MailBrowser wants to make Gmail and Google Apps more useful by offering a consolidated view of all your contacts and attachments in a browser sidebar. In this sidebar, you can quickly search for contacts, see the latest emails you received from a specific contact, add calendar events and attach notes and tags to a contact. In many respects, MailBrowser looks a lot like Xobni for Gmail. Sponsor Features MailBrowser is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Mac (OSX 10.5 and higher) and Windows, though the team is working on Safari and Chrome versions as well. The plugin offers a rich set of features , including support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts and rich previews of attachments. Another nice feature is the "trend" section that appears at the bottom of the sidebar. Here, two graphs show a timeline view of how many emails you sent and received from any given contact. MailBrowser stores all your data locally on your hard disk, so no information is ever shared with the service. Because all the data is stored locally, MailBrowser also keeps a copy of all your attachments on your machine. The application also syncs all the data back to Google Contacts in the cloud, so any changes you make on one computer will automatically appear on another machine. Xobni for Gmail In many respects, MailBrowser is very similar to Xobni - a popular Outlook addon. Xobni, however, puts a stronger emphasis on giving you additional information about a contact by looking at the contact's social networking profiles. MailBrowser plans to add this functionality in a future version . Currently, the service can only display details about a contact's domain and website. More Features Coming Soon MailBrowser has big plans for the future. The company plans to offer support for more services (Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc.), integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce and integration with social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Verdict For now, MailBrowser works just as advertised. It doesn't yet offer the rich feature set of Xobni, but the company is clearly working on that. If you have a very large mailbox, it can take a while for MailBrowser to download and index your information. Luckily, the download process starts with your most recent email, so that you can be up and running long before your last email has been downloaded. Discuss

Continue reading here:
MailBrowser: Get More Out of Your Google Contacts

Apple has just booted a major iPhone developer out of the iTunes App Store along with their catalog of 1,000+ apps, a number so high it represented almost 1% of all the apps in the store. The developer, Molinker Inc., has been accused of attempting to game the ratings system where application users are allowed to review the various programs using a 5-star system. As discovered by an unnamed internet user and a reader of the iPhoneography blog , the ratings scam involved a set of iPhone application reviewers who only rated Molinker apps, giving them each a five-star review. Most of the apps in question ended up with 50 or so of these five-star reviews, representing what was clearly an attempt to boost sales by pumping up ratings through artificial means. Sponsor According to the user who unearthed the scam , the highly ranked reviews were poorly written and the reviewers in question had only rated applications from Molinker. Despite this fact, one of the applications ("ColorMagic"), had made it to the front page of the App Store where it was featured under the App Store "Staff Favorites" section. (On a side note, this makes us wonder whether those "Staff Favorites" are genuine picks from Apple employees or if there's some sort of automated algorithm that simply highlights high-rated applications.) In a detailed letter to Phil Schiller , Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, the accuser noted that the developer was likely using their promo codes (every developer receives 50 per app) on 50 of their own accounts to create the reviews. Shortly after receiving the letter, Schiller confirmed that this was indeed a scam and the developer apps "have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either." Cheating Won't Get You Ahead, But What Will? While obviously we don't support unscrupulous developers who attempt to game the system in order to get ahead, we do understand the temptation. At present, the Apple iTunes Store houses over 100,000 applications and development shows no sign of slowing down. Developers who have invested their time, energy and money into building an iPhone application business are becoming desperate for ways to make sure their apps get noticed. The problem has become so bad that an entire ecosystem of "app discovery" services and websites has risen up to fill the void. Although Apple recently launched an " Apps for Everything " section on their website to allow for category-based discovery and extended their "genius" recommendation technology to include the App Store back in September, none of these solutions have really addressed the discoverability problem. For some developers, it has become a case of "desperate times call for desperate measures," apparently. We wouldn't doubt for a second that this ratings scam is the only one of its kind. It probably won't be the last one either - developers will just be more careful to not be as obvious as Molinker was. Unfortunately, the real losers here aren't the cheating developers, but iPhone owners. Without a trustworthy ratings system in place, it's harder than ever to pick out the best app from a handful of similar applications. Can you count on the stars as an indicator? Are the reviews out-of-date? Are the complaints referring to problems fixed ages ago through updates? Is the download count a true indicator of popularity? As more and more applications filled the virtual shelves, users will need a better ranking system than what's currently in place. We hope the geniuses at Apple are working on something like this right now. Discuss

Read the rest here:
Apple Kicks Cheating Developer Out of the App Store

If the rumors are true, then something is afoot in the Apple music camp. According to a recent article in Bloomberg , Apple is in talks to acquire online music service Lala . If a sale is finalized between the two companies, a number of new music monetization models can emerge and with Apple holding the supply chain from devices to players to downloads, a streaming music component may prove devastating to others. Sponsor Tiered Pricing : With a Lala purchase, Apple could easily employ a tiered pricing model for a streaming service. Users would continue to purchase streams on a per-song basis while also having the option to download songs through the iTunes store. Full Subscription : In contrast to this model, Apple could also follow MOG's lead and launch a full subscription service with links to purchase Apple downloads. Full Subscription with Download Limit : And finally, different still, there's the opportunity to employ Microsoft's Zune Pass model. The company could offer a $15 dollar per month subscription streaming music service with the option for users to download their ten favorite songs per month to keep. If Apple decided on this route, downloads would still prove lucrative as users in excess of their download limits would be driven to iTunes for additional sales. Discuss

See more here:
If Apple Acquires Lala: 3 Models for Service Integration

Dell has just released a customized version of Chromium OS, the open source code behind Google's new operating system called Chrome, in a build designed specifically for Dell Mini computers. According to a blog post on the Dell Community site , several company employees were inspired create this custom version after seeing Engadget's video showing Chrome OS running on a Vostro A860 netbook. After tinkering around with the code, they were able to create their own version of Chromium OS, complete with functional Wi-Fi drivers, and have made the build available for download as a USB key image file from the Direct2Dell blog . Sponsor About Google Chrome After last week's sneak peek at Google's upcoming operating system dubbed Google Chrome OS, tech enthusiasts everywhere have been playing with the open source code which Google released to the community on the day of the press conference. This code, called Chromium OS, lets anyone take the basic building blocks of Google's operating system and customize it for their own purposes. Going the open source route isn't just an example of Google's desire to "not be evil," but protects the company from anti-trust, anti-competitive claims surrounding the new project - a project which is basically an OS that runs only one web browser: Google Chrome . In fact, Google's browser is the operating system in its entirety. No desktop applications will be supported on this web-based, Wi-Fi only machine. As Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, said during the press event, if any other browser maker wants to build their own version of the OS using their own browser, they can. Since the launch of the Chromium OS source code, there have been a number of articles explaining how to run the operating system in a virtual machine on your own computer as well as how to boot the operating system from a USB flash drive . But up until now, these efforts have been steered by enthusiastic technology users and not those associated with any large computer manufacturer such as Dell. And while the Dell Chromium build isn't exactly an "official" company product, it's noteworthy for the fact that it was designed by company employees, posted publicly on a Dell website, and is customized to run specifically on Dell Mini computers. Dell's Chromium OS Build According to the Dell blog post , the USB key image file (available here: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto ) only works on Dell Mini 10v computers . Most importantly, the build makes the built-in Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter on these machines functional, a feature needed when running a web-based OS. After all, what good is a cloud operating system if you have to be tethered to an ethernet cable? The blog post includes instructions on how to copy the USB image file to a USB flash drive, but unfortunately the directions are aimed only at those who have access to another Linux machine. We're not sure why Windows and Mac users couldn't just modify the instructions found on this website to make their own Dell Chromium OS USB keys by substituting the Dell build for the one hosted on that site. In addition, if you're interested in trying out the Dell version of Chromium OS, there are a couple of things you should know: You'll need a hefty USB key drive - 8 GB minimum. It may take 5-10 minutes for the Chromium OS network connection manager to "see" the Wi-Fi access points. Some issues with the connection manager are still present. If it gets hung, reboot and try again. And by the way, there's no "reboot" - you have to press the power button on the Mini laptop. The Dell build is unsupported and minimally tested - use at your own risk. If you're still feeling brave, the download is available here . Discuss

Continued here:
Dell Releases Customized Version of Chrome OS