Archive for December, 2009
Mozilla is moving closer to the release of its first mobile Firefox browser.
The alpha 2 version of Fennec was made available on Dec. 22, one Mozilla developer announced.
The BBC, quoting a Firefox mobile developer, noted that Fennec is only day’s away from release.
“We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading,” wrote one Mozilla Fennec developer, who announced the release of Alpha 2 on his blog. “In addition to the great performance work, we’re starting to work towards feature completion. We’re making great progress on our Windows Mobile builds and are starting to roll on Symbian.”
The mobile browser runs on Nokia’s 810 Internet tablet and Nokia 900 smartphone, which run the Maemo Linux based operating system. Mozilla has also provided versions of Fennec for Windows, MacX and Linux desktops for developers.
Mozilla also plans to support Windows Mobile and Symbion mobile operating systems.
Fennec includes touch-screen support, a password manager, pop-up blocker and Firefox-style tab-browsing interface.
Filed under: Developer, Mozilla, Browsers
Just when we thought Mozilla was getting Firefox 3.6 back on track to meet its December 2009 deadline, it looks like the release schedule has been extended again. Firefox 3.6, the next version of the browser, is now aimed for “early 2010.”
Firefox 4.0 has also been pushed back from its original target of 2010, and is now due in “late 2010/early 2011.” However, a beta of Firefox 4 is scheduled for summer of next year, so beta junkies can get their hands on it then. Just last week, we reported on some early images of the dramatic facelift Firefox will get in 4.0.
Some of the new features being added to Firefox 3.6 before the final release include tab matching – which shows you when an a page in your location bar is already open, so you can choose to switch to that tab instead of opening a duplicate – and even the ability to run plugins as separate processes, so they don’t take down your whole browser.
We reported on that last week, but Mozilla’s wiki indicates that it’s a go for Firefox 3.6′s final release: “out-of-process plugins in Q1 2010 shipped on 1.9.2 branch” is listed as a goal.
[via CNET]
Mozilla misses Firefox 3.6 deadline, moves 4.0 back to late 2010 originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mozilla – Mozilla Firefox – Download Squad – Firefox 3.6 – Web browser
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Filed under: Games, Internet, P2P
The votes are cast! Or, rather, the seeds and peers are cast! After poring through numerous lists of figures, the nautical masters over at TorrentFreak have tallied up the total number of (illegal) video game downloads in 2009. This year’s winner: Modern Warfare 2. Big surprise.
What might surprise you is the sheer volume of downloads: 4.1 million. In six weeks. Hahahah. Sorry, it’s unprofessional to laugh. In contrast, the Sims 3 managed 3.2 million – in seven months.
To put this into perspective, back in the early days of BitTorrent, a large games group shifted 300,000 copies of Doom 3 during its opening weekend. TorrentFreak go as far to say that download figures in 2009 are double those of 2008 — mirroring the growth of uTorrent (which now has 52 million users!)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was also the most-pirated game on the Xbox 360.The PC titles far outweigh the console games in terms of total downloads, probably because pirating on consoles is still a lot trickier.
Hit up the TorrentFreak article if you want the full charts.
The most pirated video game of 2009 – it’s Modern Warfare 2 in a landslide originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Video game – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Games – Doom 3 – Xbox
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Filed under: OS Updates, Google, Mobile, Android
Although we haven’t seen any official confirmation of this, there’s a widely-circulated rumor that T-Mobile G1 phones are getting an Android OS update soon. That could mean G1 owners will be treated with Android 2.0, or the latest and greatest version, 2.1. That’s good news for early adopters whose T-Mo contracts were still running when Android 2.0 and the Verizon Droid hit the streets.
The bump to 2.0 (or 2.1?) is rumored to be an over-the-air update. It should bring speedier, snappier performance, along with a ton of new features. 2.0 was a pretty major overhaul of the Android OS, adding car mode, new navigation features, and Facebook and Gmail integration. There’s some speculation on message boards that Android 2.0 can’t actually fit on a G1 without using an SD card, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google found a way to make it work. I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, G1 owners!
[via Engadget]
Android 2 may hit T-Mobile G1 devices soon originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google – Android – HTC Dream – Facebook – T-Mobile G1
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This past week 15 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 14 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Bing Maps and Menu Mania. The most often used APIs this week are Google AJAX Libraries, Google Maps, and Twitter. And the most frequently used types of APIs were Mapping (3 APIs, 6 mashups), Internet (3 APIs, 3 mashups), and Photos (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Bing Maps used in ACRES Preserves Map
Freebase used in QuoteRelish
Google AJAX Libraries used in Tvitre.no
Google Analytics used in Google Analytics + Olark = Understand your Chat Conversion
Google Maps used in Baseball Stadiums Map – All Levels, Cut Your Own Christmas Tree: Ottawa Area Tree Farms Map, funda.nl, Tweet Street View
Menu Mania used in Zoodle.co.nz
Moreover used in QuoteRelish
Panoramio used in Panoramio Holiday Countdown
Twilio used in Tickets Suck
TwitPic used in Food on Twitter
Twitter used in flittr, Food on Twitter, G4M3 Twitter Flash Games, Tickets Suck, Tvitre.no, Tweet Street View
uClassify used in AgeAnalyzer
Yahoo Geocoding used in Panoramio Holiday Countdown
Mashups of the day:
And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:
Google Analytics + Olark = Understand your Chat Conversion
Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, iPhone
Remember when a lack of copy and paste was one of the biggest complaints about the iPhone? Well, even though those days are far behind us, copying and pasting on an iPhone could still be a lot easier. That’s where Pastebot comes in. This slick new app from Tapbots lets you store multiple snippets of text, links, and even images, for easy pasting later.
Adding a clipping is extremely simple: just copy something, open Pastebot, and it’s automatically added. Pastebot doesn’t just collect clippings, either. It lets you organize and modify them, even including some basic image filters, making it easier to find what you need later. It even syncs over wi-fi with a desktop app on your Mac, so you can pass clippings from your desktop to your mobile device with ease.
Pastebot is 3 bucks in the app store, and it’s 3 bucks well spent if you paste frequently on your phone, or just want a quick way to transfer some images and text between iPhone and Mac.
Give your iPhone a seriously powerful clipboard with Pastebot originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – Download Squad – AppStore – Mobile device – Macintosh
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Filed under: Fun, Games, Photo
If you’re looking for some extra motivation to take photos this year, how about turning it into a game? Noticings is a clever location-based photo game built around the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Noticings has a lot in common with another well-known location-based game, Foursquare. The difference is that you score points in Noticings by taking a photo of something interesting at a location, instead of just checking in there.
Each player can upload three photos a day for points, and you get them scored by tagging them “noticings” on Flickr. There are no set rules as to what a “noticing” is, except that photos of people don’t count. Some things are worth more than others, like being the first to upload a noticing from a new neighborhood, or spotting a sign with a typo. All you need to play is a Flickr account and a camera.
There’s a good rundown of the rules of Noticings on the game’s website. If you get really into it, you can also check out the Noticings iPhone app. It’ll run you three bucks in the App Store.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
Noticings turns Flickr photos into a fun location-based game originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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App Store – Download Squad – Flickr – Photo sharing – IPhone OS
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Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Browsers
As I write this, you’re probably tucking into your Christmas dinner.
Actually… if you’re reading this, you’re probably peeling back the plastic of your microwave turkey and uncrispy ‘roast’ potatoes.
Of course, the other option is, in this day and age, that you simply don’t celebrate Christmas. Here at Download Squad we want to cater for everyone, Christmassers, loners, nerds, Twitterers: the lot. This Festive Firefox Friday is for you.
Instead of bringing you Firefox-related news from the last seven days, this is an entire recap of Firefox in the year of 2009. It’s been a big year for that cute little red panda and 2010 will be just as exciting if not more so!
1. Firefox 3.5 surpasses IE7 in market share
Perhaps the biggest news this year! Firefox finally passes Internet Explorer — or one version of it at least. There’s the usual cynicism, citing the combined percentage of IE6, 7 and 8 as far greater than Firefox — and that’s true! — but if you combine Firefox 3.5 and 3.0′s shares, you’re talking about 30% of the Internet using Firefox. (Let’s not forget its 100% market share in Antarctica!!)
That’s quite a lot, and with the European Commission’s ruling expect to see Firefox climb towards 40% in 2010 — or even higher because…
2. Mobile Firefox — Fennec — is almost ready for prime time
Yup, as Paul puts it, with Firefox finally on the smartphone, all your apps in 2010 may well belong to Mozilla. Apple may never open up their iPod Touch and iPhone to third-party browsers, but we can hope for a ‘mobile surfing revolution’ in 2010 on the Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms.
There was also news of Firefox making its way to the Sony PS3 — maybe we’ll see it on even more devices in 2010?
3. Multiple login sessions at last!
I don’t know if it’s because I’m a web developer, but there’s something really frustrating about login sessions persisting between tabs in Firefox. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s convenient — for all your Google web apps, perhaps — but most of the time it’s just plain annoying.
What if you manage multiple email accounts? Or PayPal accounts? Or Ebay? Multifox is the answer.
4. The maturing (cough) of the Firefox Personas gallery
I don’t think I’ll understand the NEED to customize everything that we use and interact with. For some reason, despite corporations spending millions of dollars on specialized and optimized user interfaces, we just have to change it.
Thankfully, in the case of Firefox, you can’t actually alter the UI itself — all you can do is skin it with a variety of obnoxious images. But anyway, whether you love it or hate it, the Personas gallery is now full to overflowing with themes — so if you’re bored with grey, how about changing to LUMINOUS ORANGE??
5. Greasemonkey continues to be utterly awesome
Well, to be fair, it’s the dominance of both Greasemonkey AND its huge repository at userscripts that has made this a bumper year for Firefox users.
If you use Firefox and use the Internet for anything other than simple surfing, Greasemonkey will probably revolutionize your experience. It enables, via some truly fantastic userscripts, functionality that you’ll soon grow to love. You’ll wonder how you ever used Flickr or Gmail without the Greasemonkey add-on. Most websites have a few annoying ‘foibles’ — chances are there’s a Greasemonkey script that’ll fix it for you.
WebGL is almost here! Our reliance on Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash is almost at an end: on one side we have HTML5 video and on the other we have WebGL, an in-browser version of OpenGL. What this means is that you’ll finally be able to produce inline 3D elements in web pages — and hopefully with a lot less CPU and memory usage. I assume Direct2D will also play a role in this ‘next stage’ of Web development.
As always, due to their open-source nature, Firefox and Chrome are leading the WebGL charge. Nascent versions are already in the beta builds, so expect to see some neat WebGL proofs of concept soon. As always, IE is just a little way behind…
7. Microsoft and Firefox grow (uncomfortably?) close…
Here’s a turn-up for the books that no one expected: Firefox — or at least one of its veterans — prefers Bing to Google. If that wasn’t enough, Bing then turned around and paid their respects to Firefox with a little homage.
Just for a moment, let’s just imagine that Firefox falls out with Google in 2010. What if they jump into bed with Microsoft? What if some future iteration of Internet Explorer is based on Firefox? What if Firefox BECOMES Internet Explorer?
Hmm…
8. Firefox continues to burn a hole in your thigh
Firefox might’ve been out for five years now, but it still absolutely slaughters your CPU. Desktop users don’t tend to notice it, but if you own a laptop or netbook, you’ve probably experienced either a) very hot genitals or b) about half the usual battery life when running Firefox.
Fortunately you can boost battery life — and lower CPU usage — with the army of ad-blocking add-ons.
9. Firefox nursed and bolstered its invaluable add-on developer community
Curious how there’s so little negative news about Firefox, eh? Something about them always taking care of their community of developers, and giving back much more than it takes from the OSS movement.
2009 saw the debut of Firefox’s Add-Ons Contribution system. Not only does this encourage add-on programmers to continue coding, but Mozilla don’t even take a cut! The money you contribute goes straight to the community.
Also of note, in the ‘charity’ vein, you should install the new Browse for a Cause add-on. Why not donate a little money to charity while you surf? It’s painless and free!
10. And looking towards 2010: Firefox 4!
I was thinking… how many of today’s Firefox users actually used Firefox 1 or 2? For many people, Firefox 4 will be the first major revision of the world’s most popular web browser — and boy does it look pretty.
In comes the Ribbon UI made famous by Office and some more drop shadows on the other buttons for good measure. We’re still only at a beta stage on Firefox 3.6 though, so I wouldn’t expect to see Firefox 4 for a few months yet!
* * *
As always, if you think we missed a ‘seminal’ moment of Firefox in 2009, don’t hesitate to chime in in the comments!
Festive Firefox Friday: 2009 review originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google – Microsoft – iPhone – Apple – Internet Explorer
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Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source
To say that Microsoft and Novell have a muddy history when it comes to open-source projects and the GPL would be an understatement. Things were looking up, with the release of the open-source implementation of Silverlight, Moonlight 2, last week, but today things took a turn for the worse: Novell has just cut all the open source code from MonoDevelop.
The implications of this aren’t immediately clear, nor can we be certain of what Novell and the Mono development team have in store for us. All we know is that Novell has decided to lock Moonlight development up in a stricter, more-commercial LGPLv2 and MIT X11 license: generally it’s a bad thing when free things become non-free.
This in itself might not be news, if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s recent ‘Moonlight Covenant‘. In it, Microsoft claims that end-users are safe from being sued should they overstep their ground — sounds good, if their decree didn’t have so many holes in. It is looking more and more like, after so much help from the community, Moonlight will be snatched back by Microsoft.
It is increasingly likely that Novell, in one last, desperate bid at freedom (hah) will screw Mono and Moonlight, pocket some cash from Microsoft, and make a runner. This is an example of the OSS movement gone wrong and I have a feeling that the community will fry Novell for it.
Novell and Microsoft cut out the GPL cancer from open-source Silverlight originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft – Novell – Open source – Mono – Moonlight
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This was a hard year.
It was a year where “working for” became a danger signal. Anyone whose salary came from someone else was looking over their shoulder all year long, waiting on the lay-off notice.
And it came for millions. The year became known as the Great Recession.
Positive growth numbers returned by the third quarter, but unemployment remains stuck at 10%, and underemployment is even higher.
Hard times.
Erica Zeidenberg at Palamida recognized this in February, and offered the suggestions for what became the 2nd most-popular post on the blog all year, Open source for hard times. (I owe you, Erica.)
Erica offered a list of some good software that you can download free and get real use from. I was well acquainted with many of these programs, but some, like OpenGoo, were frankly new to me.
She didn’t just line up the usual suspects, in other words. I appreciated that.
I illustrated the piece with a classic photo of the Great Depression, by John E. Allen Inc., of men trudging past a sign put up by a local chamber of commerce reading “Jobless men keep going. We can’t take care of our own.”
It is useful when times are hard to recall that times have been harder, and in the lifetime of people still living. My mom lived through the Great Depression. She’s 86 now, and coming in next week for a visit. We’ll talk about it.
If you know of any Great Depression veterans, talk to them this Christmas. They would love hearing from you. They won’t be with us forever.
But when they’re gone we’ll have your stories and memories of them.