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Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The First $1000 iPhone Application

Harry McCracken

iPhone developer Armin Heinrich has released an application for the iPhone with two noteworthy characteristics: 1) Its primary function is to display a handsome glowing red jewel on your iPhone’s screen. 2) It sells on Apple’s App Store for $999.99, thereby explaining its name: I Am Rich.
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears

Harry McCracken

Back on May 30 of last year, Google released Google Gears, a browser plug-in designed to help Web-based applications work even when they couldn’t connect to the Internet. I was pretty jazzed up about it, and so were my PC World colleagues: We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007. I still think that Gears is a fabulous idea. But I’m beginning to worry about its viability.

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

Internet Explorer 8 and the Boring Era of Web Browsers

Harry McCracken

Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 today, and we’ve been playing with it at PC World. … In this early version, IE 8 is not an upgrade that’s going to bowl you over with amazing new functionality. Microsoft is touting its better compliance with Web standards. (Shouldn’t the world’s dominant browser already be super-compatible with the Web?) It says that IE now recovers from crashes more gracefully. (Wouldn’t it be nicer if it didn’t crash?) A feature called Activities lets developers add functionality to IE in a way that doesn’t seem radically different from things clever sites have done for years with plain ol’ bookmark buttons; Web Slices, which let sites create widgety little snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button, are kind of interesting–but they’ll only take off if they’re widely supported by major sites, and they’re not radically different from Apple’s Web Clip feature in Safari, which works with all Web pages, not just ones designed to support it.

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This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

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