The browser is a beautiful thing, but it can be made so much better with the right tools. In the screenshot posted here, you can see new two tools in action - both of which you should check out right away.
What you're looking at in that image is the page for a single Tweet, viewed using the brand new Chrome browser extension from Embed.ly, which displays embedded previews from 165 different publishing platforms and previews of any web link posted on Twitter. It's a must-have. Overlayed on top of that? The rapid sharing tool Cortex - probably the fastest way to post links to Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper and Tumblr. Click your mouse, hold for two seconds and that circle shows up. Move over one of the sections and you're on your way to sharing a link.
Almost two years after announcing Latitude, Google's entry into the location sharing market, Apple and Google have finally come together to offer an official native Latitude app on the iPhone. And it's a real let-down.
Location technology is incredibly hot right now, innovation is happening fast and furious, the sky's the limit, but the Latitude app is a clumsy and severely limited piece of software that's only likely to appeal to unsophisticated customers who don't know any better. (Update: A commenter rightly told me this is an arrogant and inappropriate choice of words. I apologize.) It represents the latest missed opportunity by Google and just more fuel for the fire for critics who assert that it "doesn't get social technology."
The San Francisco Airport has released its own iPhone app called flysfo, complete with schedules, maps, airport restaurant reviews and notifications when any of your Facebook friends are also at SFO and available to drink one of those really tall, overpriced beers with you before a flight.
The app was created by San Francisco agency M-Line and may have Blackberry and Droid versions made in the future. I'll be checking it out next time I'm at SFO. If you're there at the same time maybe we can go get a couple of those beers together. Screenshots below.
ChromeOS notebooks arrived by FedEx today for testers around the country and I'm writing this blog post on one right now. This isn't Windows and it's not a Mac - it's a little notebook consisting of nothing but a Chrome browser!
There are some good things about it and there are some bad things. On balance? It's OK, but for one very big problem. The page scrolling in this browser is terrible. Presumably it's a result of the disposable hardware it showed up in, but scrolling up and down pages turns steady trackpad motion into fits and starts of scrolling. It's maddening. There are some good things about it, but after enjoying Chrome a lot on my Mac and waiting excitedly for a year and a half for this ChromeOS, it feels like the iPad came in and stole its thunder in the casual computing space just like happened to everything else.
Popularity isn't the best judge of quality, but it's not a bad place to start - especially in a pinch. Instapaper is a wonderful app that captures online articles and stores them for clean offline reading on your mobile device. InstapaperFeed is one of many apps built by independent developers on top of Instapaper, but it's an especially cool one I think.
Here's how it works. First, give InstapaperFeed access to your accounts on both Instapaper and Twitter. Then the app will look at every link shared by someone you're following on Twitter, look for the ones that link shortening service Bit.ly has clickthrough numbers for, and post the most popular ones each day to your Instapaper account. What a smart little hack!
Email can be a burden. Whether you're sitting at your desk obsessively checking your inbox for that special email while you should be doing other things or you're surreptitiously glancing at your smartphone while you're out on the town, it can be a constant distraction. Would phone calls have made it this far if you constantly had to ask your device "is someone calling me?"
Enter AwayFind, a Web-based service that lets you escape your inbox by alerting you to those critical, "can't miss" messages. And today, AwayFind leaves beta with the arrival of an iPhone app that makes separating yourself from your email account easier than ever before.
Google Chrome announced the availability of its new web app store today, which means web applications are easier to ever to access and can leverage HTML5 features like local storage mixed with web pages.
The first one I tried? My trusty Twitter client Tweetdeck. I've said for years that Twitter pays my rent as a journalist, but when I say that - these days that means TweetDeck too. So how does the new TweetDeck for Chrome look? It looks great. It feels great. It is great, if you've got casual Twitter needs. I'll be sticking with the desktop version, myself, but hopefully only for a few more days, as the TweetDeck crew adds features to the Chrome version.
Flipboard, the iPad "social" magazine which launched to a barrage of press back in July, has just announced the addition of several more publishing partners, the first to test Flipboard's new framework called Flipboard Pages. This framework automatically converts traditional Web content into an iPad-friendly format, featuring full-screen, paginated, magazine-like pages.
When readers tap content from these publishers shared by friends on Twitter or Facebook within the Flipboard app, they're now taken to this new magazine-like reading experience instead of a traditional Web page. And for publishers, the result of the tap is the same as a Web hit on their end.
Flipboard Pages, however, isn't the only big news coming out of the company today.
Aro Mobile, a mobile communications startup backed by Microsoft's Paul Allen, made waves back in October when it emerged after three years in stealth as a suite of interconnected applications for Android smartphones. Installed as a single download from the Android Market, Aro places icons on user's homescreens: Phone, Email, Browser, Calendar, Contacts and Messaging. These are the core "PIM" (personal information manager) applications on mobile devices.
Because of Android's relative openness, Aro is able to completely integrate its PIM solution onto the Android mobile platform. But now, as the company prepares to launch its iPhone version, compromises had to be made. This begs the question: can innovation around core apps even work on iPhone?
Aviary, a New York startup that provides web-based media editing tools, has announced today that it now offers a simple photo editing widget that can be plugged-in to any website with ease. Called Feather, the tool uses HTML5 to let users quickly and easily remove red-eye, add text, crop photos or perform other simple image editing tasks.
Aviary says that the service is free to use but will include premium features later. The tool puts an emphasis on customizability now and will be entirely open sourced later. Site owners can choose between a floating, draggable widget or a lightbox and site visitors can edit images without ever leaving a publisher's page.
