Take Five: New App From The Iconfactory For When You Forget To Un-Pause Your Music

I love waking up to new apps from people I respect and admire. The Iconfactory guys are among these people: how couldn’t the makers of Twitterrific not be in the list? They’re great developers and experienced designers that don’t fail to surprise on each new app release.

Take Five is a new app for iPhone from The Iconafctory aimed at letting you remember about the music you paused and never turned back on. Admittedly, this is quite a common problem: not all iPhone apps support automatic resume after a phone call interruption (Spotify, for example) and so many times we simply forget to press the play button again. Take Five automatically fades your music back in after 5 minutes. Why didn’t we think of this before? Read more

New Gorgeous Grooveshark App Hits Cydia

The guys over at Grooveshark are going back to their roots: they have just released a brand new 2.0 version of their iPhone client in Cydia, where it all started. Grooveshark, in fact, released the first version of the music client in Cydia in 2009, when Apple didn’t want stuff like background streaming on its iPhones and iPod Touches. Last August, though, Apple revised its rules and approved the Grooveshark app - just to pull it a week later due to a complaint filed by the Universal Music Group UK.

As it turns out, the promising music streaming startup has grown tired of Apple’s rules and limitations, so they’re going back to Cydia. The app has been released for free under BigBoss’ repository. Read more

Zune could Befriend iPod in Possible Mac Matrimony (Update: Windows Phone Sync Confirmed)

Microsoft was never able to hang with the cool kids even after they released a rather sublime MP3 player you might now as the Zune. In its three iterations from a brown rubber brick to sexy brushed metal beast, wanting Mac owners could never tap into Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace (which offers a pretty good subscription service) through their Xbox inspired Zune software, or enjoy the startling good looks of the Zune’s eerily minimal (and sometimes purposefully illegible) interface.

Now with the release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft may finally be willing to reach out to Macintosh owners interested in experiencing Redmond’s take on social media, communication, and of course music and video. Engadget reports this evening that the Zune software (and of course all the Zuney hardware that goes with it) may be ported to OS X thanks to a tip from a UK Microsoft Marketing guru (and Microsoft does have gurus you know) by the name of Oded Ran. In an exclusive #WP7 announcement on Twitter, the promise of being able to use “Zune” on our Macs to sync with all of the upcoming phones was made, though the announcement was deleted shortly after.

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Chromium for Mac Gets Spiffy Google Instant Integration

I love Google Instant: since Google launched its new real-time updating version of the search engine last month, I’ve been using it regularly and, yeah, I like it. A lot. I know many people are out there would like to revert back to the old “type and press enter” system but hey - this is where we’re going. Sorry if you don’t like it.

For as much as I love Google Instant, when I’m in my browser I don’t really fancy manually opening Google.com every time I need to fire up a new query. My searches start from the new Omnibar instead (Google’s definition of the address bar) because the Cmd + L shortcut is just too useful and fast. For this reason, I’ve been looking forward to the Google team baking Google Instant right into the browser and finally, we Mac users can have it: the Chromium trunk channel for Mac was updated earlier today to include support for Instant right out of the box. Read more