A 13-year-old downloaded the billionth application from the Apple App Store, becoming the grand-prize winner in the company’s app countdown contest, the Apple said Friday. (more…)

Welcome to the future, Safari fans, because the Safari 4 beta just hit the download shelves and it’s ready to tear some things up in Tiger and Leopard and even Windows. The download requires the latest security patch (2009-01) but other than that you’re ready to ride. Guess what? Javascript is 4X faster! (more…)

Now, this is kind of neat: Facebook Connect, the sprawling social network’s universal-login project, has started to come to desktop software. Namely, it’s been hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto, per a post on the company developer blog.

“We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife ‘09, Apple’s new suite of applications that includes iPhoto ‘09,” the post by Facebook platform manager Dave Morin said. “Users of iPhoto ‘09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With help from Facebook Connect, photo tags from iPhoto ‘09 can be added to Facebook and generate Facebook notifications. Additionally, Mac users can update Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple’s iWeb ‘09 application.” (more…)

The BBC has created a version of the iPlayer that works with both Mac and Linux computers.

The two systems, which have been able to stream BBC programmes via the iPlayer for a year, will now be able to handle downloads.
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