Half Off for WWDC Week, Just in Time for Summer.
aTV Flash, the first alternative browser and multimedia center for the new Apple TV, is out and available for purchase. We have covered aTV Flash in the past week, and we saw the app it’s capable of bringing several new features to the 2nd gen Apple TV, such as HTML5 playback via a custom browser or weather information.
The first public version of the app is available for $19.95 during the beta (or pre-order) phase here. Read more
Of all the cool mods and hacks for Apple TV 2nd gen and AirPlay we’ve been covering in the past weeks, this one’s for Cupertino’s little black box has to be the most promising one.
Two weeks ago a video of aTV Flash, developed by Fire Core, made the rounds as it appeared like full-featured web browsing with Last.fm integration was coming to jailbroken Apple TVs. Development on the suite has been proceeding steadily, and a few days ago a new video of the tweak in action surfaced showing support for HTML5 video inside Fire Core’s browser – all played smoothly by the Apple TV.
As wrote by the developers, some parts of the app like Last.fm integration and the installer are ready for beta, but the release of iOS 4.1 for Apple TV and support for additional video codecs are turning out to be more difficult tasks to accomplish. In the meantime, check out the demo video below, and get ready for aTV Flash to make your Apple TV a lot more useful in the upcoming weeks. [via 9to5Mac] Read more
Is there’s one thing I can’t stand on Safari for iPhone is the way it displays “tabs”: by default, when you hit the tabs button in the toolbar you’re brought to a page with a “gallery” of all your open pages, and you have to swipe between them to navigate to the site you want to switch to. On the iPad, Safari is much better: it doesn’t display real desktop tabs (although there’s an iCab for that), but at least it presents them as beautiful thumbnails on a dark grid. It’s easier to switch between websites on the iPad because you just have to tap.
GridTab, a new tweak available on the Cydia Store at $0.99, enables iPad-like tab navigation on the iPhone. Once installed, you’ll be able to switch between open pages just like on the iPad by tapping on thumbnails. Very cool.
GridTab is available at $0.99, and I highly recommend it.
For all those of you who have always been interested in trying Opera but never quite made the switch, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. Today the Opera team shipped version 11 beta, which adds a lot of new features to the already innovative (yet not so popular) browser including what the team says to be a revolutionary “tab stacking” functionality.
Think of tab stacking as “tab grouping” ported to the address bar: if you click and hold on a tab, you can drag it onto another one to create a “stack”, which is basically a group of tabs aimed at uncluttering your browser window. Say you want to group all your social networking sites or TSA-related links in one place, now Opera lets you do that with stacks. The implementation on OS X is nice, although I wished stacks had some sort of 3D” effect, where one would easily understand how many tabs are in each stacks. Instead, you get an expand button that indicates a tab is a stack. Animations are cool. Read more
iOS is a “closed” platform, right?
Impressive work by Michael Flarup.
A few minutes ago Apple released an update to Safari, which reaches version 5.0.3. It’s available now in Software Update, or via direct download on Apple’s website.
Apple also released Safari 4.1.3 for Tiger users. Safari 5.0.3 comes with a variety of fixes and overall performance improvements. Specifically, the update addresses issues with search and text input fields on Netflix and Facebook, improves stability of Javascript-intensive extensions and introduces more reliable pop-up blocking.
Check out the full changelog below. Read more
Developed by Milind Alvares of Smoking Apples (and Beautiful Pixels) Facebook Neue is an extension for Chrome and Safari 5 that does one thing very well: it makes Facebook simpler. The extension removes the ugly ads from Facebook (sorry Mark, I’m tired of Coca Cola ads) and resizes the main container to two columns, making it more Twitter-like. As Milind says it’s far from feeling exactly like Twitter, but I like this new layout. It makes everything readable and elegant.
Also in the extension:
I also selectively hid some of the settings in the sidebars, such as application links, or that language settings button next to the chat toolbar. I was happily using this until I realised I could very well just convert this into an extension and share it with everyone. Some more bug fixes, and a redesigned login page later, version 1.0 was ready.
I’m sure some of the changes, like the fixed masthead or the rounding of image avatars, are not going to be universally appreciated, and I’m okay with that.
I love it. Go download it here.
RIM believes in its upcoming Playbook tablet as a feasible alternative to Apple’s iPad. With the new video comparison they posted on their official Youtube channel, it looks like RIM is betting a lot on the web surfing capabilities of the device.
The video shows that the Playbook is faster at loading web pages than the iPad, although the selection of websites is limited and a test is focused on loading a website that feature “rich Flash content”. The iPad can’t load that, and the Playbook seems pretty fast at rendering it, but the video doesn’t show how scrolling speed is affected by Flash. The Playbook’s browser looks fast anyway, scoring a 100/100 on Acid3 test and loading a Javascript / HTML5 Canvas based webpage faster than the iPad. It looks fluid.
Check out the video below. Read more
