DoubleTwist Does Podcasts

DoubleTwist, the excellent free media manager, has added podcast features to its Windows version. (The Mac one gets them next month.) If you have an Android or Palm phone–or any of the scads of other supported devices–and a collection of songs and videos, you need this program…

Opera Mini 5 Beta for Android

Opera has released a beta of its Opera Mini 5 browser for Google’s Android OS. Mini’s signature feature is the way it caches and compresses Web pages on the server side so they’re relatively snappy on a phone even via a sluggish wireless connection. As its name suggests, Mini started out as a pretty basic browser, but version 5 is full-featured for a phone browsser: It’s got tabs, a password manager, and Opera’s Speed Dial feature that provides one-click access to favorite sites.

In my brief time with Mini 5 so far on a Verizon Droid, it felt fast but not strikingly faster than the standard Android browser (an experience which PCMag.com’s Sean Ludwig also encountered). Formatting is never as faithful as in the stock browser, and some of the sites I visited with the beta looked just plain wonky. But on the plus side, Mini let me get into one Web site–the back-end part of WordPress.com I use to update Technologizer–which I haven’t been able to access with the bundled Android browser.

Worth a look if you’re a browser buff with an Android phone (and I’m glad that Android users have the option of choosing Mini–here’s hoping that iPhone owners get to choose, too).

Rumor: iPhone OS Multitasking

Apple will enable multitasking of third-party apps in iPhone OS 4.0? Sounds good to me…

LifeLock Settles With the FTC, States

Somehow, it just isn’t a stunner that identity-theft protection company LifeLock–the one with the ads that revealed its CEO’s Social Security Number–turned out to be a tad questionable. After being charged by the FTC and 35 states with everything from failing to live up to its sweeping claims to being sloppy with customers’ personal information, the company has ponied up $12 million and promised to try and do better.

One lesson: cheesy ads nearly always means cheesy company…

Amazon Gets to Keep 1-Click

Amazon’s 1-Click e-commerce patent–everybody’s favorite poster child for overly-broad patents that don’t actually foster innovation–lives. After a four-year investigation, the U.S. Patent Office has concluded that the somewhat more limited version of the 1997 patent which Google Amazon refiled in 2007 is legitimate. When will other shopping sites be allowed to let you place an order with a single click? 2017, when Amazon’s patent expires.

5Words: Kindle Reader for Android? Cool!

Is Kindle for Android coming?

Google Maps caters to bicyclists.

Verizon: Buy iPad…and MiFi.

Google to digitize Italian treasures.

E-books should use Web standards.

Facebook to make location shareable.

HP MediaSmart talks to TiVo.

How to erase hard drives.

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FileMaker Goes to 11

You’d think there’d be a huge audience for powerful, easy-to-use database programs–especially ones that run on both Windows PCs and Macs. But FileMaker Pro, from Apple’s FileMaker, Inc. subsidiary, has long had the market pretty much to itself. Which is fine, because it’s a terrific program.

On Tuesday the company announced FileMaker Pro 11, an upgrade whose major new features are so logical that I was startled in some cases to realize that the software didn’t already have them:

• FileMaker now has a built-in charting engine that lets you create slick-looking bar, line, area, and pie charts based on information from your database, then embed them in records. It’s pretty easy to use; I’d like it even better if it gave you a what-you-see-is-what-you-get preview with real data as you tweak your chart.
• The program’s spreadsheet-like Table View has been beefed up a lot: It’s now easy to group records for reporting purposes, hide fields, and add fields and data without switching views.
• A jumbo-sized, floating Inspector palette lets you click on an item in Layout Mode to see all the aspects you can control, such as position and alignment.
• The Quick Find search field in the upper right-hand corner–similar to OS X’s Spotlight and the search in iTunes–lets you quickly do searches in the current layout.
• You can now organize layouts into folders.
• By using Recurring Import, you can set up a database to automatically import an external file such as an Excel worksheet every time you open the database. It’s handy if you use FileMaker to navigate your way around data created and update in another application. You can’t, however, make changes to records and then save them back into the original file, making the feature useful for viewing of external information but not editing.
• Snapshot Link lets you capture a query result, then share it with other Filemaker users as a static lists of records that shows what you got at a particular point in time.

As before, FileMaker packs lots of power into a user interface that’s much friendlier than Microsoft’s still-gnarly Access 2007. Starter Solutions” provide templates for a variety of applications, from businessy ones (asset management) to personal productivity (a task list) to the purely personal (a database for organizing your music). Bento’s approachable enough to make it a good choice for serious home users as well as corporate types, but I wish that the company would bring its even more approachable (and much cheaper) Mac database Bento to Windows users. (It wouldn’t be a cakewalk, since the Mac version ties itself heavily into Mac-specific stuff like iPhoto’s photo library–but I don’t know of any Windows apps that are even Bento-esque.)

FileMaker Pro 11 is $299 for the full version or $179 as an upgrade; FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced, which adds more features aimed at professional database developers, is $499 or $299 as an upgrade. It’s available now, and there are free trial versions at the FileMaker site. A few screens after the jump.

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Twitter Fights Against Phishing

Good news: Twitter has announced that it’s using anti-phishing technology to detect dangerous short URLs submitted in direct messages and Tweets. I proposed that it do so last September. And given how many fake direct messages I get with short URLs that lead to sites that try to swipe my personal information, it’s pretty obvious that some form of short-url safeguards were way overdue…

Google Apps Gets an App Store

I’m at Google for one of its Campfire One developer events. There’s a campfire and a tent–even though we’re indoors–and a piece of significant news: The company is introducing Google Apps Marketplace, which is both a portal for business apps and a set of tools that let third-party developers integrate their wares with the Google Apps services.

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Valve Gives Mac Gaming a Boost

Some serious PC gaming is about to come to Macs, with Valve announcing that its Steam platform will support Apple computers in April.

Valve says it’ll treat the Mac as a “tier-1″ platform, meaning that its games and all updates will be released simultaneously for Windows and Mac. A new feature called Steam Play will let people play the same game on a Windows PC and a Mac for no added cost, with saved games transferring between computers.

Valve’s a heavy hitter in PC gaming, with iconic first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead. And Steam, a platform for digital game downloads and online play, has 25 million members. That number will soon inflate with Mac support, and there’s a good chance other game developer will give Mac ports more serious consideration; DICE, the maker of recent blockbuster Battlefield: Bad Company 2, is already mulling a Mac version.

Why now? Thanks to Wikipedia, I found this 2007 Kiziko interview with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, in which he explains that Apple never seemed particularly interested in gaming. “I just don’t think they’ve ever taken gaming seriously,” he said. “And none of the things developers ask them to do are done. And as a result, there’s no gaming market there to speak of.”

Apple has since made a few moves that show the company no longer ignores gaming. Indeed, the iPhone has proven that games are a lucrative market, so why not give the personal computer some love? Newell didn’t elaborate in the Kiziko interview what he wanted from Apple, but I’ll wager that Apple has addressed Valve’s concerns. Given the way Valve teased its announcement of Steam for Mac, it seems there’s a lot of love going around. Nothing wrong with that.

Apple Plays Hardball, Microsoft Benefits?

Good post over at CNN Money by Philip Elmer-DeWitt with some backstory about Apple’s lawsuit against HTC over iPhone patents. Elmer-DeWitt quotes Yair Reiner, an analyst who says that the suit is spooking handset manufacturers since it throws the future of Google’s Android OS into doubt. (And Reiner says that manufacturers were already nonplussed over Google’s introduction of its own Android phone, the Nexus One.)

End result, according to Reiner? A window (pun unavoidable) of opportunity for the otherwise way-behind OS known as Windows Phone 7 Series, which manufacturers may turn to instead of Android. (I don’t know if Windows Phone is vulnerable to Apple lawsuits, but on the surface, at least, it owes far less to the iPhone than Android does…)

5Words: When’s Windows 7 SP1 Shipping?

Windows 7 SP1 timing questions.

iTunes LPs: not so popular?

HP slate: a sneak peek.

HP sues Taiwanese cartridge maker.

Sobees Twitter client gets upgrade.

Firefox to stop Flash crashes.

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The Secret Origin of Windows

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday’s story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released.

Thanks to GUIdebook for letting us borrow many of the Windows images in this story.

–David Worthington

Microsoft staffers talk MS-DOS 2.0 with the editors of PC World in late 1982 or early 1983. Windows 1.0 wouldn’t ship for almost another two years. From left: Microsoft’s Chris Larson, PC World’s Steve Cook, Bill Gates, Tandy Trower, and founding PC World editor Andrew Fluegelman.
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AT&T’s Backflip: Fresh Out of the Android Oven–and Already Stale

More Android fragmentation madness: If Motorola’s Verizon Droid is a loaf of day old bread, then its new AT&T Backflip sounds like it’s stale beyond all recognition.

Little Apps, Big iPad

I’m (mostly) enthusiastic about Apple’s iPad and its potential to be the tablet that convinces the world that the world needs tablets. But if you were making a list of dirty little iPad secrets, this one would rank near the top: Running iPhone apps on a device with a far larger screen sounds like an inherently unsatisfying stopgap.

Ads, Ad Blockers, Technologizer, and You

Over at Ars Technica, founder Ken Fisher has an interesting post on ad blockers and a devilish experiment that Ars performed on Friday: For twelve hours, it blocked back, preventing users of ad-blocking software from seeing any content. Fisher says the counterstrike was a mixed success at best. But he also says that forty percent of Ars visitors block ads, and that doing so can be “devastating to the sites you love.”

As I’ve said before, Technologizer doesn’t need everybody to see the ads here–just a critical mass of folks. I don’t have a reliable way to measure how many visitors use an ad blocker, but here’s a guesstimate: In February, roughly fifteen percent of all Technologizer page views had the ads blocked. I might be more alarmed if the numbers looked more like Ars’, but we have that critical mass of people who don’t block ads. And I’m sure that some of the visitors who block are leaving worthwhile comments, telling their friends about Technologizer, or otherwise doing things that make this a better site and a better business proposition.

Or to put it another way: Ad blocking isn’t devastating Technologizer.

In the Ars post, Fisher says that he takes pride in the fact that his site’s ads aren’t in-your-face crud. Which led me to realize that although Technologizer has a number of guiding principles about the advertising we carry, I’ve never outlined them here.

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