Today it seems to be a day with a lot of interesting news and rumors about the iPhone, and I am sure you'll be happy to find them all in one place, especially since there's not much to say about them, but they are all good hints for the future of this notorious phone, portable media player...and a little more. Basically, it's about the iPhone disappearing from US stores, some rumors about the upcoming 3G iPhone, as well as the amazing fact that Microsoft may release software for the iPhone!


First, if you're in New York and you need an iPhone, don't bother to look for one in Apple's stores. Why? Well, in a report published in The Huffington Post, Danny Shea wrote that not a single iPhone can be found in any of the 3 Apple stores located in the city! To make things even a bit worse, none of those stores seems to have a clue about when they will get new iPhones, but the good part - for Apple, of course - is that the iPhone seems to sell like crazy, if they ended up in this situation...

Second, we have a report from Gartner's Ken Dulaney, who claims to have gotten some hints from his Asian sources that Apple placed a huge order for 3G iPhones. We're not talking about 1 million, 2 or 5 million iPhones, but no less than 10 million units! Apart from this impressive order, it seems that the 3G version my incorporate an OLED display, but none of these two facts have been confirmed or negated by official sources yet.

At last, it seems that a team based in Silicon Valley played with the beta iPhone SDK for over a week, while Microsoft executives consider the iPhone an interesting platform to move on. In the end, if they play their cards right, it is possible to see the iPhone software revenue exceeding the revenue Microsoft gets from its Mac software in a couple of years, but we're still far from that moment. Anyway, this is another interesting issue worth keeping an eye on, so this is it - 3 iPhone facts for today!

On Macs, Yahoo! Messenger doesn't have some of features that made it so popular on Windows, but things are changing with each new release, no matter if we're talking about final ones, or Betas. For now, the current non beta for Mac is 2.5.3, and is dated back in 2003, missing a lot of features and being quite buggy, as users reported. In June 2006, the first Beta for Mac OS X arrived, and remained in a perpetual Beta stage since then, despite all new builds that were made public. Now, the latest Beta has finally managed to add a feature everyone was expecting on the Mac version of Yahoo's instant messaging software...


<-125x125 Button - left->Ready to be downloaded for free from the official page, the new Yahoo! Messenger 3 Beta 3 for Mac is now a Universal Binary, so it's going to work natively on both Mactels and Power PC-based Macs, and comes with tabbed chats and voice calling.

Being given the above, most things that can be done with the Windows version are now also possible on Mac, including free computer to computer calls, the ability to use a Phone Out account to call regular phones from your computer via Yahoo! Messenger, SMS messaging, as well as the chance to receive calls from phones on your Mac, but that is only possible if you have a paid Phone In account.

These being said, I only hope they will release a stable version once and for all, because I know a lot of people that usually don't even try Betas, and Mac users could also add a little crowd to the mass of Yahoo users, but they could also simply go away, if things are not right. After all, there are plenty of choices when it comes to instant messaging, don't you think?

After licensing Flash Reader and Flash Lite to Microsoft, it seems Adobe has big plans with their Flash technology, especially since a lot of people expected to see it arriving on the iPhone, but there were only rumors about this so far, and most of them claimed the iPhone won't get Flash support anytime soon. Well, fortunately, the reality is a bit different...


During a conference call with investment experts, Adobe's chief Shantanu Narayen said they are currently developing their own Flash client for the iPhone, and this didn't happen before because they are using the iPhone SDK to help their efforts, and the SDK just became available. The intention is to use the App Store to release a version of the plugin as soon as it's done, but the question remaining is "When?"

Unfortunately, there's no answer to that yet, so I guess we should wait for a while, especially since Apple's limitations(third-party software can't run on the background on the iPhone) force the iPhone Flash "plugin" to be a standalone application...

Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a brand new version of Safari, and this time I think I'll give the Windows version a first try...but let's keep it simple and leave Windows aside, for now. No matter what some people might say, test proved that Safari 3.1 is the world's fastest browser on Mac and Windows - but that doesn't mean it's also the most secure or the one with a feature set that makes its competitors cry - after all, nothing is perfect, don't you agree?


When talking about speed, Safari 3.1 is loading HTML pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7, 1.7 times faster than Firefox, and almost 6 times as fast as Opera, but when it comes to JavaScript, Safari 3.1 crushes its competitors, being up to 6 times as faster. I know, you all have a question - what about compatibility and security?

Since security is not my field, I will get to the compatiblity part, and run all 3 Acid tests available at this time. The results are the following - Acid 1 and 2 were completed successfully, and the result for Acid 3 is an impressive 74/100, better than the current development build of Firefox (71/100), and almost as good as Opera 9.5 beta, that reached a score of 77!

Other than the above, you get enough features, including a built-in RSS reader, but the feature set can be easily extended by using additional plugins, just as it happens with every serious browser out there.

To download Safari 3.1 and get more information about the features available, as well as other interesting details, simply go to the official page, here. Good luck!

Working as a team on an article can be a tough challenge, especially since it can take some time for everyone to do their own research and writing, then link all the parts together. Synchronization can also become a problem, especially when the members of such a team are not located in the same office, so collaborative editing is a very interesting and useful alternative to try, and SubEthaEdit 3.1 introduced exactly this feature for Mac users!


According to its producers, SubEthaEdit is "the only collaborative one you can actually use", including advanced features such as overhauled printing, exporting to HTML, both with collaborative metadata, completely customizable syntax highlighting, as well as a feature that some advanced users will be very pleased to see included - a UNIX command line utility.

SubEthaEdit 3.1 requires at least Mac OS X 10.4, and a license is priced at about $44. Since you can easily see other people connected to a certain document (this is what "friendcasting" is all about), as well as interact with them using iChat, if you're using Leopard, of course, I think a lot of you will be pleased to find out about SubEthaEdit.

...oh, yeah! A free 30 days trial version can be downloaded from here.