The day has finally come: today Opera has submitted the iPhone version of its browser to the App Store, and now it’s up to Apple to approve it.

Opera Mini, which is already available on other smartphones, is one of the leading browsers in the mobile scene, sporting a nice looking user interface and its well-known speed, achieved with to a compression method that involves Opera’s servers (like proxies) that should make the browsing experience a lot faster than MobileSafari’s one.

Whether this is good or not (would you redirect your traffic to an external server?), we can’t wait to find out how Opera compares to the other browsers available for iPhone OS, especially when for the navigation itself.

To get a better hang of how Opera Mini for iPhone works, you can watch the official preview video embedded below.

thermoCLine, the quick entry text field for Mac OS X , has been updated and is now known as Threshold. The new version now sports better integration with a lot of 3rd party applications, including Things, Coda, Yojimbo, Omnifocus, Textmate and many more.

As the developer writes “the goal is to be a universal quick entry text field for all your applications”. And with the latest update, Threshold is on the right path to do so.

9to5mac

He did it again. Steve Jobs, well known for replying to customer’s emails every once in a while, replied to an English iPad enthusiast telling him Apple won’t support Google’s Picasa albums and faces recognition. He further suggested to get iPhoto instead, which has much better features.

And yes, he’s still running iPhone OS 3.1.2.

It may sound like a joke, but it’s not: with a blog post Linebreak has announced the official release date of the long-awaited Cloud app, the Mac app that should revolutionize the way you share stuff on the web which we previously covered here.

Cloud app has gone under some major changes and improvements during these past months, the web app has been rewritten and the Mac client should sport some new Cocoa goodness as well. Also, the developers say they’ll open an API next week, so if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate Cloud’s feature into your own app, now you can.

You should look forward to April 1st. It’s gonna be a great day for Mac users.

Patently Apple has discovered some documents on USPTO today referring to a new application for iPhone Apple’s developing called “iGroups”. The app should be based on the MobileMe infrastructure, allowing users to create groups and communicate with people attending “live events”. The whole document is rich and worth a read, here’s an excerpt:

“Apple is working on a new communications based social networking application that they’re simply calling “iGroups.” According to the documents published by USPTO today, Apple’s iGroup will be a new service that will work on your iPhone and likely work with MobileMe. The idea is to allow groups of friends or colleagues attending such events as a concert, a tradeshow, business meeting, wedding or rally to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information or reactions to live events as they’re occurring. The technology behind the new iGroup social networking applications works with a very sophisticated cryptographic key generation system to ensure security and privacy of your communications. Interestingly, the patent states that if one of the devices in your group happens to be without true positioning technology, it appears that Apple’s MobileMe service will provide some sort of “virtual GPS” capability to that user so that they could be aware of the locations of others in the group. Apple’s patent provides us with example scenarios of both a concert and WWDC event to clarify the service.”

Geo location, real time communication, MobileMe and a lot more in a single application that seems to start from the solid foundations of services like Gowalla and Foursquare. Interesting.

Link

“If true, the total number of iPads reserved or pre-ordered in the first week may be close to 400,000.”

Which means it will be a gold rush again for developers.

Remember when Amazon announced they were developing a Kindle app for Mac? It’s now available here, ready to be downloaded. It’s definitely straightforward and simple, but at least it’s something.

Available at developer.apple.com.

From what we’ve been told so far, one major change include the Photos.app which, upon launch, will show 3 tabs: Photos, Albums and Camera. The camera tab seems to be there only for the Camera Connection Kit for iPad, thus putting an end to every camera rumor we’ve seen spreading around.

German blog Touch-this.de has received some extra screenshots of IM+ for the iPad directly from Shape Services, which show more of the functionalities the developers are implementing in the upcoming new version.

Modal windows, popovers, icons in top toolbars, emoticons in keyboard. Sure they look good, but there are some elements (like the aforementioned icons) that really seem out of place and, most of all, not so easy to actually touch, due to the lack of spacing between them. It’s good to know that the developers are adopting the new UI standards for developing an iPad app, not just mimicking the old iPhone guidelines on a bigger screen.