apps

Apple has posted a new guided tour of the iPhone 3G that primarily rehashes previously announced features, but also fully demonstrates purchasing and downloading of applications from the App Store--a mechanism not seen in action heretofore.

The video shows an application being purchased via a "Buy Now" button in a fashion similar to the Wi-Fi music store. Once the application is purchased, the user is immediately returned to the home screen and an application icon with a progress bar appears. The user can (presumably) perform other actions while the application is being downloaded.

Posted from our sister site … Read more

LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.

Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove designed to let people move e-mail, contacts, and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google's online service. Google initially helped LimitNone develop, promote, and sell the product, assuring LimitNone it wouldn't offer a competing product, but then reversed course by giving away its own tool, Google E-mail Uploader, to premier-level … Read more

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Update 12:23 p.m. PDT: The official Firefox 3 download site is live; the record-setting attempt began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Update 10:53 a.m PDT: See this separate blog post on the Mozilla download site troubles. Update 10:02 a.m. PDT: Mozilla is having some technical issues with the site but expects the download to be available shortly. Update 6:43 a.m. PDT: I added the scheduled launch time, 10 a.m. PDT.

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser … Read more

Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.

People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)

The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted … Read more

This morning, Six Apart unveiled its newest iPhone creation, a very svelte-looking port of Blog It, which the company introduced back in April. The simple tool lets you write and cross-blog a post or status update to several services at once. The company is hoping people will use it as a home base to manage all their updates. It's also a somewhat early look at some of the features users will be getting in the upcoming native blogging application announced on Monday.

The tool started out as a Facebook app and has since pulled in about 10,000 users. … Read more

Editor's note: Though this FAQ posted originally on June 11, we updated it on July 1 to reflect new information from AT&T.

Is your heart aflutter at the thought of buying an iPhone 3G? Are you counting the days until the July 11 release date? If this describes you, or even if you are just toying with the idea, there are a few things you'll need to know. The process for buying an iPhone 3G will be quite different from what it was last year for the original model. Fortunately, CNET is here to tell you … Read more

When Apple announced the iPhone apps store several months ago, it appeared to signal the end for the popular homebrew Installer.app by Nullriver. While the application has a few developer creations that cost money to use, most of the library is completely free, letting people load up on useful applications without spending a dime. The application became so popular it started coming with popular unlock and jailbreak utilities, including ZiPhone, which has had more than 3 million downloads of its latest version.

Apple's new system is a different story. It doesn't cost anything, but developers must go … Read more

Apple has moved to squash rumors that the iPhone's App Store could be coming sooner rather than later.

Earlier Wednesday, Apple's Australian Web site had a little note at the bottom of its page about the iPod Touch that said "Shop for hundreds of applications made for iPod Touch. Available June 27." On Monday, Apple announced that the App Store, which is part of the iPhone 2.0 software release, would arrive on July 11.

An Apple representative confirmed that July is still the plan, and the Aussies have since updated their page to point to … Read more