RealNetworks’ RealPlayer SP just got release, and not just in your neighborhood either. Tacked as a global release, this iteration of RealPlayer seems to be aiming for the stars this time around, and following a pretty common strategy now a days: social integration. Users of the new RealPlayer will be able to take their videos around with them, as well as share them on Twitter and Facebook. So here we go on the sharing adventure again.
It wasn’t all hardware at Apple’s WWDC 2009 event: Safari 4, the company’s browser, finally came out of beta, and Phil Schiller saved some fighting talk for all web rivals. According to Apple, Safari 4 is 7.8x faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, and passes all 100 of the Acid 3 tests while IE8 languishes behind at 21/100.
Security researcher Charlie Miller has shown how he can hack into a MacBook notebook in a matter of seconds, via a Safari exploit that currently remains unaddressed. The demonstration was part of Pwn2Own 2009, a competition in which hackers attempt to break various platforms in the fastest time possible, taking away both a prize fund (in Miller’s case $10,000) and the machine they hacked.
Apple have launched Safari 4, the latest version of their browser for OS X and Windows. Claimed to run JavaScript over four times faster than Safari 3 and thirty times faster than IE7, thanks to the new Nitro engine, there’s also a number of new features including Cover Flow, to browse through history and bookmarks, and Top Sites, which gives a visual overview of frequently visited pages.
It was great to see Firefox’s success in the browser war. While IE still dominates the market, Firefox has been chipping away IE’s shares. Now come Google Chrome which many have reported it would be hitting gold release soon. According to TechCrunch, the reason why Google is pushing Chrome to final release milestone is to be able to get PC Vendors to bundle the browser in their systems – as many of them would not accept incomplete software.
Apple has been sued by LA real estate developer Elliot Gottfurcht over technology used in the mobile version of Safari found on the iPhone. The suit claims that technology used by the Safari browser to navigate and display mobile-formatted sites infringes on a patent obtained in October 2008 by EMG Technology LLC, a company founded by Gottfurcht and two co-inventors.
An unnamed search engine has reported traffic from a product purporting to be Apple-made but with a screen-size larger than that of the iPhone but smaller than that of MacBooks. The disclosure was made to John Markoff of the NYT, on the understanding that their identity be protected, and instantly the speculation began that Apple is testing its own netbook or tablet.
Apple are planning a Safari update to take on Google’s new Chrome browser, with a non-linear history that would make tracking website visits more intuitive. That’s the suggestion from a new Apple patent application, which discusses a non-linear, timeline threaded display of a user’s browsing history that uses context and a timeline rather than simple forward and back. In a way, Apple make it sound like Visual Voicemail for your history.
Snow Leopard and Safari 4 screenshot has shown up on a German site Apfeltalk.de. As you might recall, some developers who signed NDA at WWDC 08 get to peek into the new upcoming OS.
The latest update to the iPhone’s firmware beta has become available and our own Vincent Nguyen has gotten his hands on it. The build number is 5A240d, Vincent has been running the second version of the beta for a couple of weeks and he said he immediately noticed a major improvement in system stability after upgrading to this latest firmware.
New enhancements include being able to save images from safari as well as the ability to search your contacts. They also apparently fixed a lot of the bugs that were found in the second beta release.
There are also some other new features included such as more settings for your calendar and a lot of new mail settings. Vincent is apparently also toying around with PWNAGE with the iPhone Dev Team reporting that these days cracking the latest firmware is as simple as doing “a simple byte search”. So, it’s nice to see things moving along in both the official and unofficial iPhone development worlds.
[via iPhoneBuzz]
JP
