iPhone has a special YouTube player that you can launch right from the home screen. So now you can access and browse YouTube videos wherever you go. And when you find a video you want to send your friends, iPhone can even create an email with the link in it for you.

 All I can say is that Blingo rocks.

Netscape has released Navigator 9, bringing the latest Firefox engine into the fold, as well as a new version of the browser for Mac. This new release includes a new, slimmer theme, a Mini Browser in the sidebar, and ties into Netscape’s news site with a “share” icon in the address bar to easily submit sites. You can also see your friends activity on the Netscape site in a sidebar panel.

Apple has posted 3 commercials for the iPhone that should start airing soon on TV. It also sets the official release/availability date of the iPhone as June 29.

For complete coverage of the iPhone and all things Apple, be sure and check out our sister blog, Apple Gazette.

ForkLift is designed to be the fastest, most powerful file manager for the Mac. Connect to FTP or SFTP servers, manage your Amazon S3 account or your mobile devices over Bluetooth. All these features are beautifully integrated into a sophisticated, yet easy to use Cocoa based interface. Dual-pane view will dramatically increase your productivity along with state-of-the-art features like live preview, spring loaded folders and any-to-any workflow. All this to be topped by tabs, to keep your workspace nice and clean.

I have just started to play around with it, but it seems cool. It has some nice features in the 1.0 release like support for Bonjour, Growl, and even Rar Archives.

Well, I got back from a long Memorial Day weekend and had an e-mail notifying me that one of my “friends” had won a prize, which means that I won a prize as well. Now, I get e-mails all the time notifying me that I had won a movie ticket or an iTunes giftcard, and I have probably only claimed half of them. That is partly my fault. I forget to star the email and it gets pushed to page 2 or 3 of my Gmail account before I have a chance to act on it.

This e-mail was different though. I hadn’t just won another gift card. One of my referrals won a 42″ Plasma HDTV! I immediately accepted the prize and told my wife – who was less than enthusiastic, quipping “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

So I went through the necessary steps, faxed some paperwork to, and got a call from someone at Best Buy HQ in Minneapolis today to schedule delivery of my TV from the local Best Buy. Looks like it will be here at my office early next week.

Disclosure: If you don’t want to visit Blingo through our referral link, click here to go directly

Now, if I could just find a Wii for my office…

A great deal if you are a Mac user and want some great apps. Here is what they are putting in the bundle.

• Delicious Library. (info, normally $40)
• RapidWeaver RapidWeaver. (info, normally $40)
• iClip 4 iClip 4 (exclusive beta access) (info, normally $39)
• FotoMagico FotoMagico (info, normally $80)
• ShapeShifter ShapeShifter (info, normally $20)
• DEVONthink Personal DEVONthink Personal (info, normally $39.95)
• Disco Disco (info, normally $14.95)
• Pangea Games Pangea game of your choice (info, normally $19.95-$29.95
• NewsFire Newsfire? (info, normally $18.99), unlocked for all at $50,000 raised for charities
• TextMate TextMate?!! (info, normally $49), unlocked for all at $100,000 raised

Head on over and help them raise some money!

Mozilla has officially relased Firefox 2. Although it has been available for the past 24 hours on the FTP site, it is now available for download via the Mozilla website.

You can also get

The Chicago Tribune posted this photo today of U2 and Oprah at the Michigan Avenue Apple store in Chicago, clearly showing the red iPod Nano. Also, someone posted a photo of the Apple store in Manhattan getting a makeover, converting the normally white “apple” that hangs inside the entrance to a red one.

Ten dollars of each PROJECT RED iPod purchased will go towards the PROJECT RED Charity.

Google has finally brought Writely into the fold, fully integrating it into its other services. Before, Writely existed as a seperate service, still sporting the same interface it had when it was purchased by Google. Writely is a web-based word processor that allows you to create documents that are compatable with Microsoft Word.

With the launch of Documents, Google combines Writely and its recent Spreadsheet app into a single site. People have always talked about the possibility of a Google “Office” app
something that could replace the need for Microsoft Office. This could be the first step.

The deal is regarded as a largely defensive one that leapfrogs Google into a leading role in a burgeoning Internet marketplace. Moreover, the Google/YouTube deal highlights how Google and other Internet companies are betting heavily on video to attract more customers and generate more advertising revenue.

Microsoft’s “iPod Killer”, the Zune, will retail for $249.99, while songs for the device will cost about $.99 each. At this price, it sounds like Microsoft could take a loss on each unit sold, similar to what it did with the XBox 360.

Microsoft said it needed to put a comparable price on Zune, even if it meant that the company will suffer a loss from the device’s sales this holiday season.

“Halo Wars” is the next big real-time strategy game from Ensemble Studios, creators of Age of Empires. Designed exclusively for the Xbox 360, “Halo Wars” allows you to take charge of the human UNSC armies and see the Halo universe from a totally new perspective.

The time frame for Halo Wars is set before Halo 1, when the UNSC first encounters the Convenant. The game is being developed as an XBox 360 exclusive and no release date has been announced.

Walt Disney chief executive Robert Iger said on Tuesday the company sold 125,000 movie downloads worth $1 million in revenue through Apple Computer’s iTunes Store during the offering’s first week, Reuters is reporting.

Seems to be a pretty good start for the service. With results like this, I would expect to see other studios jumping on board soon.

Marking the next big milestone for its Connected Entertainment vision, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled details of the first products to be released under its Zune™ brand. Designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community, Zune will create new ways for consumers to connect and share entertainment experiences. The Zune experience centers around connection — connection to your library, connection to friends, connection to community and connection to other devices.

The Zune features a 30GB HDD, 3″ QVGA (320×240) screen, and WiFi. No word on price yet, although some speculate around $300, and it will be available this holiday season.

With all the Apple goodness going around yesterday, it seems that the release of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD sort of slipped under the radar. The three disc set with a bonus disc is available for about $50 on Amazon.

Each disc includes 2 versions of the original Trilogy: the “enhanced” version with new scenes and special effects, and the original theatrical release.

UPDATE: I apparently linked to the wrong product at Amazon. Here are the links to all three episodes.

• Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
• Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
• Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

YShout is a lightweight package that allows you to easily add a shoutbox to your website. Shoutboxes are a great tool to receive feedback from your visitors, and YShout allows you to chat with them in real-time! YShout is also:

Think of it as a basic version of Campfire written in PHP rather than Ruby.

They also have:

• $200 rebate on 15″ MacBookPro $2299 – $200 = $2099
• $200 rebate on 17″ MacBook Pro $2799 – $200 = $2599
• $100 off white MacBook $1299 – $100 = $1199
• $100 off the black MacBook $1499 – $100 = $1399

All with free Super Saver Shipping!

More Apple Deals At Amazon

The tools that have been released is a stand-alone uploader application and a full-on iPhoto plugin (think FlickrExport) that lets you send photos directly from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums. I decided to give them a little test drive and here are my thoughts.

The iPhoto plugin works well enough. You select which photo or photos you want upload, chose Export from the File menu and click on the Picasa Web tab. You can either upload the photo to an existing album or create a new album. It will also let you resize the image on upload or leave them alone.

Once it starts uploading, it shows you a progress window with how much time is remaining, how fast your are uploading and how much data you are transferring overall (3mb of 4mb, for example). Once the upload is complete, it gives you an option of opening the album in your browser.

The standalone uploader works very similar to the uploader tool that is bundled with Flock. You drag the photos you want to upload into the interface, where you can create a new album or add the photos to an existing album. You can also add a caption to the photos before uploading them. Aside from the drag and drop function to add the photos to the upload batch, it works in much the same way as the iPhoto plugin.

Both apps are listed as Beta (of course), and seem to be pretty stable. I just uploaded 2 photos using each method and ran into no problems. Will they sway me from using Flickr and FlickrExport? Probably not, but they are nice to have and at least if I DO want to upload images to my Picasa Web Album, I don’t have to use my web browser to do so.

Republished from the author’s site with permission.

Well, I was flipping through the channels tonight at home and caught the tail end of a commercial adveritising DVD sets of both series. The Animaniacs DVD Set contains 25 episodes and the Pinky and The Brain DVD Set contains 22 episodes. Both are definitely on my wishlist.

To check this, go to Applications > Utilities > Audio Midi Setup.

I have posted about this problem here, also pushing it to Digg, as well as posting numerous times on the Apple Discussion Boards, but to no avail. Upgrading to 10.4.7 didn’t seem to resolve the issue either.
Daryl Rosin commented in the post that he was able to remedy the problem by running Garage Band. It seems that by just opening the GarageBand application once, VLC no longer changes the Audio Output Format, which means that audio now works in Flash.

In addition to running Garage Band, I ran Disk Utility and verified permissions on the hard drive. That turned up some permissions issues with the Flash Player files that were repaired.

So apparently the combination of running Garage Band once, then repairing disk permissions on the Flash Player files has fixed the problem of the Audio Output Format being reset whenever 3rd party audio/video applications are run.

Reposted from the author’s personal website. Digg This!

Google Desktop gives you easy access to information on your computer and from the web. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks. It makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google.

Google Desktop doesn’t just help you search your computer; it also helps you gather new information from the web with Sidebar, a desktop feature that shows you your new email, weather, stock information, personalized news, RSS/Atom feeds, and more. Sidebar is personalized automatically, without any manual configuration required (though you can certainly make your own customizations if you want to or turn off automatic personalization).

Google Desktop is available as a single download or as part of the Google Pack, a suite of applications from Google such as Desktop, the Google Toolbar, Picasa and more.

I will say that I haven’t had any reason to use Picasa. All of my photos are stored on my MacBookPro, and I use iPhoto and the most excellent FlickrExport plugin to share those photos via my Flickr account.

At first, I thought you actually had to be a Picasa user (on the PC) to use the service, but I was able to upload photos from my Mac without any problem. I was under the impression that this would be a service tied into Google’s Picasa application. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

A few things I have seen that I am not fond of. First of all, it appears that it will only support JPEG formatted images. I tried uploading GIF and PNG images, and was given a warning that the image was not a valid JPEG. With Flickr, I can upload PNG, GIF and JPEG, which is nice since my screenshots are saved as PNG.

There was also no upload progress indicator. I uploaded two photos and the only way I knew anything was happening was seeing the progress icon on my browser spinning. It also doesn’t look like you can upload a photo without creating an album for it. I also wasn’t able to describe or title the image immediately after the upload.

Aside from those minor issues, it was pretty easy to set up the album and upload the photos. It has a pretty good interface, showing your storage capacity used and available. It will let you rotate images to correctly display their orientation, resize the thumbnails and rearrange the order the photos appear in the album.

You can send invitations via e-mail to those you want to share your album with. For a visitor looking at the gallery, they can view the images in a full-browser slideshow, zoom in on them, and subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire gallery or for specific albums.

So there you have it. If you want to try out the Picasa Web Albums, you can go to the service’s website and sign up for an invitation. You can also download the Picasa application if you are on a PC and use it (I assume) to send images directly to your web album.