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Spiele fürs iPhone: Lustige Geheimtipps und coole Blockbuster

Sonys Playstation Portable und Nintendos DS haben Konkurrenz bekommen. Denn Apples iPhone und iPod Touch werden als mobile Spielkonsolen immer beliebter. Mittlerweile finden sich im App-Store Tausende kleiner und großer Games – FTD.de hat einige angespielt.

Von meinem iPhone gesendet

Handbrake 0.9.4 released, includes 64-bit support

Filed under: Multimedia, Freeware, Open Source

It’s been a year in coming, but Handbrake, the multiplatform, open-source video transcoder, has been updated to version 0.9.4. It’s one of the tools I included in my list of 10 must-have apps for a new Mac.

That 10% performance improvement estimate appears to be very close to the mark, at least on my MacBook Pro. Using 0.9.3, Handbrake encodes would average around 27 – 29 frames per second when transcoding a VIDEO_TS folder to H.264. In 0.9.4, using the same settings, I’m seeing encoding rates of closer to 30 – 34 frames per second. This means that on my Mac, Handbrake is now transcoding DVDs in real time or faster thanks to the improvements in the new version.

The Handbrake team has trimmed some of the fat from this release. There are no more presets for the PSP, PS3, or Xbox 360; all three have been replaced with a “Normal” preset that should work on any device that supports Main Profile H.264. Handbrake has also removed support for transcoding to AVI, OGG, and XviD. Personally I won’t miss any of these, as I always transcoded to H.264, but for people who are still clinging to AVI (for whatever reason), this update will force them to abandon the format.

Another new feature that looks like it’ll be incredibly useful is Live Preview, which allows you to encode a small portion of the video source using current settings and then see what it looks like. This will keep you from having to encode the entire video only to find out two hours later that one of your settings was off, forcing you to start all over again.

Handbrake 0.9.4 is a free download, available here.

TUAWHandbrake 0.9.4 released, includes 64-bit support originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Drobo supersizes product line with the new, faster Drobo S and DroboElite

Filed under: Enterprise, Hardware, Peripherals, Xserve

This morning, Data Robotics doubled the size of their Drobo storage line with two new products equipped with the proprietary BeyondRAID technology — the Drobo S and the Drobo Elite.

The Drobo S (at right) is a performance storage device designed to answer the question “Why isn’t there a Drobo with an eSATA interface?” Not only does the Drobo S have the eSATA interface that many have requested, but the device is now equipped with an even faster ARM processor for enhanced FireWire 800 connectivity.

Like the DroboPro, the Drobo S can offer protection from two simultaneous drive failures. To do this and still offer a large amount of protected storage capacity, the Drobo S has five drive bays instead of the four on the original device, while still maintaining a small desktop footprint. The dual-drive redundancy option can be switched on or off at any time.

As with the DroboPro, the new member of the Drobo family has self-healing technology built-in. The device constantly examines the blocks and sectors of all drives, and flags questionable areas. By scrubbing the drives, data is only written to “healthy” areas on drives in the array.

Mark Fuccio of Data Robotics told TUAW that the eSATA interface provides data transfer up to 50% faster than what was available with FireWire 800, or about 90 MB per second.

Earlier in 2009, the DroboPro brought even more expandability to the Drobo line with eight available drive bays and an iSCSI (Gigabit Ethernet) interface. While the DroboPro had immediate success in locations with a single server, it couldn’t multi-host — in other words, it couldn’t be used by multiple servers simultaneously.

Continue reading Drobo supersizes product line with the new, faster Drobo S and DroboElite

TUAWDrobo supersizes product line with the new, faster Drobo S and DroboElite originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How.

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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Neuer Google-Coup: Navi-Mammuts sind vom Aussterben bedroht

Sie haben 2500 Euro für das Navi-System in ihrem Auto ausgegeben? Kann man machen, muss man aber nicht. Denn der Markt für die Orientierungshelfer gerät ins Rutschen. Newcomer werden brutal unter Druck gesetzt – und der Gigant Google könnte am Ende als Sieger dastehen.

Von meinem iPhone gesendet

Von meinem iPhone gesendet

Facebook Pokes XMPP. MSN, Yahoo & AIM Better Watch Out

The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat.

Why is this news disruptive? Simple: Until now, in order to use Facebook Chat to communicate, one needed to be logged into the Facebook web site or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook’s web site, the usage of that IM is only going to increase. This would, in turn, mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN.

To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in the fall of 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users at the time. As of September, nearly a billion user messages were being exchanged every day with 1GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by the Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September.

The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon

The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.

The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.

But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.

Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:

One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung (we mentioned this on CrunchGear earlier this week). Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google. So rumors like this one may be much more important than they first appear. But either way, the best information we have right now points directly at Korea as the birthplace of the Google Phone.

We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January.

That’s all we have for now. We don’t yet know what the device will look like, how big it will be, or even if it has a physical keyboard. But we do know that Google is getting into the phone building business directly, and doesn’t seem too concerned about competing with all the other device manufacturers building Android phones.

Update: The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP device.

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Growl updated to 1.2, adds 64-bit support

Filed under: Software, Freeware, Open Source

Ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, the one remaining 32-bit niggle I have has been with Growl’s preference pane. Today, however,* Growl has announced and released v1.2 of its famous application notification system with, among other things, 64-bit support.

While most of the updates in 1.2 are “behind the scenes,” the biggest user-facing improvement is in the upgrade to 64-bit. What this means is that for Snow Leopard users, selecting the Growl preference pane does not require Preferences.app to re-launch in 32-bit compatibility mode.

In addition to the Growl preference pane, GrowlMail and GrowlSafari have been updated to 64-bit and are now Snow Leopard compatible. Further, the Growl framework has been re-written in Cocoa dropping support for the Carbon-based API.

You can see the full list of changes over at Growl’s version history page. Growl users should have received a notification to download the update. Alternatively, you can head over to Growl’s homepage and click “download” to get your ticket to the notification express.

*Several readers have pointed out that version 1.2, while the current version, wasn’t released today. Our apologies.

TUAWGrowl updated to 1.2, adds 64-bit support originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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