Centercode, the guys behind OnlineBeta.com, have just announced a new community: iPadBeta.com.
We’re pleased to announce iPadBeta.com, a new unique user community being offered by Centercode. Unlike other communities we’ve announced in the past which use our software, iPadBeta.com is owned by Centercode and will act as a sister community to OnlineBeta.com, but focused specifically on the Apple mobile platform
Very similar to the OnlineBeta.com project, iPadBeta will allow users to sign up to test new iPad/iPhone/iTouch apps. The site allows users to chat about the new product in forums, create problem reports and submit bug reports.
App developers will have FREE access to a wealth of knowledge and, what I’m sure will be, a huge tester community.
App Developers are each given their own private projects which include bug and feature tracking, custom surveys, discussion forums, custom wikis, build distribution, tester participation monitoring, reporting, and much more. iPadBeta.com will also recruit App Testers matching the Developers market; or they can invite their own friends and customers. Developers will also have access to market research materials on the App market, as well as the ability to request custom research. These services are all offered at no cost, with no ads.
Am I disappointed? Well … yes and no. It’s cool, it’s really f-ing cool. It’s almost exactly what I expected from Apple, but it’s not exactly what I wanted.
[singlepic id=143 w=500 h= float=]I think it’s evident by many of the speculative renderings that some additional connectivity was expected. We wanted, at the very least, a built in USB port. I think the other thing everyone wanted was a full-blown version of OS-X and not the iPod Touch software running on a large screen.
Oh, and can I just mention the name…. Uhm. iPad just sounds like a feminine product. I don’t know why, since crunchpad sounds like a great name and doesn’t bring tampax to mind, but I can’t shake the image….
Anyway — I can’t wait to get my hands on one for a little real-word play. Maybe it’ll be enough for me — at the very least, it’ll make a great little news-reader and e-book platform.
Microsoft’s Mobile World Congress is just about four weeks away now, & WMPowerUser is heavily speculating (along with many others) that Windows Mobile 7 will be announced at the annual conference. That’s announced, mind you; I don’t see any devices showing up with it on board until Q4. Though WMPU has quite a compelling list of reasons, DigiTimes (which is known for being accurate on these sorts of things) is saying that it won’t be the new version 7 that will be trotted out, but yet another interim release, version 6.6.
Seeing as how we’ve just seen 6.5.3, plus its threaded email glory, hit the interwebz, & that DigiTimes says that 6.6 will be the same ol’ plus capacitive touch screen support, I can definitely see this line of thought playing out. The disheartening bit in the DigiTimes piece is that WM7 may be sloughed off till 2011… but would anyone really be surprised about that at this point?
Today’s the day that Google is expected to officially announce its Nexus One Android phone, custom built by HTC. The details & rumors have been swirling for over two months now, & Google is expected to make some waves today, just two days before CES kicks off. According to the link above, the press conference is scheduled to begin at 10am PST, so to tide you over until then, why don’t you read Engadget’s official review? Lots of good stuff in there, including a side-by-side-by-side web browser loading times with the Droid and iPhone.
Hey all — New version of WordPress has been released. Just about three weeks after the release of WordPress 2.9, version 2.9.1 hits the street with several bug fixes.
Many believed that the release of 2.9 was a bit premature after tons of users reported issues related to CURL (curl_setopt() to be specific) and several other issues, so the dev team took a few weeks to get these fixes tested in the form of a beta and RC1 version before finally releasing it as a final. We’ve been testing the updates on several sites and they have in fact fixed all of the problems we were seeing.
Grab your upgrade at WordPress.org or use your auto-update feature (after backing up your database, of course).
WordPress 2.9 has been in the works for a while now, and in beta for a couple months. I’m happy to announce that it has been officially released!
Some notable new features:
Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
Get your asses over to the WordPress download section or use the update feature to get yourself some 2.9 sweetness. WordPress is a very light-weight script for a normal blog account, you won’t be needing any best dedicated hosting providers.
[singlepic id=225 w=200 h=200 float=left]After a few betas & as many release candidates, Mozilla has finally released Thunderbird 3. It packs all kinds of new features like tabbed emails & a schpankity new search function.
I knew it was a bit of a crap-shoot with my twenty-some add-ons, but I was genuinely surprised to see that Lightning no longer worked when I did my update. D’oh. I definitely need my GCal sync back in TBird, so hopefully they’ll come up with an update soon. I also freaked out a bit when I was in the default “smart folder” view, but it was simple enough to switch out of that view at the top of the left pane. One final gripe is that the new IMAP sync process seems to be taking a while on the first go; not unexpected, but still a bit of a pain.
Go get you some scary early-adopter goodness here.
**Follow-up: holy hell is the “synchronization” feature unbelievable. I may not be a typical case, but I’ve got five IMAP accounts setup in Thunderbird, & after installing TBird 3.0, it automatically proceeded to “synchronize” all of my accounts (two of them GMail accounts with thousands of listserve emails). Know what that does, boys ‘n girls? It turns your accounts into a sort of POP3/IMAP mashup so that you can access your emails “offline.” I couldn’t even get the program to slow down long enough to stop it from trying to “download” multiple tens of thousands of messages (locally, to my PC), so I had to kill it from the task manager… twice. At any rate, I finally managed to get the settings changed so it would quit downloading all my emails, but it’s still going ahead & indexing them (something that’s needed for the new search feature).
I have my accounts setup as IMAP for a reason! I’m sure I’m mostly to blame for this, since I really only glossed over the “synchronization” settings, but here’s hoping this warning will save someone else out there from making the same mistake. I’m seriously questioning why this setting would be the default…
**Update – as you can read in this post, the Lightning/Sunbird team is hard at work on the compatible release. I just downloaded & installed the latest nightly build & it’s working so far. They also have a nightly build for the Google calendar provider available. The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that creating a new event (in my “Home” calendar) won’t show the event on the main calendar page, but it does show in the “Today pane”). Other than that, I’m happily back in action.
[editors note: Personally, any phone that has cutting edge Text to Toast and a coffee warmer is on my christmas list. Screw the iPhone, I'm an xPhone fanboy now!]
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