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.

Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Conn., will receive a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule backup system for the Mac, and a MacBook Pro. The billionth app was Bump Technologies’ “Bump,” which enables iPhones to share contact information from users’ address books by bringing the devices close together.

The App Store, launched nine months ago, reached the billion-app milestone Thursday, according to Apple. The online store that offers third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than 35,000 applications available in 77 countries.

Mobile applications have been available for download for years from the Web, but the popularity of the App Store has changed the market. All of Apple’s major rivals are expected to eventually have their own over-the-air way to distribute mobile programs.

However, competitors have their own twists. Google says its Android Market will be more open, Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)’s App World is more enterprise-friendly, Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Ovi Store will integrate social networking and location, and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile will allow users to be billed through their carriers.

Apple is hoping the App Store will become even more popular with the release this summer of version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system. The update provides more than 1,000 new application programming interfaces that enable developers to build software with in-app purchases, peer-to-peer connections, push notifications, and more.

Source: InformationWeek

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!

UPDATE – Now with video.

And that’s not all. The press release appears below but here are the major updates. I’ll install it and give you the details as soon as everything reboots:

• Top Sites – a visual representation of all of your frequently visited pages (warning: could be NSFW for some)
• Full History Search – an index of every single page you’ve visited including titles, URLs, and text
• Cover Flow – iTunes like browsing for your bookmarks and history
• Tabs on Top – A more intelligent method for tabbed browsing.

Apple Announces Safari 4—The World’s Fastest & Most Innovative Browser
New Nitro Engine Runs JavaScript More Than Four Times Faster

CUPERTINO, California—February 24, 2009—Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”

Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.*

Apple is leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 for an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari for Mac, Windows, iPhone™ and iPod® touch are all built on Apple’s WebKit, the world’s fastest and most advanced browser engine. Apple developed WebKit as an open source project to create the world’s best browser engine and to advance the adoption of modern web standards. Most recently, WebKit led the introduction of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards and is known for its fast, modern code-base. The industry’s newest browsers are based on WebKit including Google Chrome, the Google Android browser, the Nokia Series 60 browser and Palm webOS.

• Innovative new features in Safari 4 include:
• Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;
• Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;
• Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes®;
• Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
• Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
• Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
• Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;
• built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
• a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

Pricing & Availability
Safari 4 is a public beta for both Mac OS® X and Windows and is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari.

Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard® version 10.5.6 and Security Update 2009-001 or Mac OS X Tiger® version 10.4.11, a minimum 256MB of memory, and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire®. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted on an iMac® 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows Vista, with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test. HTML benchmark based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Source: CrunchGear

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.”

Basically, this means that if you’re a Mac user running the latest edition of its iLife package, which started shipping earlier this week, you can hook up your Facebook account for easy uploading right from iPhoto. If you use the iWeb site creation tool, you can set it up to post a message to your Facebook profile (and your friends’ news feeds) if you make some kind of edit. That’s pretty similar to what a number of Web-based blogging services have already set up using Facebook’s platform.

I haven’t actually checked it out yet, so I can’t provide a thumbs up or down, but the concept itself is pretty cool. Facebook rolled out its Facebook Connect product, which lets third-party sites (and now desktop apps, apparently) use Facebook usernames and passwords for user accounts, over the second half of last year. The reception, so far, has been generally positive.

What’ll be really interesting is to see the further implications of Web-based login standards like Facebook Connect as they’re synced up to more desktop applications. Not that you’d really want to share all your Microsoft Word edits in your news feed or anything.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Caroline McCarthy

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.
The BBC, working with Adobe, has developed the new version, known as BBC iPlayer Desktop.

The Corporation also ran tests of a system to help ISPs cope with increase in traffic generated by the iPlayer.

Lab edition

The iPlayer is the BBC’s online media player that lets viewers stream programmes for up to seven days after broadcast or download and watch them for up to 30 days.

When the iPlayer first launched the BBC was criticised for producing versions that only worked with Microsoft’s Windows XP and which used Microsoft’s digital rights management (DRM) system to enforce viewing restrictions.

The BBC’s head of digital media technology, Anthony Rose, who is responsible for delivering the next generation of BBC iPlayer, said the structures put in place by the BBC Trust on how the iPlayer can operate meant DRM was a necessity.

“The BBC Trust said we could make content available for seven or 30 days after broadcast,” he said. “The ability to take things away after some time requires DRM.”

The new version of the iPlayer has been written with Adobe’s AIR technology which aims to make it possible to create applications that can be downloaded to your computer, rather than just embedded in browser web pages as is possible with the widely used Flash software.

Those who want to try the new player must first install Adobe AIR and then get the trial version by signing up to be an iPlayer Labs tester via the iPlayer site.

A beta version of the BBC iPlayer Desktop that uses the Adobe AIR technology was made available on 18 December with a finished version likely to be released in February 2009.

The cross-platform nature of Adobe AIR means the iPlayer will work with Open Source and Apple Mac computers “out of the box” on 18 December, said Mr Rose. It fulfilled the Trust’s demand that the iPlayer be “platform neutral”, he said.

Mr Rose said the iPlayer now supported three separate DRM technologies: Microsoft, Adobe, and the OMA standards for mobiles.

“We may embrace other DRMs as needed,” said Mr Rose, adding that putting the iPlayer on phones, game consoles and many more computers was helping to drive the success of the application.

Traffic congestion

At the same time, said Mr Rose, the BBC has carried out tests to help ISPs mitigate the bandwidth demands of iPlayer users.

In early 2008 ISPs complained that the popularity of the iPlayer was putting a strain on their networks and forcing up their costs.

Net provider Plusnet published figures which suggested the cost of carrying streaming traffic increased from £17,233 to £51,700 per month largely because of the iPlayer.

The BBC has worked with British company Velocix to test a system which puts servers in ISPs that store, or cache, the most popular iPlayer programmes.

Mr Rose said smart software in the iPlayer would check these caches to see if the programme a user wants is loaded locally on a caching device near the user. Streaming from within an ISP’s network cuts the cost of transporting that traffic for both the BBC and the net supplier.

It was up to ISPs now to get hold of the caching boxes and install them, said Mr Rose.

“The BBC is not building its own content delivery network,” he said. “But we can help move the market in this area.”

Mr Rose said it would establish commercial relationships with ISPs that use the caching technology in the same way it did with other firms that carry or broadcast BBC content.

Source: BBC