Today, both Mac and Windows users can scarf up a beta copy of Safari 4, with many new and desirable features. Here’s a download link for those who are ready to go.

The new browser features:

• Cover Flow — You can browse through your site history or bookmarks the same way you browse album covers in iTunes
• Top Sites — look at renderings of your favorite sites, and open any one of them with a single click
• Full History Search — A clever way to visit sites you have been to in the past. You can type a word or phrase into the history search field and you’ll get a cover flow view of sites that match your criteria
• Nitro Engine — Apple claims JavaScript now executes 30 times faster than IE7 and 3 times faster than Firefox
• Tabs on Top — Allows Safari to have multiple pages open at the same time in a single browser window, and to switch back and forth with a click. The new Safari beta gives you more room at the top of the sceen when in tabbed mode.
• Windows Native Look and Feel — The Windows Safari 4 beta more closely matches the look of other Windows applications and gives access to standard Windows fonts; Apple claims the same performance boost on Windows as in the Mac version

Other features include Full Page Zoom, a ’smart’ address field, a ’smart’ search field, and more robust phishing and malware protection.

Safari 4 beta also includes some improved developer tools. Details on those options can be found here.

(via)

iPhoto

iPhoto has been updated with two features called “Faces” and “Places.” Faces, as you may have guessed, lets you tag photos by subjects’ faces, similar to what Facebook and Picasa have done. iPhoto makes its best guess as to the identity of a subject based on previous tags and asks for confirmation. Of course, Phil called it “..the best technology we’ve found for face detection.”

Places allows for geotagging of photos. Some cameras and the 3G iPhone will use GPS information to tag photos on longitude and latitude. iPhoto then organizes those photos by location, or “place.” Also, Flickr and Facebook support are built-in. Those without GPS access can retro-tag photos by hand.

Other iPhoto features include enhanced slideshows and travel books.

Source: TUAW

The 60 second commercial begins with acrobatic engineers providing real time human pixel animation, creating the car and the driving environment. As the acrobats’ cards flip faster and faster the Audi Q5 image becomes more and more the real thing.

Marco Spier and Eben Mears from Psyop explain the creative process behind the advertisement…

“First we explored many different ways of creating dimension. We talked to our choreographer to find ways to throw people in the air, to create human pyramids and synchronous summersaults. It was important that everything could actually be created by people. The scene had to feel human. We wanted to shoot as much as we could in order to blur the line between real and CG.

The idea of acrobatic engineers fit nicely with the perfect synchronization of the Audi Q5 and for us illustrated the concept of thinking outside the box. It explored new ways to demonstrate Audi’s incredible performance capabilities. These are engineers who literally do the impossible by working together to form the shapes, images, and finally the Q5.

This spot pushes the idea of people working in synchronicity to the next level, surprising the viewer with methods that are on the edge of impossible, or in moments even beyond.

To further support the idea, we thought it was important to understand, that this is an actual show set on a very big theatrical stage. We wanted to create the illusion, that this is something that was created and performed through huge effort and scale. So the design became a process of landscapes that could be created in a real theater space.”

Source: The Inspiration Room

Apple and Microsoft.. How similar and how different they are? The new Microsoft Store (as we say Apple Store) has a logo that is very similar to all Apple products’ logos with two gray shades (picture).

Just be patient! The new Windows 7 are coming with ‘new and innovative’ ideas! (maybe they will include Spotlight, Time machine, Dock and many other NEW features!)

Sexy sumo carwash commercial featuring music by Electric Six. Japanese SUVs just got a little sexier.

The Sexy Subaru site was developed at Tribal DDB, Toronto by creative director Dré Labre, copywriter Travis Sellar, agency art director Ryan Semeniuk, production manager Cathy Kim.

Filming was shot by directors Cy Hogg and Joel Grenier via Fuel Industries, Ottawa. Sound was designed by Rob Plowman.

The Sexy Subaru site was recognized with a Gold at the London International Awards this month.

Google continued to increase its U.S. search share dominance in October, widening its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft. In October, Google’s share of Web searches by people in the U.S. rose to 71.7 percent, up from 71.2 percent in September and 64.5 percent in October of 2007, according to market research company Hitwise.

At the same time, Yahoo’s share slipped to 17.7 percent, from 18.1 percent a month earlier and 21.7 percent a year ago. Microsoft’s share rose slightly in October to 5.4 percent from 5.36 percent in September, but the down from 7.4 percent in October of last year. Internet searches at Ask.com fell to 3.5 percent from 3.6 percent a month ago, and from 4.8 percent last year.

Hitwise bases its data on a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users over four week rolling periods. The Microsoft figures include Live.com and MSN Search but does not include Club.Live.com.

The remaining 43 search engines Hitwise tracks accounted for 1.6 percent of U.S. searches in October.

Source: Macworld

According to TechCrunch’s “multiple (if thin) reports,” Apple may be working on a search engine in the interest of weaning themselves from Google’s teet. Given that Apple defaults to Google search on Mac and iPhone versions of Safari, and given that Google is sort of competition now with Android, the rumors make sense…but given that Apple does not appear to be recruiting search programmers from other companies, and given that you need experienced programmers to build your engine, the rumors don’t make sense. So I guess that all we can conclude is that there’s nothing conclusive yet.

Source: TechCrunch

(L to R: Leah Culver, Pownce; Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare; Dina Kaplin, blip.tv; Marissa Mayer, Google; Cyan Banister, Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer; Caterina Fake, Flickr; Gina Bianchini, Ning; Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID; Mena Trott, Six Apart; and Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post.)

The ad was created for Toshiba’s new low-definition to high-definition upscaling tech built into its LCD TVs, DVD machines and laptops. But it’s amazing all by itself: whereas the Wachowski-brothers’ technique used static images in Bullet-Time, this new style uses looped video clips, digitally compiled together for the final result. Apparently the 200-cam 14-meter diameter filming rig used “the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence” and took three days to just focus up and align. All 200 cameras were triggered by a single remote, and it took four weeks to process the image data. Four weeks! The $4.7million ad’s showing in Europe currently.

Did you know there are 42 good things you can do with the Samsung Omnia mobile phone? You can discover each one of them by watching 42 short videos on the dedicated website. Yes, I know, at first sight the idea of watching 42 videos sounds a bit boring and frustrating, but if you give it a try, probably you will change your mind, as I did.