Firefox 4.0 is set to have a later release date than expected. In fact, it could be pushed back to over a year from now – the thoughts of waiting over a year are dreadful! Even Firefox 3.6 is being set back to the end of the first quarter of 2010. Question is, why?

Firefox 3.6 bringing some cool features to do with accelerometer support and customization is being released ‘at the end of the first quarter of 2010′, even after its planned end-of-2009 release. I don’t particularly care – but the big punch is Firefox 4.0’s release, being pushed back nearly 6 months. With a slick Chrome-like interface that abuses the Aero look, and some great new features particularly with screen space saving and separating tabs into individual processes, Firefox 4 promises a lot – and better not just be a whole ton of hype from Mozilla that they can’t supply. But an extra unprecedented 6 months? Eh.

Here’s a screenshot of the new proposed UI.

Source: Mashable

Well, eh.

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Something that’s incredibly annoyed me over the weekend is the recent Nokia activity. If suing Apple, Microsoft and various other companies isn’t enough, let’s sue Apple again.

Nokia, have recently lost out heavy market share, especially to smartphones such as the iPhone, Droid, and the upcoming Google Phone. Their products are losing innovation, it seems, and although they set the standard, their UI is boring, used and doubled with unattractive and clumsy. Their touchscreen phone went out with a whimper, and it’d seem they don’t really have the innovation to enter the smartphone market.

So, instead of work on a better product, they’re pulling everyone to the ground with them like sore losers. I don’t really know what kind of psycho bullshit this is going on about, but it claims to be breaching their innovations in camera, wireless, and power management technology. Basically, little itty bits that no one who doesn’t study their competition wouldn’t know about.

A statement from Nokia said in a statement: “This action is about protecting the results of such pioneering development. While our litigation in Delaware is about Apple’s attempt to free-ride on the back of Nokia investment in wireless standards, the ITC case filed today is about Apple’s practice of building its business on Nokia’s proprietary innovation.”

This time they aren’t stopping on iPhones – they’re moving on to claim it affects the iPod range, and even as far as the Macbooks.

Then again, it’s not like Apple are innocent to this. Who can remember what Apple did to Pystar? Yeah, Pystar are gonna feel that for months. I mean, they’ve degraded themselves to selling T-shirts for a living.

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I’ve sorta been sat here thinking about how amazing the sensation of Christmas is. The connectivity. And while I’ve not seen it so much lately this year, it’s certainly true that everyone’s still getting Christmass in their own little ways. For example, Art community DeviantART have a festive logo, and pixel-art world Habbo Hotel have completely redone with a blanket of snow covering the virtual landscape.

But still, few websites have done it. I know this is hypocrasy, as we haven’t either, but I really think that more websites should! The internet is amazing loads of people team together and celebrate Christmas and decorate themselves for Christmas. It’s harder for smaller blogs but the larger websites really should join in.

Christmas has been hard this year, with large financial losses. But what I’m saying is, explore, have a look around. See what sites you like.

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I sit writing this, staring at the snow loftily falling from the sky in graceful drifts, cascading down to earth in a bizarre yet beautiful fashion, and think about the timing of everything. It’s Christmas, and it’s an important time for sharing time with family. And the software releases slowly cease coming up until Christmas. And yet, one company is still very hard at working building its new release – that’ll be Wordpress.

Wordpress, for those of you who aren’t aware, is pretty much my favourite platform.

Anyway, it’s been updated to 2.9 – you have to get this, it’s probably the best update yet, especially for developers. Everything snaps together. I mean, one simple yet ultimately useful feature is the ability to add alternative text to an image without having to add a caption then remove the caption via HTML – simple, and yet so, so useful.

Tomorrow I’ll outline all the new capabilities with Wordpress 2.9.

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Zynga have just surpassed an important milestone, one of which dignifies their impressive mass – they’re worth nearly $3,000,000,000. That’s more than Twitter. They’re massive, and I’m pretty sure this company is gonna set their eyes or a more dominative market.

Zynga, incase you’re not aware, are the company that create all those annoying games that force you to join them – Farmville, Petville, Fishville, Café World, Mafia Wars, even YoVille. Their cheap, easy-to-assemble and quick to push out games have proved a formidable force when it comes to online gaming – one that could almost be a fantastic business plan.

Zynga’s money-making strategy includes charging people Farm Cash, Café Cash, Fish Cash..? and many more ‘cash’ currencies that involve the purchase of virtual dollars. Of course, they also supply a free-to-collect in-game currency, normally called coins. There’s loads of cash-exclusive items, advertised provocatively and occasionally given away to random users to incite their friends to purchase the virtual money. It’s a business strategy not too unlike that of Sulake, the people behind Habbo Hotel. In fact, I wonder if sulk may feel a little threatened by the presence of a new online mega-giant.

They’ve not always been reputable, though. As a matter of fact the main argument against Zynga is the type of game they build – and it’s always nearly exactly the same as another game that has been released several years before. For example, Farmville is identical to Farm Town, Fishville to Fish Tycoon, Rollercoaster Kingdom to Rollercoaster Tycoon (come on, ripping from Chris Sawyers? That’s just low!) and various other games. Various other Mafia games have also complained that Zynga has been stealing their ideas.

I don’t really get how all these massive game companies can’t be earning the same as a start-up social media game. Still, Zynga are worth a fortune.

[Mashable]

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Google’s Chrome browser has slipped past Apple’s Safari, recent statistics show.

Even if it’s by a minor percentage, this still goes to show the demand Google had from Mac OS and Linux users on their Chrome operating system. Apple, seemingly are not too happy about this – I mean, I’m typing this article outside the Apple store, and they’re heavily whoring their Safari browser at the moment.

Chrome had heavy advertising most notably just after the release of the Mac and Linux versions, including large billboards in towns and sponsorships on magazines and newspapers, even taking the entire front page of the Metro on Monday. Frankly I’m not surprised.

Neither of the two browsers change in market percentage goes to show anything slight of Internet Explorer’s whopping market percentage of over 60%, or Mozilla’s market percentage of nearly 25%. Each Safari and Chrome have around 4.5% of the market.

Image below of statistics:

It’s funny though – we may start to see a Google powered world soon, what with all the hype over Google’s Nexus One, the proposed Google Phone that everyone’s hyping about (and other people are nonsensically rambling about plots to take down Google from Apple…).

Still, It’s fitting. Google, releasing a browser to take on Safari for Mac. Google, releasing a phone to take on the iPhone. Google, releasing an OS, to take on Mac and Windows. Google have announced war. Oh, and I don’t think Apple are taking it well.

[Source: Gizmodo]

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Alright. I’m a blogger. And I travel a lot. These aren’t great mixes, partially because when you travel, you can’t usually type or blog. I use my iPhone to blog when I’m AFK – this is a trend to do with smartphones. They’re increasingly useful as temporary computers, for when you’re in another country and can’t use your laptop, or on a train, walking down the street (imagine how much of a douche you’d look walking down a street trying to type on a laptop) and various other applications.

There’s no denying that the iPhone, let alone smartphones, are incredibly powerful and useful phones. And even so, as Apple say, most smartphone companies are just playing catch-up. Blackberry aren’t – but Blackberry are business phones. Apple’s iPhone has been a real game-changer – it was the most noticeable touchscreen phone and arguably one of the best smartphones – and it brought smartphones to a younger generation. No one in my school had a smartphone. Some geeks had blackberries, but that was in the lesser 2% of the school. Then Apple came along and maybe around a twelfth of the school have one. It’s strange, isn’t it?

What’s really eating me at the moment is the chaotic fuss over the Nexus One – Google’s Smartphone – and why everyone is hyping over it. To put it short, the Google Phone is just a phone with the Google logo. It has nothing special and it is not different from any other smartphone. There’s no exclusive features and it is not game-changing. I dread to see the day where Google is the next Apple – anything with a Google logo is apparently amazing?

Yeah, I’d admit this is a bit of an opinionated post, but at the moment the Nexus One is nothing. It’s not game changing, and it’s using technologies I saw a year ago. I want something new and refreshing with a new feature, not just the same phones on the market with a Google logo. I know Google are probably trying to do something interesting with this phone, but it’s not magical and amazing – yet. I don’t understand why people are up in arms about this revolutionary phone when it’s frankly nothing more than an iPhone catchup in an HTC Passion shell. Yeah, Android OS is something cool. But a phone running the same Android as the HTC phones and the Droid?

Guys, the Google Phone aint anything amazing. Stop acting like it’s the next super phone.

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So what have we been doing? We been, sat on our backsides watching TV? Well kinda, but I’ve got a social life too, yaknow. Anyway, I’ve a preview to show you, and I hope it’s one you’ll like. These are some of the new already implemented features that are coming to TekCube.net on Christmas Day. Yeah, as you can guess things are pretty hectic. Hell, I’ve had to learn PHP in the past week to implement this – although, granted, I’ve had help. Still, 10 days left to finish this baby and it’s really coming up close. Oh, don’t worry. The new layout will be Christmassy on Christmas.

So, what’s going on? What’s new?

Paginated Image Scroller (Click image for full-size)

Paginated Page Scrollers

This is our new idea for showing you our content. Each article will appear in the ‘Latest’ category with a headline and short summary – clicking the image takes you to the article. You’ll see this on the homepage now, that’s because we implemented it into the real thing a little early. However, we’ve added in something new – we’ve added a ‘next latest articles’ box – with 3 articles per page, and 3 pages – so you have the 5 most recent in large for the first box, then the next 9 most recent in the paginated scroller – 14 articles total. We aim to post around 21 articles per week and hopefully more, so this should work out great, showing roughly the last 5 days worth of content.

Categories and the Footer

The new footer (Click for full size)

Categories aren’t something we’ve focused on a lot recently – partially because we’ve actually been optimizing for tags, before realizing the two are equally important. Also, feed users probably would like to see just technology news, or just internet news, or just business news, or just off-beat news – and because of that, we’ve implemented new feeds for Feedburner – meaning that each category has its own feed. Also, we’ve made some mashup categories that will be coming soon, like Internet + Technology, Business + Technology + Offbeat, so that you can acquire your perfect selection of news. As well as that, there’s a box that will appear beneath the paginated scrollers with 5 recent articles from 4 main categories, and a link to see all categories. This is all part of the plan to make news easier for users to find what’s relevant to their interests.

People complained about a useless footer in the current theme, so we’ve brought you this. It’s a footer with function. We hope this helps you reach your content more easily.

Breadcrumbs Navigation

Navigation via Breadcrumbs is increasingly popular – Windows Vista/7 uses it as the primary navigator. And now, we’ve implemented it. You’ll see the same links as you do now on the index page, but you’ll see on other pages something interesting…

(click for full-size)

Yeah, that’s the breadcrumb bar. It’ll help you find your way through the site, whether navigation via Tag or Category. You’ll see what I mean when it’s implemented.

These are just 3 of the many features coming to TekCube. More and more are implemented every single day, so keep your eyes peeled.

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Before anyone argues the point, it’s clear that Twitter is popular now for its news-sharing capabilities. People love to find out information and news via Twitter. Not only that, but news companies like @Mashable, @TIME and @Engadget use Twitter to broadcast and share their news. It’s an innovative and useful way to make sure that your content is spread around.

And because of that it’s become increasingly popular for not only businesses to spread the news around but it’s also a way for users to find out about information – Twitter’s trending topics, a bit like Facebook’s ‘News feed’ (sigh) has been a classic way to see what’s going on since Twitter started. For example, on the day Apple released the Magic Mouse, ‘Magic Mouse’ was a trending topic. That’s how I found out about the release, anyhow.

Facebook, however, is famous for connecting friends – but it’d seem that’s not what it wants to do. Facebook have been criticized for trying to grab a slice of Twitter’s fame for a long time, most recently for it’s ‘@mentions’, exactly the same concept as @mentions on Twitter. And even more recently, have you noticed the recent attempt at pushing your Status Updates to ‘Everyone’? That doesn’t mean everyone on your friends list. That means the whole world. And that’s what makes it kinda obvious what Facebook is wanting to do.

An example of what Facebook are aiming to do.

Because of Twitter’s growing popularity, I guess Facebook could be jealous. Twitter is stealing users away from it. But under no circumstances do I feel it is appropriate to slyly allow users to give away all their data, in an attempt to become a news-sharing site. Images like the one to the right are just classic examples of the changes Facebook is making to try and emphasize news.

People on Facebook don’t wanna share news though – they want to connect with friends and chat. And that’s all I really use it for. That’s all most people use it for. A few businesses encourage users to subscribe to information and share with friends, but nowhere near as much as Twitter.

Facebook, you’re not a news-sharing site. Don’t try to steal Twitter’s spotlight, either.

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Apple have just patented something new – something unseen – something unthinkable – it’s a sponge. Not just any sponge – but some kind of sponge that charges gadgets. We’re not too sure on whether or not Apple are actually going to build this but it’d be pretty funny if they did – it’d be a one of its kind.

Here’s the image:

Who knows. We could be seeing a new style of charging… with sponges.

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Here’s an interesting find – the original version of the Mac vs PC ads. I do love finding stuff like this. As far as I’m aware, this was during the 1980’s – 20 years of ceaseless attacks, it’d seem! Here’s the image (click to enlarge! – make sure you have javascript enabled.)

Nifty.

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Google today released their Google Chrome web browser to the Macintosh and Linux platforms. Each are missing some features, but it’s better than nothing.

Google have released their famous Web browser, Google Chrome, to the Macintosh and Linux platforms. While they’ve released it, it’s only in beta stage and still lacks some critical features -

but we’re sure these features will be slammed in at a later time.

So what’s it like? It rivals Safari Mac in graphical capability, and it rivals Firefox in speed (and soon maybe extensions). The Linux version is also impressive.

Find out more at http://www.google.com/chrome

Screenshot

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