Google Chrome for Mac arrived yesterday in beta form. The browser is lacking important features, including bookmarks and cookie management, and the useful app mode available in the Windows version. Also, benchmarks show it’s marginally slower than Safari. But in use I’ve found it good enough to set as my default, and Chrome’s superior to Apple’s browser in important ways: it launches more quickly, and is far less taxing on my Mac regarding RAM and processor usage, even with many tabs open.

However, one thing I’m finding irritating is Chrome’s tabs. Google’s efforts elsewhere in making Chrome a Mac-like experience should be applauded—the browser supports Keychain and the Mac OS X dictionary, and there are subtle animations peppered about—but the main toolbar and tabs area is problematic. I spent a short while making a mock-up (see the full-size version on my Flickr page), which offers ideas for a more Mac-like Chrome interface.

UK supermarket giant Tesco has just announced tariffs for iPhone, which will go on sale from the company next Monday (December 14th).

The headline they’ll be using in adverts is that this iPhone is available for as little as £20 per month. Whether you go for a contract or decide to pay-as-you-go, this gets you £60 worth of calls and SMS messages (assuming PAYG customers top up at least £20 per month, which qualifies them for extras – and obviously encourages them to switch to a contract). Also consider that the free credit is applied once a month and only lasts for one month, then automatically expires.

We begged. We pleaded. We begged some more. Steve Jobs finally listened — this morning, Ustream made live streaming from the iPhone a reality (pinch me!) with their Broadcasting app.

Yes, the clouds are finally parting. In the last week or so, there’s been a flurry of activity on the streaming-iPhone front: On November 30th, Fring — a VOIP app that allows users to stream one-way video to another iPhone with Fring installed (turning the iPhone into a one-way videophone) — went live at the App Store. One day later, Knocking Live Video allowed two-way video-iPhone-ing.

Now, Ustream Live Broadcaster lets the iPhone broadcast to a mass audience via the Ustream website — and it’s pretty damn cool. And free. It even works over a 3G connection (albeit a bit wonkily — a friend of mine likened it to a NASA broadcast from the shuttle). And because the iPhone’s camera is on the gadget’s backside, using the little guy to stream to a wide audience makes much more sense than does two-way videophoning with it.

So have the floodgates finally opened? And will the next iPhone, rumored to be in the works, bring major advancements in video conferencing (for instance, a camera that isn’t on its butt)?

[ via TechCrunch ]

Whatever reality-bending substances are being imbibed, chewed or smoked at UPS, sign me up: they tagged Adam Jackson’s iMac Core i7 as a fruit.

And now his work tool is awaiting inspection by the FDA, after UPS did the smart thing by “submitting proper documentation” for what it believed was a 40-pound shipment of possibly forbidden fruit from China.

Sounds like a funny fluke, but there’s more than one burnt bulb at UPS processing centers — MG Siegler at Techcrunch had the same problem just last week.

Note to UPS: the words “apple” “mac” and “core” do NOT necessarily mean foodstuffs.

Or are they just PC people messing with us?

UPDATE: After viewing your comments about other incidents, we asked for a comment. Here’s what UPS had to say about it.

When I was a kid, I always thought those photostrip booths dumped unceremoniously near the entrance of suburban malls were like a mini fun house and a comic-strip press rolled into one.

Now, with a service they’re calling Wink,  Shutterfly brings those booths to your iPhone ( the comic-strip press part, anyway — but I’m assuming instructions for making a booth out of cardboard and gum can be found at Craft:)

Just download the free app, shoot away and upload anywhere from three to five photos; Shutterfly does the rest, combining the photos into a strip and shipping the product off to any Earthly address desired — all for $2.50, which includes shipping and tax (and Shutterfly says the photos can be uploaded from anywhere in the world). No iPhone (really?), no problem — photos can be uploaded from Facebook and Flickr too.

Bonus: Shutterfly says it’s giving away three (count ’em!) free strips to the first 50,000 strip-crazed iPhone users who download the app.

Me first. Just as soon as I head over to Craft: to figure out how many packs of Bubblicious I need to chew for booth material.

We start the day off with a deal on MacBook Pro laptops. PC Connection has a number of MacBook Pros, including a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo and 13-inch screen, starting at $1,046. Dragon Dictation is offering free iPhone and iPod touch versions of its voice-recognition software from Apple’s App Store. If you need an external battery and case, you might check out HHI’s Apocket 1350 mAh external backup battery for the iPhone or iPod. The $20 deal also gets you a slim case, dock connector and LED flashlight.

For details on these and many other bargains (such as an iPhone 3G/3GS case for $9), take a look at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Apple is preparing to release a limited beta version of Mac OS X 10.6.3, following just a month after publicly introducing 10.6.2, according to a report.

The update — expected within 48 hours — will include an unknown list of issues and carry a “10Dxx” prefix, the report claims. (When 10.6.2 was detected, it carried a “10B” and “10C” prefix.) The previous update addressed a series of issues, including the notorious “guest account” bug that deleted data when logging into or out of a Mac running the Snow Leopard operating system.

Today, Apple launched a new RSS feed for iPhone Developers, promising updates, tips and how-to information on a range of relevant topics — from development to distribution.

The idea is to keep iPhone devs on top of the ever-shifting highways and byways of getting an app on iTunes, including:
— Tips for submitting apps to the App Store
— Current turnaround time for app reviews
— Program updates
— Development and testing techniques

With complaint sites over rejections and possible scams growing along with the astronomical app sales, something needed to be done to get better info in a timely fashion to devs.

The first few headlines look promising (see below)  it remains to be seen whether the RSS will be another reality distortion field emanator…

iTunes Connect Unavailable Dec 23 – Dec 28

Adding iPhone OS 3.x Features to Your iPhone OS 2.x-compatible Apps

You Can Now Choose the Currency For Your App Store Payments

Updated iTunes Connect Developer Guide Now Posted

Via Network World

Motorola’s Droid, Verizon’s answer to the iPhone, was ranked the No. 1 gadget of 2009 by Time Magazine Wednesday. Apple’s iconic cell phone finished in fourth place, behind Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader and Dyson’s $300 Air Multiplier fan. Is the Droid winning the buzz war for the hippest handset?

“The Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don’t miss it,” according to the magazine. The entry is praised for its “phenomenally sharp and vivid” touchscreen and its connection to AT&T rival Verizon Wireless. “Best of all, the Droid is on Verizon’s best-of-breed 3G network. It’s Android’s first credible challenge to the iPhone,” said the writers.

Apple’s long-rumored and much-discussed tablet will appear in March or April 2010 with a 10.1-inch screen and a $1,000 price tag, according to an analyst. In what has become a cottage industry, Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner told investors production will begin in February.

“The manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action and should begin to hit a mass market stride in February,” noted Yair, citing “supply chain” checks. Such a timetable would put a product launch in March or April.

To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.

If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.

The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.

As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.

[via TUAW]

With Time Capsules epidemically failing after an average of 18 months and 22 days, it might be time to start thinking about an alternative use for your pristinely albino, Apple-branded router once its body squirts out its last breath of 802.11-n ectoplasm.

Why not turn it into a lovely gift box? Over at Instructables, there’s a handy little tutorial on how to convert a Time Capsule into an ornamental box worthy of display, simply by prying it open, gutting it, then adding hinges and a silk cushion.

Not the most revolutionary use for an old Time Capsule’s casing, certainly, but this would be great presentation for, say, an iPod Touch gifted to a loved one later this month, and it can even be reused as a jewelry box or even a humidor (for cigars or the disembodied fingers of people who owed you money, you decide).

The AppleTV was a bizarre misstep for Cupertino, and judging by how they’ve consistently ignored the device since it launched, Apple damn well seems to know it. Popular AppleTV media software suite Boxee seem to too: they have just announced their own competing set-top media player for release in 2010.

First Boston launched its CitizensConnect app in June, giving its citizens the ability use the iPhone to tag locations and upload photos of potholes and other urban hazards; now San Francisco is using the iPhone to build a better city too — through tracking cyclists with its CycleTracks app.

Dragon Dictation is a cool, free little app that allows you to write emails or text messages just by talking into your iPhone, because it transmogrifies your speech into text. In fact, I’m using it to write this.

Well, sorta. As documented by the above-left screenshot, even with the most pristine elocution I could muster, the results provided by Dragon Dictation still left me with errors to clean up. The above-right shot is what happened when I spoke with my everyday, habitually clipped delivery.

So, perhaps not the best solution for popping out a quick text on the road, but a good option to quickly get text down in words that you can straighten out later. Because Dragon Dictation is service-based, connection via wifi or 3G (i wasn’t able to test it using EDGE) is required. And right now Dragon Dictation is free, making it easy to take out for a test spin.

PC users (yes, PC users read Cult of Mac) might correctly identify Dragon as the same engine that powers Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the impressive speech-to-text PC app (and MacSpeech Dictate, a similar app for the rest of us).

Released over a year ago for the PC, Google’s wonderful Chrome browser has been purgatorial on the Mac for far too long, but now that’s all over: Google has finally released Chrome in beta form for OS X.

Mac users have a duty to download the beta and help Google finish it — it’s a great piece of work.

It’s a feature light release compared to the PC and Linux versions. For one, the Mac version is missing its Bookmark Manager and Bookmark Syncing; it also omits the App Mode, which allows Chrome to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Google’s Gears is also off the table for Mac users, but Gears won’t work under Snow Leopard anyway, so this isn’t a big deal: anyway, Google has announced that they will cease developing Gears because HTML5 is now suitable for the same purposes. Finally comes probably the biggest omission: the Chrome Beta for Mac totally omits Firefox-like extension support.

All together, it feels like something of a phoned-in affair, and it’s hard not to feel a bit bitter that Google delivered so little of the full Chrome user after a year of keeping Mac users waiting.

That all said, I’ve been using Chrome’s developer nightly builds for months, and its combination of extreme simplicity, the effortless amalgamation of the address bar and search engine support, and its sandboxed security mode that prevents single tabs from crashing the entire browser have quickly made Chrome my favorite browser for Mac. Despite my enthusiasm for Chrome, though, I’ll be keeping Firefox as my working browser until Chrome finally builds extensions into their Mac version… and, more importantly, some plucky developer comes up with a Chrome alternative to Tab Mix Plus.

Reports of scorching MacBooks abound, one frustrated flickr user stuffed the calescent computer in the fridge above the vegetable crisper and below the leftovers to cool down after that realizing that rendering a big chunk of video on it became an “aluminum BBQ.”

When you’ve regained your composure, you can come out of the fridge, little MacBook.

Let’s start off with a pair of dueling deals on Apple hardware. Whether you are looking for a basic MacBook or one with all the frills, this may be your day. PC Connection is offering MacBooks starting at $850. The basic computer includes a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 13-inch screen. At the other end of the spectrum, Expercom is hawking a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4GB of RAM. Also part of the package: three years of AppleCare for $1,248.

If you are more in the mood for an iMac, the Apple Store has five desktop machines, including a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo desktop with a 20-inch screen for $849. Expercom has a beefier iMac running a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with 22-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and AppleCare for $1,403.

Also on tap is a 50-percent discount on iPod touch accessories, plus various hardware and software deals. As always, for details on these and many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVQqYNGzYA

It took them eight months, but the planning commission in Cupertino granted Apple permission to rezone a nearly 8-acre property to expand the company’s campus.

Apple asked for the rezoning last year after purchasing the property back in 2006.

Check out Steve Jobs’ addressing the city council about Apple’s growing pains resulting in far-flung employees they considered leaving the town to reunite — keeping it soft until the end when he can’t help but mention that Apple is the largest local taxpayer. Council members make lots of kissy-kissy noises,  but they didn’t reach a consensus.

The 7.78-acre property on Pruneridge Avenue, south of the Hewlett-Packard campus, houses two office buildings currently occupied by Apple employees.
The buildings were already on the property from the site’s industrial days. Before Apple purchased the property in 2006, the city rezoned the industrial site to residential in anticipation of a 130-unit townhouse and condominium project that previous property owners Morley Brothers had proposed.

Via San Jose Mercury News, Mac Rumors

Almost a year to the day since Google released its first stable version for Windows, the search giant has today announced a final release of its Chrome browser for Mac. If you haven’t played with it, it’s worth a spin — I use it as my primary browser on my work PC.

And yes, before anyone else mentions it, its add-on architecture isn’t completely rolled out yet, so if you love Firefox extensions, this isn’t the browser for you, and its benefits over Mac Safari 4 are dubious generally. But you might just enjoy how it feels.

Via Silicon Alley Insider

Meet the iVictrola, the weirdest and possibly the coolest iPhone dock you’re likely to see this Christmastime.

Or should I say not likely to see, as it appears that the limited stock at Design Within Reach has already sold out. Oh well.

Apple has just unveiled iTunes Rewind 2009, a feature on the iTunes Store that lists all of the year’s best selling content, across music, video and apps. For some, the feature will be confirmation of the intractable cretinism of that mouth-breathing biomass, mankind. For others, it will be a handy primer on popular media they might have missed this year. Let’s dive in!

It’s a small update, but it’s an important one: Apple has just quietly upgraded iTunes to allow buyers the ability to preview whole albums at a time.

iTunes has always allowed buyers to preview tracks before they buy: thirty second snippets that allow users to confirm that the 99 cents they are about to pluck down for “You Shook Me All Night Long” is, in fact, the AC/DC version, and not the migraine-inducing caterwaul of Miss Celine Dion dueting with Anastasia.

If you wanted to buy an entire album, though, you had to click the preview button in iTunes for every single song. No longer: now, a handy “Preview All” button is available on each album page in the iTunes Store.

Some nice functionality, to be sure, but long, long overdue. Amazon’s MP3 store has allowed users to preview full albums for over two years, and it’s hardly difficult functionality to ape. But better late than never.

[via TUAW]

Apple likes Intel’s desktop line of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs well enough to put them in their iMacs, so it makes sense that they would want to avail themselves of Intel’s three new Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (codenamed Arrandale) for any forthcoming refresh of the MacBook line. But things may not be that simple.

One way the Arrandale line of processors differs from previous Intel mobile CPUs is that the chips include mandatory integrated graphics. According to the Bright Side of News, Apple’s not interested in that: even the most inexpensive Macs now contain NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPUs, which offer far superior performance to integrated graphics solutions.