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With Android getting all Flash-ey, Apple's "Goldilocks" position on Flash -- the full Flash player is too hefty, Flash Lite is too weak -- seemed pretty untenable. Now Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has revealed that Apple and Adobe are "collaborating" on making Flash a reality on the iPhone, citing the technical challenge it presents. What's clear is that with all this work to do, it doesn't seem they're going the watered-down Flash Lite route, but we're trying not to hold our breath for a full-on, Hulu-friendly version that will finally help us get that Doogie Howser fix on the go. Naturally, there's no word on when this will hit.

[Via AppleInsider]

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Video

Apple teams up with Adobe for iPhone Flash at long last originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before you go polishing your new flat panel in preparation for tomorrow's big game, let's not forget how crazy you were for Windows 7 in January. Here's a quick look back at January's greatest hits:

• How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista
  If you're dying to try out Windows 7 but aren't ready to give up your installation of XP or Vista, let's take a look at how to dual boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista.
• Windows 7 Beta Available Pulled; "No ETA" on Product Keys
  Microsoft derails their attempted Windows 7 Beta launch day.
• Windows 7 Beta Product Keys Now Available (For Real!)
  After a daylong rollercoaster drama during which Windows 7 Beta gave us a false-alarm release followed by a server smackdown, Microsoft is finally handing out honest to goodness product keys for the beta.
• Windows 7 Beta Available as Free Download on Friday
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced at CES today that Windows 7—the highly anticipated followup to Windows Vista—will be available as a free, public download on Friday, January 9.
• How to Get in on the Limited Windows 7 Beta 1 Download
  Everyone's excited about the free Windows 7 Beta download Microsoft's handing out tomorrow, but there's a catch: it's only available to the first 2.5 million downloaders.
• Enigma Desktop Customization Update Now Available
  Windows only: Reader Kaelri—famous for the beautiful and functional Enigma desktop—has packaged and released version 1.1 of the customization files.
• Five Best Portable Applications
  Whether you got a shiny new flash drive over the holidays or your old thumb drive is looking for a new lease on life, pack it full of goodness with these five killer portable applications.
• Six Words You Should Drop from Your Resume
  Whether you're polishing your resume because you've been laid off or you just like to be prepared, weblog Squawkfox suggests six words you should banish from your curriculum vitae.
• How to Get Your Windows 7 Beta Product Key
  Reader Digerati offers detailed instructions for getting your Windows 7 beta product key which worked for me (when last night's did not).

Wired has a ton of new info and some gorgeous pictures from the upcoming Terminator Salvation for you to salivate over. It looks pretty promising so far. [Warning: some spoilers ahead.]

McG, the director, seems to be going for a Batman-style re-evaluation of the story, heading into darker and more serious waters with some real storytelling instead of just a bunch of shit blowing up. Not that it won't feature a whole bunch of shit blowing up, but with any luck that won't be the focus of the film. Take a look! [Wired] galleryPost('terminator4', 7, ' ');

Get a good look folks, because you're sure as hell never gonna see it in real life.

One Billion Dollar is stacked on 12 standard pallets, altogether 10 million 100 USD notes. One Billion Dollar is not so much about what you see but what you could do or not do with the money. Besides, this is the most expensive piece of art ever made.

Haha, that's not art, that's somebody robbed a bank. And speaking of which.... UPDATE: Damnit, wrong bank. Oh well -- anybody looking to get pregnant? Hit the jump for a couple more pictures and another piece of art by the same artist (Michael Marcovici) that depicts an average life in bags of Rolex sand.

Like these ads but without the social commentary, these magnets can make a whiteboard full of photos look like a screenshot of Photoshop or Illustrator.

The magnets have the look of CS3 on a Mac, and include a number of contextual windows, palettes, and the all-important menu bar for creating the perfect fake destop. They retail for $65-95 depending on size and number of magnets, and can be found at the designers' website. [Technabob]

Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In a recent interview with Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee, the Palm investor explained that Palm knew it had to step up its game after RIM launched the BlackBerry Pearl, which he described as "the first real consumer electronics product in the smartphone category." The Pearl launch served as the coming out party for the BlackBerry brand among consumers as RIM began stepping up its advertising, and the product's narrower hardware design was a noticeable break with the staid stylings of previous BlackBerry devices.

Indeed, back in November of 2006 as Palm rolled out the somewhat consumer-focused Treo 680, I wrote a Switched On column noting that the Pearl broke with the evolutionary path that RIM had been on and served as an example for the kind of hardware shift Palm needed to make.

Palm finally answered the Pearl with the Centro, a compact, inexpensive, and successful smartphone that has apparently served as the final resting place of the original Palm OS architecture. However, between the release of those two devices, the entry and subsequent SDK of Apple's iPhone proved a far more significant turning point in the evolution of consumer smartphones. The iPhone's resonance and popularity have provoked responses from many competitors, but there is a particular contrast in the flagship CDMA touchscreen handsets released by RIM and Palm --- the other two smartphone developers that grow their own operating systems -- since then.

Continue reading Switched On: With Pre, Palm breaks from the Storm

Filed under: Cellphones

Switched On: With Pre, Palm breaks from the Storm originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Meet Gregg and Brittiny Peters. They've had a pretty terrible year. Two of their children were diagnosed with costly medical disorders, and as the bills began to mount, they decided to start over by selling all their worldly possessions on eBay. Enter Donnia and Keith Blair, who upon learning of the Peters' plight, bid $20,000 and won the auction. Here's the catch: the Blair's are willing to pay, but they don't want to take any of the Peters' things. This has apparently infuriated the Peters.

The Peters spent Friday morning trying to persuade the Fort Worth family to accept their belongings, which include a 2000 Chevrolet Tahoe. They even tried to retract the couple's bid.

"They are apparently not willing to take our stuff," Brittiny Peters said. "They're purchasing them to give them back to us."

Now they aren't sure what their next step is.

They are also trying to figure out what to do with money raised on the Web site, www.everythingweown.org. They didn't ask for the money and their efforts to return donations have upset some people, Brittiny Peters said.

The Peters are perfectly willing to stick by the bargain. But the Blairs — who wouldn't give details on how they can afford to give away $20,000 — won't budge.

"We've really been blessed the last few years and we saw an opportunity to help," Donnia Blair said.

The items were worth about $40,000, so the Peters can take solace in knowing they got a pretty rotten deal. Why won't they take the money? They say that they were trying to "start over, not take a handout," which is noble and all, but not exactly the model of good manners or consumerism.

Other than giving the money to you, what, dear commenters, would you have the Peters' do?

EBay top bidder: Take our money, keep your stuff [The San Francisco Chronicle]
(Photo: Mr. Kimberly)

Everybody gets a little ribbing at their birthday party, and we're no different. As part of Lifehacker's fourth birthday, let's take an awkward, yet light-hearted, stroll through the strangest and most controversial stuff we've posted.

Photo by tandemracer.

We made your mothers cry with a flashlight hack

We're always pretty quick to jump on a video or tutorial that tells you how to assemble something new out of stuff that's cheap or already in your home, if it seems cool or useful enough. The second criteria of why you'd build it, or whether it's safe to, sometimes lags just behind the first press of "Publish." So while in posting DIYer Kipkay's turning a flashlight into a handheld burning laser does deliver a creative reuse of old DVD drives, it should have occurred to us that said creation is probably best left in a locked fire-proof box, never shown or explained to kids, and taken out only when everyone in the room is wearing dark goggles and signed off on release forms. Commenter EBone said it best in quoting Dave Attell on the game of horseshoes:

... this can only end in two ways: 1) This is boring, let's do something else, or, 2) OWWW! My eye!

After all, the last thing a blogging site supported by display ads wants you to do is lose the use of your eyes. (Kidding! Kind of!)

32 AA Batteries from a Single 6 Volt? Not So Much

Cracking open the casing on batteries turned out to be a Pandora's Box for Lifehacker in 2007. We first saw, right before the new year, that you could pull three AAAA batteries from a nine-volt—but those are four As, mind you, and it's only some batteries, and not always acceptable as replacements for those tiny remote guys. But then we saw that you could get eight—eight!—watch batteries from a 12-volt battery. So along came a little video promising to help us 32 AAs from a single 6-volt lantern battery, and, well, we rushed into what we thought was pure money-saving, geeky love. And we got taken. Here's what you really find inside a 6-volt. Heads were shaken and then kept low, emails exchanged, and a vow taken to be far more cautious whenever the leprachauns of the how-to web promise to show us hidden treasure inside household items.

Tips that aren't really tips

Just like where you work, it's okay when the Lifehacker staff jokes amongst themselves about how the only life tip left to write about is "Wipe your shoes before you enter your house." When anyone else does it, though, it stings—even it it helps remind us, occasionally, of the fine line between "Good point!" and "Well, duh." So even if detailing the (sometimes) quickest way to get your Starbucks and get out did feel like an inspiring little thought-let to some readers, scroll through the comments, and you've got a good lesson in the instant-feedback training we go through, more than a dozen times a day.

Porn Private browsers that don't work, and otherwise stink

We know exactly why most of the world's web users want the occasional ability to surf without revealing their tracks—they don't want their kids to know they're getting a puppy! If that's your situation, or you've got some other crazy reason, we're sorry we ever pointed you to Browzar. It sounded convenient (plugs into Internet Explorer) and clever, and, hey, there were funny testimonials about why it was helpful! But it turned out to not cover up anything, and it was also full of adware and spammy search results. We certainly weren't the only ones who thought that a privacy-focused browser was unique and neat—this was 2006, remember—but at least two writers here put their heads on their virtual desks when it was mentioned. So, yes, we're pretty sorry about that one.

Falling for Windows "fixes" is easy

The typical Windows system is a big, unwieldy thing, stuffed full of safety features, corporate services the home user doesn't need (and vice-versa), and plenty of cryptically named features. And it's hard to tell exactly what's speeding up where, or slowing down, since every computer boot and run is different.

All that is to say we're usually cautious about making deep system changes, but we sometimes get caught up in what seems like ingenious fixes. In the summer of 2008, Vista bashing was the style (as opposed to modern-day, but related, Windows 7 evangelizing), and a setting that seemed to force Vista to use multiple cores for booting seemed like a hidden fix for a deep-rooted problem. Right? No, totally wrong, and that was my bad. Over four years of linking, we've probably ventured into, or at least not explained fully, a few other tips to "speed up Windows" that may or may not work—the catalog is too vast to index and verify. But, luckily, fake multi-core hacks and other such material inspired The How-To Geek to clear the table with a manifesto on debunking common Windows performance tweaking myths.

Anything we've ever written about BitTorrent or file-sharing

We saved the best/most-obvious/guranteed-flame-starter topic for last. There are those who have paid for every MP3, ripped or otherwise, and every video file they've ever had on any type of media player, and use file-sharing networks to trade public domain works. And then there's the vast majority of computer users, whose copyright values range far and wide across the rest of the legal spectrum. We try to keep both the law and its consequences, and the average user's convenience, in mind when we write about BitTorrent, peer-to-peer networks, and net-grabbing tools, and it usually pays off.

Usually. Lifehacker started its blogging life accused of corporate-backed copyright fascism for trying to state the obvious, if unlikely, risks of illegal downloads. We shared a reader's story of getting caught, and, 497 comments later, learned that our readers are all over the place on digital media and its discontents. Eventually we crafted a guide to protecting your privacy when downloading, and while we tried to explain that it wasn't 100% guaranteed and was intended for any downloads, we read the comments and track-back links and felt a strange circle-of-life nostalgia from the early days. We're pretty much expecting this kind of debate for our next four years, and beyond. Overall, that's a great thing.

Your turn

Before we turn off the projector and put away the Slides of Shame and Silliness , let's give a special shout-out to the posts where someone, anyone, jumped in to suggest the solution to any problem, on any computer, was to "Get a Mac," "Switch to Linux," or even head "back to Windows," on rare occasions. We wouldn't have half the heated comments we do if it weren't for you crazy party crashers!

But wait! Before you go, we'd love to hear which Lifehacker posts struck you as crazily out of place, surprisingly controversial, or as evidence that certain bloggers were working with far too little sleep. Drop the links, and your reactions, in the comments.