNN reports that Google Desktop is now available to Mac users the world over. Google Desktop is a new Universal app that indexes the contents of a Mac's hard drive. This includes everything from applications and files to Web histories from Safari, Firefox, and Camino, enabling users to keep a closer eye on their files, including results from previous Gmail searches when offline.

Google Desktop for Mac is currently in beta form and supports Spotlight plug-ins. It also uses Spotlight privacy features to prevent some documents from being searched. The app also includes a new Google app that lets users stay updated and download more Mac apps from Google. It also has an optional feature that integrates with Google's Web search, allowing users to search their PC's local desktop from Google.

Future iterations of Google Desktop are expected to include support for Gadget integration. Google Desktop will run on PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Mac users can download Google Desktop by clicking on the link below.

Download: Google Desktop for Mac beta

  
  

Remember when we told you of stuff that the Apple TV is doing that it's not supposed to do: i.e., running Apple TV on a MacBook, and getting the Xvid to work on the Apple TV? Those are only some of what you can do with the help of this extensive tutorial from the Tutorial Ninjas.

The Ninjas made it clear that doing the stuff they specify will have to require you to put apart your precious Apple TV. If you get over that quite iffy part, you will be able to do the following stuff:

• Disable the Firewall
• Enable SSH & VNC
• Playing xvid/divx encoded stuff
• Stopping Watchdog
• Running Applications(Firefox, Centerstage, etc)
• Installing Quartz

All you need is a computer (preferrably an Intel Mac), a torx 10 and a torx 8, a way to hook up a 2.5" hard drive to your computer, and a method of SSHv1 into a box. But remember: you're on your own when you start breaking apart your hardware for these mods; albeit the steps that the Ninjas provided, available on the "via" link below, can be very detailed.

It's a couple of days late, but we think it can still afford to be labeled important news. Now up for beta testing is the Gentoo PPC64 PS3 LiveCD, which will enable you to use a GNOME desktop environment on both the PS3 and the G5 Apple PowerMac.

If you don't know what GNOME is, it's a kind of open-source desktop environment that people have updated with open source versions of the software normally found in other operating systems. In other words, it's an alternative desktop choice that also has a big, supportive fanbase for newbie questions.

In addition to GNOME, the LiveCD also has Audacious, Evolution, Firefox 2-X (Bon Echo), Gaim, Gimp-2, and Xchat software included, which make it a pretty hefty package. You can find more information on the ins and outs of this new development at the source, and feel free to check the additional link for download mirrors. Just look for the "experimental/ppc64/livecd" directory in your respective mirror sites. Enjoy!

Offsite Link: [Gentoo Download Mirrors]

Just a few days after the latest Firefox 2.0 update hit the web, the developer of the optimized Firefox builds for G5 and Intel Macs has also released optimized builds of Firefox 2.0.0.1 on his blog.

According to the developer's blog, there are two different versions available - one with "Firefoxy" form widgets applied, and one with "the more OS X-looking aqua form widgets."

These builds are also the first to have an overhauled version of the aqua form widgets. The overhauled version has undergone a few tweaks to fix some of the rendering and alignment issues in earlier versions.

The user agent has also been tweaked so that the builds identify themselves as Firefox instead of BonEcho. And while we're on the subject of naming, here's what th developer has to say on why the name and icon of this build is different from Firefox's:

I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but every time I post a new Firefox release I still seem to get people annoyed / pissed off / confused as to why these builds are missing the Firefox name and icon. So here comes the strong emphasis:

The Firefox name and icon are copyrighted and cannot be used with non-official builds. These are non-official builds, so they cannot have the official branding. Pretty straight-forward. Please don’t ask me to build versions with the official branding.

Download: [Optimized Firefox builds for G5 and Intel Macs]