Opera 11.5 Released, Features Streamlined UI, Live Speed Dials And Password Sync

Opera has today released Opera 11.5, a fairly major upgrade on Opera 11, which was released six months ago. The update’s most obvious feature to users will be its new and improved “featherweight” UI that has been significantly streamlined – shredding a number of buttons and increasing the display area. According to Jan Standal, VP of Desktop Products at Opera, a major reason for the change was that users were reporting that Opera was slower than the other browsers. In 11.5, Opera is now around 10-15% faster in SVG rendering.

Opera’s Speed Dial is another feature that has received some big improvements in 11.5, and now touts a new ‘Live Speed Dial’ feature. The feature allows a new type of extension that lets developers create live content for a Speed Dial box. Some examples of this include a stock ticker, weather information and a Twitter box.

As all web browsers have been doing, Opera 11.5 continues to improve support for web standards and in particular HTML5. Another nice new feature is that passwords can now be kept in sync on multiple computers with Opera Link in 11.5 – but Opera makes special note that they have focused on improving security to enable this feature and have also introduced features to help users create secure passwords. The final new feature of note in Opera 11.5 is simplified installation of missing plug-ins, whether it be Flash, Java or some other plug-in, it can be installed with a few clicks and users do not have to restart the browser to start using them.

You can download Opera 11.5 for Mac and Windows directly from their website, the Mac App Store version has not yet been approved. Jump the break for some screenshots of Opera 11.5.

[Via TechCrunch]

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Rovio Hires Iron Man 2 Executive Producer For Angry Birds Movies

Back in August last year, there was news of Rovio being approached by several movie studios to potentially create an Angry Birds movie. Over the following year, Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise has continued to see exceptional growth on the iOS platform and has since launched Angry Birds merchandise and a deal with 20th Century Fox to create Angry Birds Rio – a crossover version of Angry Birds with the animated movie Rio that arrived in cinemas earlier this year.

I’m very honored and excited to join Rovio, and my goal is to help unleash its great potential, Rovio has already had amazing success and established a great brand with Angry Birds. The business model, intellectual properties, and the franchise potential of Angry Birds give Rovio the most exciting prospects I have seen in the entertainment business since Marvel in 2003.

Yet this isn’t enough for Rovio, they are set on creating their own Angry Birds movie and if you haven’t thought that they were serious about it, think again. Today they revealed that they have brought David Maisel on board to be a special advisor to Rovio and the executive producer for the Angry Birds films – yes, “films”, according to this Rovio blog post. Maisel has got considerable experience for this role as he was the executive producer for Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger and was the Chairman of Marvel Studios.

Rovio also reveal in the post that earlier this month they had acquired a Finnish animation studio, Kombo, to add to its in-house animation capabilities. They note that they are still looking out for more animation talent – but it isn’t clear if this is for the Angry Birds apps or movie development.

[Via The Next Web]

Apple Releases Thunderbolt Cable, Sony Unveils Details Of New PC Featuring Thunderbolt

Update: The cable has made its way on to the online US Apple Store and it is indeed US$49.

Following yesterday’s Thunderbolt firmware update that brought “performance and stability fixes”, Apple has released the ‘Apple Thunderbolt cable’ that allows users to connect and daisy chain multiple Thunderbolt capable devices. The 2m long accessory is simply a cable that features the Thunderbolt connector on both ends. It is priced at $55 in Australia, £39.00 in the UK but has not yet made it into the US Apple Store – although based on similarly priced accessories it will be roughly US$49.

Thunderbolt technology supports blazing-fast data transfer with two independent channels of 10Gbit/s each. Use the Apple Thunderbolt cable to connect your Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to your new iMac or new MacBook Pro.

As explained in our Thunderbolt editorial a few months ago, the Thunderbolt specification works by daisy chaining multiple devices together – allowing just one cable from the Mac to actually connect a number of devices together. This Thunderbolt accessory cable is that cable that can connect multiple Thunderbolt capable devices together.

The other piece of Thunderbolt news is that Sony has announced details of its new 13.1-inch VAIO Z that features Thunderbolt, except they are calling it Light Peak (the old name of the specification). Interestingly it features a ‘Power Media Dock’ that includes an external GPU and optical drive – all connected by Light Peak. It is certainly an interesting use of the Thunderbolt specification, and with its speeds that external GPU will certainly make that laptop much more powerful when connected.

[Via This is my next]

Thunderbolt Firmware Update Released

A few minutes ago Apple released Thunderbolt Firmware Update through its downloads website and the desktop Software Update control panel, targeting all machines running the recently introduced Thunderbolt I/O connectivity standards. Until today, Apple has released new MacBook Pros and iMacs featuring the Thunderbolt technology from Intel. The update brings “performance and stability fixes”.

This update provides Thunderbolt performance and stability fixes.

When your computer restarts a gray screen will appear with a status bar to indicate the progress of the update.

Do not disturb or shut off the power on your computer during this update.

Apple’s release notes don’t specifically mention the targeted machines so we assume it applies to all 2011 Macs with at least a Thunderbolt port. The new MacBook Airs rumored to be getting a Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt update later this month or in July will likely come with these fixes pre-installed, so if you need to download the patch now go ahead and pull the 486 KB package from Apple’s website.

Don’t Be Stupid: Keep App Reviews To Yourself While Using an iOS Beta

These past few weeks of iOS 5 testing and casual talking with my fellow writers and Twitter followers had me thinking about the fact that some people really don’t get the difference between “public previews” and “developer-only betas”. I’m talking about those people who are leaving negative reviews in iTunes for apps that are allegedly “broken” under iOS 5, which reached the beta 2 status last Friday.

There’s an important difference between previews and developer betas. With previews, like iTunes in the Cloud, Apple feels confident enough to release a new piece of software with new features to the public and let everyone enjoy it until the final version (with more features) comes out. Example: automatic downloads and past purchases. In spite of Apple calling it a “beta”, this is in fact a public preview (that requires iTunes 10.3, also public) of the new iTunes in the Cloud system that will gain the additional Match functionality this Fall. So why is Apple letting regular users mess with a beta? Because it’s not really a “beta”, not in the sense we geeks are used to when seeing the beta label on Apple’s various Dev Centers. iTunes in the Cloud is a public preview of something that will grow even bigger in a matter of a few months. The company knows it’s stable enough for everyone to play with. All the systems are in place. No third-party support is required. All users can benefit from it now, and will get to use more functionalities once the faux beta label goes away. It’s a good deal. Read more

Fring Releases iPad App with Group Video Calling

After teasing a brand new iPhone version of its mobile app with support for fullscreen video calling and dynamic video quality and then releasing it in the App Store for free back in April, fring today announced the availability of its first official iPad app, which takes advantage of the device’s bigger screen to lay out a larger and taller contact list, as well as visualize participants in a group video call in a wider UI.

As usual, fring is completely free and cross-platform, which means you’ll be able to call from your iPad on WiFi or 3G to other fring users running iOS or Android devices. Text chat is enabled as well, with a split interface that allows you to quickly switch between your buddy list and what a contact is saying. An activity log button in the upper left corner gives you access to your previous activities on fring and chats. The fringOut system has been integrated to call mobile and landline phones using fring’s low rates (you can buy credit on iTunes with in-app purchases), but perhaps the most intriguing addition is the possibility of dragging & dropping new contacts onto a video calling session, as also seen in the app’s promo video. The new app works with the iPad’s cameras in both orientations, and can display multiple video calls on screen simultaneously.

You can download fring for iPad here. Check out the video below.
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MacBook Air Supplies At Best Buy And Others Dwindle, Refresh Creeps Closer

It is pretty clear that a refreshed MacBook Air line is coming soon, based on the numerous rumors and reports that have come in over the past month or so. Further evidence of an imminent refresh came late yesterday night when 9to5 Mac discovered that Best Buy had stopped shipping all MacBook Airs from its website. Although they are still selling them from their retail stores, stock is reportedly low, with some “exceptionally low on MacBook Air stock”.

The UK Best Buy online store is also completely out of stock except for the 128GB version, which is low in stock and can only be collected from certain retail locations.  The story is similar with Canadian retailer Future Shop which is also low on stock as well as Amazon, which has low stock in a number of countries. 9to5 Mac also speculated in its post that July 4th could be a potential release date for the refreshed models, other rumors had suggested the launch would correlate with the launch of Lion.

The refreshed line of MacBook Airs is widely expected to include the new Sandy Bridge processors from Intel, as well as the new Thunderbolt I/O port which made its debut in this years refresh of the MacBook Pro models, and more recently in refreshed iMacs – both refreshes also brought new Sandy Bridge processors.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Apple Blocks SHSH Blob Method Of Downgrading Firmware Versions In iOS 5

Apple and the jailbreak community have always enjoyed somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game between them and today we are learning that Apple has pounced to fix up one of the common circumventions used by jailbreakers. The circumvention in question doesn’t involve an actual exploit to jailbreak devices but rather a way that people were using to downgrade from one iOS version to another – often to a version that was capable of being jailbroken.

Apple had implemented a system where it would only authorize certain iOS builds to be installed, making it nearly impossible for downgrades. The circumvention was that by using SHSH blobs people could use iTunes to restore to a previous firmware version. According to what the jailbreak Dev-Team has said in a blog post today, that is all changing in iOS 5 as Apple moves to a new signing process. As the Dev-Team explains, the new process will become much more like the BBTicket (Baseband Ticket), which will make it much more difficult to reverse engineer:

Starting with the iOS5 beta, the role of the “APTicket” is changing — it’s being used much like the “BBTicket” has always been used. The LLB and iBoot stages of the boot sequence are being refined to depend on the authenticity of the APTicket, which is uniquely generated at each and every restore (in other words, it doesn’t depend merely on your ECID and firmware version…it changes every time you restore, based partly on a random number). This APTicket authentication will happen at every boot, not just at restore time. Because only Apple has the crypto keys to properly sign the per-restore APTicket, replayed APTickets are useless.

It isn’t all bad news though, restoring to pre-iOS 5 firmware versions will still be possible (although it will probably require an old version of iTunes) and tethered limera1n exploits will not be affected by this. As for why Apple has decided to now change this process, the Dev-Team explains that it was only a matter of time before Apple made the changes and that with delta iOS updates, it was made all the more necessary. The Dev-Team ends the post by noting that whilst Apple has “stepped up their game”,  there may be ways to combat this move.

[Via Dev-Team Blog]