Archive for: July 16, 2009

While competitor Pandora unveiled the latest rev of its BlackBerry app, Slacker today announced the first version of its free Internet radio service for the BlackBerry Storm, which integrates Verizon's V Cast Music service so users can buy the tunes they hear on their customized Slacker stations.

"With the largest music library of any personal radio app, Slacker Radio makes your BlackBerry Storm smartphone the ultimate music player," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker.  "By integrating with V CAST Music, Slacker listeners will now have the ability to easily purchase music as they listen to their favorite stations."

Those with non-touchscreen BlackBerrys have had access to Slacker Radio on their handsets for a while now; version 2.0 is currently available in BlackBerry App World.  And like the existing Slacker BlackBerry app, the Storm version (which is also free) will support caching, so you can listen to your stations even if you can't get a signal. A major plus, and one you don't get with Slacker for iPhone.

In the next few days the service will be pushed over the air to Storm owners, so they'll automatically see a Slacker icon on their home screen.

If you've ever built your own computer and had to troubleshoot problems on your own, you know how important the right power supply is. Having a solid power supply from a reputable manufacturer can mean the difference between years of stability and random crashes, shutdowns, and in some cases instances where your computer won't even turn on. Thankfully, Newegg's Power Supply Calculator is designed to help you understand the power draw of the components you plan to install in your new computer. The calculator can even help you get a feel for whether your current power supply is beefy enough to handle that graphics card upgrade you've been pondering.


The calculator itself is simple. There are drop-down menus for the type of CPU you have or want to install in your new computer, the motherboard you'll use, and the graphics card you'll install (and a quantity menu for those folks planning systems with multiple graphics cards). The calculator also asks what type of memory you plan to install, the number of DIMMs, the optical drive you're going to use, and which hard drive will make up the heart of your system. If you're planning to use more than one optical drive or hard drive, you can select however many you plan to install.

Once you've made all of your selections, click Calculate and you'll see a total of how much wattage your proposed configuration will draw. Using that information, you can decide whether your existing power supply has enough juice to handle what you're planning or which power supply you should buy for ...

The New Yorker has unveiled an iPhone-optimized mobile Web site for its on-the-go readers. (Maybe The New Yorker was inspired by its recent iPhone-drawn cover?)

The site features five top stories in a feed that's updated twice per day. In addition, there are links to the publication's blogs, podcasts, and links by topic to some more recent stories, though the entire desktop site archive isn't available from the iPhone yet.

To get to the new site, key in iphone.newyorker.com on any iPhone or Wi-Fi-enabled iPod touch. Just be careful and don't do what I just did, which is to stop halfway through writing a blog post in order to read Elizabeth Kolbert's article on why we're all so fat.

Pandora on Wednesday released the latest version of its BlackBerry app, an upgrade that boasts improved audio quality and fixes several bugs.

"While we have had stereo AAC+ over Wi-Fi for a while, our BlackBerry mobile stream has been constrained to mono AAC--until now," Pandora's Tom Conrad wrote in a blog post. "We've just switched the BlackBerry mobile streams over to stereo AAC+ in our servers."

The current version is broadcasting an AAC+ stereo stream. Those who upgrade to version 1.1 will have the option of the new high-quality AAC+ stereo stream or the normal stereo stream. The normal stream is recommended for those who do not have a mobile connection fast enough to keep up with the high quality stream, Conrad wrote.

Other updates include auto-complete as you type for create station suggestions, the ability to enable or disable station auto-start, moving "log out" from the main menu into the options screen, and visual overlay when changing the volume to make it easier to see the volume level. The size of the app download, meanwhile, has also been reduced by about 30 to 40 percent.

On the bug front, Pandora fixed a problem that stopped streams on the BlackBerry storms when they received a phone call, e-mail, text, or other messages, fixed a bug that didn't let devices without a SIM card of data plan connect to Pandora over Wi-Fi, altered the low volume settings, and fixed a glitch that was causing some album art not to display.

Hello World! After several months of tooth-gnashing by frustrated developers the world over, Palm has finally released its long-awaited Mojo SDK for the Palm Pre to the public, the company said in a blog post. This could effectively end the drought of third-party mobile apps for Palm's most exciting smartphone platform in years.

In fact, the Mojo SDK already available now on Palm's new webOS developer portal at developer.palm.com. At the portal, developers will find user interface guidelines, a forum, and a webOS developer guide in addition to the SDK.

The company also announced several upcoming events, including a talk today at the MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco, a developer meetup in Sunnyvale at Palm's headquarters on July 28th, and a 73-city "preDevCamp" for Mojo developers on August 8th.

Your local shopping center may soon become the epicenter of a real world fanboy flamewar. During a keynote at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, the company's Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Turner, announced plans to open up Microsoft storefront. "And stay tuned, because we're going to have some retail stores opened up that are opened up right next door to Apple stores," Turner added.

The stores are set to open in the fall--just in time for the launch of Windows 7, a new OS that people actually don't seem to hate, this time out. No word yet on specific locations for these new storefronts.

In a blog post yesterday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone addressed the recent account hacking that resulted in some top secret company information ending up in the less than friendly hands of TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. "This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use," wrote Stone in the post.

Instead, it seems that the issue came down to the simple issue of an employee who probably should have had a better password to begin with. "This isn't about any flaw in Web apps," Stone continued, "it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords."

As for the information that was stolen and is being gleefully published by Arrington and friends? "Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they're certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world."

Q: A large customer of mine frequently requires that I use its proxy server to access the Internet while I'm in its plant. Unfortunately, this requires me to select Internet Explorer, select Tools, select Internet Options, select Connections, select LAN settings, and finally, check the box. Luckily, I only need to check the box while on site (the numbers are remembered) and uncheck the box when I leave. Then, at home, when I try to go online, it won't work, because I do not use a proxy server. Is there a way to add a "checkbox" to my desktop that does the same thing without my having to open Internet Explorer and click 6 separate steps? I run Windows Vista on my notebook. - George Medal.

A: There's a Registry setting that controls whether an already-defined proxy server is used. Actually, there are two possible locations, so we'll take a look first. Click Start, enter REGEDIT, and respond to the UAC prompt. Navigate to the Registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings. Look in the right-hand pane for a value named ProxyEnable. Not there? Then look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.

Probably you will find the value in the first key, the HKEY_CURRENT_USER one. Right-click "Internet Settings", choose Export, set the file type to Windows95/NT4 and save to a file named ProxyOn.Reg. Close REGEDIT and open that file in Notepad.

The file will start with a header line saying "REGEDIT4" followed by a blank line and a line containing the full key name in square brackets []. You need to keep those three lines. Next you'll find many lines of the form "Value"=data. Delete all ...

Google launched a personalized mapping service, My Favorite Places, at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Think of Google's My Favorite Places as an extension of the customization of iGoogle, which has added themes as well as the option to let famous celebrities configure your iGoogle home page according to their own templates.

My Favorite Places allows users to select from famous celebrities and trend setters - such as Moby, the barman at the Ritz hotel in Paris, Tokyo blogger Danny Chu, and Al Gore - and see what sort of favorite restaurants, cafés, and other sites that they prefer. It also allows users to do the same, building a collaborative database of local businesses that they frequent.

"We have been really excited to help people to use these tools more efficiently," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president of search products and user experience at Google. 'We've also realized that maps aren't just about finding things, they're about community."

Google's press conference in San Francisco was attended by both Regina Dick-Endrezzi, executive director of small business for the city of San Francisco, and its mayor, Gavin Newsom, who said that he welcomes Google's launch of its service in the company's "own backyard". "I'm very enthusiastic about these partnerships," Newsom said. "I'm here to support all these companies in these endeavors to get them online and market themselves."

And that was the message of the press conference: those companies with a presence on the Web can better connect with customers, and the assumption went, earn more business. The service was launched with partners like CitySearch and Yelp, both ...

Yahoo has unveiled a new mobile feature that lets users opt out of interest-based advertising from the company right from their mobile devices, in an effort to make each user's privacy choices more accessible and transparent.

"We believe we are among the first of our major competitors to offer an opt-out choice of this kind directly from a mobile device," the company said in a blog post.

Yahoo took the opportunity to point out that it already does several things to protect its mobile users: the company has a separate mobile privacy policy that's accessible from all of its mobile services; it asks each user for permission to access the phone's GPS radio or cell tower location; and it reflects any opt-out clauses on mobile devices that the user had already chosen from their desktop PC.

On a remote island you are god, but not in a weird "Lord of the Flies" kind of way--unless you're into that sort of thing. Pocket God is an episodic game where you choose to be a benevolent or oppressive god of your own little island. You can choose to bring new life to your plot of land or take it away just as quickly. This game for the iPhone has garnered raves since its release in January.

Thus far 1.2 million Pocket God games have sold, and it's one of the first to accomplish such a feat. Its popularity thrives in part from frequent content updates; the most recent episode posted in the iTunes App Store is about a bird with gastrointestinal problems.

Bolt Creative, the developers for the game, hope that others will take away from their unprecedented success to help succeed in making better game and apps for the iPhone.

Today's been a roller-coaster day for the Palm Pre. Apple just blocked the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes, which is (at the least) ill-advised, if not unexpected. But MotionApps has some good news about MotionApps Classic, the company's Palm OS emulator for the Palm Pre: it will soon work with HotSync.

MotionApps said in a blog post today that with the new upgrade, Palm Pre users can sync PIM data between the Pre and a desktop computer, let Palm OS users migrate data more easily to the Palm Pre, and use "custom conduits" and desktop applications that use HotSync.

The new version of Classic will be able to use HotSync over Wi-Fi and over Bluetooth. There's no ETA yet for the upgraded version, but MotionApps says that it will be a free upgrade for all existing Classic users.