Good luck with that whole “iPhone on Verizon” thing.

I’ve become a big fan of Shaun Inman’s Fever news reader. It brings some unique new topic aggregation features and UI flexibility to an otherwise stale market.

An interesting tidbit I noticed today is that Fever automatically deletes news items that are not Saved after 10 weeks. I imagine Shaun implemented this rule because Fever is a self-hosted reader, and it probably puts an at least noticeable load on one’s bandwidth, storage and MySQL server, so it’s understandable (though I haven’t checked on any of my server stats yet since installing).

I didn’t know this until now, and no, before you ask, it isn’t a deal-breaker. It really isn’t that big of a deal at all, but it’s certainly worth noting for anyone who might let news items go to waste. Guess I need to explore a little more of Fever’s UI and the finer details like this.

I’m not positive, but I think iTunes Store is using a new recommendation system powered by Genius on video purchases. Usually you’re snapped to the Downloads area in the left source list after a purchase. But after renewing my Daily Show Multi-Pass, this banner appeared in-line on the Daily Show product page with a “thanks for your purchase” message and recommendations of a few related shows. My knee-jerk reaction is that this is a nice touch and not that intrusive.

The experience fell apart a little, however, when I clicked the close button on the recommendation area. The above message appeared, informing me that “Genius Recommendations introduce you to new music you’ll love” (emphasis added). Other language like “…available after you purchase a song or album” is a sign that Apple hasn’t finished tweaking these dialogs for Genius’ broadening catalog of video recommendations.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Talk are all finally out of beta. But judging from this announcement blog post, not much may have changed since my Ars interview with a Gmail product manager. For the last few years—at least since Gmail’s introduction in 2004—Google has been waging some senseless war on the traditional definition of “beta.” I appreciate the company’s desire to be different, but the crowd still rules on this one, and beta really does still mean beta. I hope today’s move means that Google may finally begin to get over this; there are much more important battles to be won.

Web developers, sink your teeth into the fact that Internet Explorer is getting quite close to no longer owning the majority of the browser market. Either Microsoft will finally come to its senses and fix the real reasons that IE has lost so much ground—like terrible standards support and confusing UI—or the trend will likely continue until IE gets marginalized out. Either way, seems like a win.

via Neowin

Sorry SciFi—nay, SyFy—but these new identities still don’t justify your terrible decision.

Just $10 to change your number—take that, traditional telecoms.

But Google went above and beyond, addingsome great polish to the number change process. Your previous number will continue to work for three months. Calls and texts to both the old and new numbers will appear in the same inbox and be treated the same way according to your settings. Brilliant.

Gmail now tries to be smart about displaying the labels you use most often, and hiding the rest under a “more” menu. You can pick which labels are displayed, however, and there is more control over handling labels from the Gmail front-end. For instance, you can now delete a label without having to drill into the Settings area. Nice, productive update.

A decade ago, my first PowerBook was a secondary machine to the desktop anchored at my desk. Now, my main machine is my MacBook Pro, but it feels a bit like an anchor now. My mobile secondary computer is my iPhone.

- John Gruber, Daring Fireball: Meg Hourihan on the iPhone as a Computer

What a weird feature to add in such a half-assed way. Firefox’s new multi-touch support doesn’t seem to be advertised anywhere, and you have to resort to about:blank preference tinkering to enable it.