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New 3x3 cm Apple Touchscreen Spotted in the Wild?

Apple.pro posted some pictures of a new Apple-branded touchscreen, 3x3 cm in size, which - of course - they don’t know what it could belong to. As MacRumors notices, the site has been a reliable source of early Apple parts in the past - such as the Macbook enclosures and iPhone 4 parts.

What could this ever be? Some kind of new iPod nano? The much rumored iWatch? A simple demo unit for Steve Job’s touch-sensitive microwave oven? We’ll see.

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iOS 4 Now with Direct iTunes Access - DJ Apps Developers Rejoice

DJ apps seem to do pretty good in the App Store, but from today on, they’ll just keep getting better. One of the biggest complaints of DJ apps devs was the lack of direct access to the music library to edit songs already synced with iTunes. You had to upload another song to an app-specific library, fire up the app and find that song you uploaded.

Now, it looks like you can just pick up a song from iPod.app and start scratching.

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Flash-free Nexus One Faster than iPhone 4 [Video]

We keep reading about benchmarks, but numbers are what they are - numbers. We want to see the actual results when it comes to browser speed testing. We want the javascript loading tests - we want the real thing, Jason Chen might as well add.

And there you have it, Engadget saved us all once again. They took an iPhone 4, a Nexus One running Android 2.2 (Froyo), put them side-by-side and shot a video. While opening web pages, not some geeky benchmark utility. It turns out, the Nexus One is slightly faster than the iPhone 4 with Flash uninstalled. With Flash on it though, speed is about the same.

What does this mean for us? It means that when Apple will release an update for iOS 4 (and it should happen soon) we’ll likely see the same performances on both devices, but Google will have some hard times trying to explain why the much-requested Flash plugin slows down devices. And considering that Android doesn’t get updated as often as iOS - Safari will just keep getting better and better in a few months.

Check out the videos (Flash and sans Flash) after the break. [via Engadget]

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Epic Win App: GTD + RPG - We Can’t Wait.

You know what’s wrong about to-do lists? They’re boring. Ok, maybe all your to-do stuff is boring - but wouldn’t it be great if it was actually fun and enjoyable? Like, you can’t wait to wash dishes or get that meeting report done.

Epic Win app for iPhone aims at being your ultimate source of Getting Things Done combined with some good role playing.

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Blast for Mac Keeps Recently Opened Files and Apps in your Menubar

When Federico talked about subfolders on iOS 4 earlier today, he started to hit on an issue with folders in general. Management. We’re entering an era of computing where it’s not so much about where you store files, but about your device taking care of you. I suppose the word I want to use is “containers.” In iOS 4, we have a hidden container for photographs and pictures which the Photos app manages, and we have a hidden container for podcasts and music which the iPod app manages. My ideas of management have been fluctuating lately, and today I’m feeling a little frisky: people shouldn’t have to manage the files and folders on their computer even though they want to.

I even think of the Mac having containers; your Documents folder; your Downloads folder; your Desktop folder; all of these are places where users dump files for basic organization. Some wish to further their organization with subfolders, but when it comes to finally retrieving documents it can be a pain.

Blast realizes that finding files between editing and viewing can be cumbersome – it’s worse when you can’t even remember what you worked on yesterday if you happen to have weird naming conventions. Blast by Apparent sits in your menubar and gives you access to recently used files and applications which helps reduce the need to navigate the filesystem.

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Average Subfolder Maniacs

Two days ago I tried to use my girlfriend’s iPhone 3GS running iPhone OS 3.1.3 and I couldn’t believe it was the same device - running the same operating system -  I had two weeks ago. iOS 4 is a huge step forward for Apple (iAds), developers (new APIs) and users (multitasking, folders). Now that we have iOS 4, it’s hard to look back and be unbiased about iPhone OS 3.

There’s something that deeply concerns me though, and it’s about the way people think about folders.

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iOS 4 On The iPad Won’t Be What You Think

I’m reading many comments these days of people frustrated because Apple hasn’t announced further plans for iOS 4 on the iPad. We know it’s going to ship this fall, but we don’t know anything more than that. So people seem to think that Apple doesn’t care about the iPad, now that the iPhone 4 is available and they’re having some hard times convincing customers that it works just fine and all the issues will be fixed with a software update.

I’ll tell you what, you’re wrong.

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