The Download Blog

This Firefox 4.0 mockup shows a very Chrome-like interface.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has released mockups that show how Firefox 4.0 conceivably might look, and two words spring to my mind: Google Chrome.

Last week, Mozilla showed some mockups for the nearer-term Firefox 3.7 that eliminated the browser's title bar, replacing it with two drop-down menu buttons on the right, just like Chrome has had since its September 2008 debut. The Firefox 4.0 mockups show two options, one similar to the 3.7 ideas, and the other taking another step in the Chrome direction.

Specifically, the second Firefox 4.0 mockup shows the browser tabs on top where once there was a window title bar. That's the same approach that Google picked with Chrome, a view of which you can see below.

Mozilla is looking for comment on the designs, which, the browser developer takes pains to note, are "for brainstorming/exploration" and aren't final.

(Credit: CNET)

Before I get to this week's apps, the folks over at Public Radio Exchange let me know there's a new version of Public Radio Tuner (which I've featured here before). Now called Public Radio Player, this new version has been redesigned from the ground up with a new interface, added station schedule information, and new On Demand radio shows you can stream. Past episodes of This American Life, Fresh Air, and many other popular public radio shows can now be streamed whenever you want to listen.

At the iTunes Store, I noticed a lot of the comments mention the new version of the app is much slower to load than Public Radio Tuner. Upon first loading the app, it locked up on the loading screen for me, but after a restart I experienced no problems whatsoever with loading the app, streams, or the on-demand features. Please let me know in the comments what your experience is. Fortunately, downloading the new app to your iPhone doesn't replace the old one, so if it doesn't work right now for you, you can always go back to Public Radio Tuner.

This week's apps include a new painting program and a great new game that refreshes some of the stand-up arcade classics of old.

Use the button in the lower left to access the layer screen

(Credit: CNET)

Layers ($4.99) is a touch-to-paint program that's a lot like Brushes, an app I've talked about before, but with a few more options. With Layers, you get eight different brush types, a color wheel, an eye-dropper (to select onscreen colors), an eraser that has its own transparency settings, and the ability to use layers like in Adobe Photoshop. The layer functionality and interface is truly impressive, with a 3D isometric view of your layers so you can tap to pick which layer you want to work on. You also can use a fill option to fill in specific layers with a chosen color.

When you're done with your painting, Layers offers a few options for how you can share your picture. You can send it to your photo library, save as a duplicate, e-mail as a flattened JPEG image, or even e-mail as a Photoshop (PSD) file so you can keep your layers intact when you transfer the painting to your desktop computer. As an added bonus, you can download the free Layers Replay Viewer (developer's site) for Mac OS X and watch a replay of your painting in a QuickTime movie. If you're an artist or just enjoy playing with colors to see what you can create, Layers offers the most options available for touch painting and what you can do once your done with your piece.

Earth Vs. Moon ($3.99) borrows from old arcade hits like Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Pong to make a new fun and challenging game on the iPhone. You start off by playing the Story mode, in which it is your job to defend Earth by tapping on the screen to fire rockets just ahead of incoming missiles. In these stages, you'll also be able to hit UFOs that heal portions of Earth damaged by missiles and fire at strange aliens that get dropped off by enemy spaceships. Every few levels, you get a chance to play other game types. In Moon Armada levels you'll have to fight an alien armada that looks a lot like Space Invaders, but you'll shoot the armada using your three Missile Command-like gun satellites. In Moon Ball Battle, you'll play Pong against a giant spaceship by redirecting the ball using rocket explosions from your satellites. In all there are 5 different game types to challenge you--most based on old-school classics--as you move up through levels

Sometimes losing is as fun as playing the game--these guys have a good sense of humor

(Credit: CNET)

Like any good arcade game, Earth Vs. Moon gets much harder as you progress. Fortunately you also can swipe the touchscreen to fire a barrage of rockets to hit more enemies (at the cost of ammo), or touch one of your gun satellites for a momentary shield (also costing ammo). As you complete more levels, you can unlock a couple of different game modes including a old-school "get the highest score" mode or you can play each of the variations of the game found in the story mode.

As I played Earth Vs. Moon, I couldn't help but think the touch screen is probably the best possible interface for a Missile Command type of game. Not even the original track ball can compare. In any case, with several game modes to mix up the gameplay, and an excellent touch-screen interface, this game should appeal to fans of the classic arcade games it emulates and new comers who like a unique and varied challenge.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you having problems with Public Radio Player? What do you think of Layers or Earth Vs. Moon? Let me know in the comments!

Community members of Six Apart's Movable Type platform (MT) are launching a new blogging service on Tuesday. Dubbed "Melody," it's an open-source version of MT that community members are free to build on and change.

Unlike previous open-source efforts though, this one is the first to break off (or "fork") from the main product, allowing for much faster and drastic changes. In many ways it's an answer to WordPress, a competitor of Six Apart that began as an open source project and has benefited from rapid development because of it.

Even though it's going in a different direction as MT, the group of users that are creating it hope that many of its community-created features will make their way back into that product. "The word fork is a very charged word," says Byrne Reese, who has been one of the leading contributors to MT, and was its product manager at Six Apart for two years. He's now helping to head up the Melody project and organization that will manage it, the Open Melody Software Group.

In a call with CNET News on Monday, Reese said that everyone who is participating in the project has a love for MT, and that Melody is simply a way to get some new community-driven features into it at a faster pace than what's previously been possible. "When you are an enterprise product it comes with a lot of overhead," he said. "Change in the enterprise world can be dangerous. So that's been one of the great challenges, and where a lot of the pent up desire to contribute comes from."

Reese and the other community members behind Melody aren't trying to get rid of MT though. "What we really hope to do is build on top of what Six Apart has done, and what it's actively doing," he said. "When you have a commercial product, I think your priorities as far as feature development goes, are naturally going to gravitate towards the features that make the paying customer happy."

That also means a faster progression of new releases. While MT is getting a new major release every six months or so, Reese is expecting Melody's to be much faster. "We want to create features that stem from real need. But we also don't want to do that at the expense of being able to draft off the experience of Six Apart. The company is often the first to create new standards. When there's a new service that comes on the market you can expect that Six Apart will be one of the first to have it. If we didn't draft off that we would fail."

Instead, Reese wants Melody's feature set to become the "bleeding edge" of what the MT platform is capable of by implementing community-driven features that can coexist peacefully alongside the work of Six Apart. Although he admitted that doing that while making sure that changes can migrate over to the other platform will be a challenge. "What melody hopes to do is to merge those two sides of the coin. We hope to exist somewhere in the middle," Reese said.

Melody is being released as an early alpha version on Tuesday, with a version 1.0 release later this year. Reese says that this initial version is less "sexy" as much as it is a re-architecting of the core of the existing MT service to more easily integrate code from third parties. "I don't know what the right metaphor is...but I like to think of Melody as a leading edge of a knife. A very long, thin knife. Hopefully we can start to make these little changes, and features that amount to something much bigger."

Correction at 7:15 a.m. PDT: The spelling of Byrne Reese's first name has been fixed.

(Credit: CNET)

You may have already read on CNET News about how artist Jorge Colombo managed to get his work on the cover of The New Yorker. To have your art featured on the cover of a widely read national magazine is a big deal, but the coolest thing about it was that it was done with an application for the iPhone.

This week's apps include the cool painting app that was used to make The New Yorker cover and a game where you pilot a bomber high over the landscape.

No, I didn't paint that, but included gallery pictures show what you can do.

(Credit: CNET)

Brushes ($3.99 for limited time) is an easy-to-use painting app with flexible options for artists to create great-looking work. A simple interface makes it easy to find what you need quickly. You can choose from various realistic brush types from smooth to bristly and adjust the brush size from 1 to 64 pixels in diameter. You can use a hue/saturation color wheel to pick the exact colors you want for your project, and you also can use an eyedropper tool to grab colors you used previously in your project to match what you're working on. For more detailed work, you can use the reverse-pinch gesture to zoom in up to 800 percent.

After downloading and playing around with Brushes, it was easy to see the amount of detail you could add to a painting using the available tools. Even when you mess up, the app offers nearly unlimited undo capabilities so you can get back to a state you like. One thing you all should know (and I quickly learned): Brushes offers a simple set of tools to create realistic paintings, but it won't make you a great (or even good) artist. Those who have little artistic talent (like me) may want to think twice about spending the money for this app, but if you are an artist, Brushes is great for creating detailed, realistic paintings right on your iPhone.

Make sure to hit the "Bombs Away" button before you reach the target

(Credit: CNET)

iBomber puts you in the cockpit of a World War II era bomber to complete bombing missions high above your targets. The unique top-down view requires you to turn your iPhone to turn your plane left and right, while tilting forward and backward increases and decreases speed. Line up your shots using the crosshairs and try to hit your targets by dropping your bombs in advance of the target. You can play through 12 challenging missions across the familiar World War II theaters of battle. Each mission offers several sub missions (take out four destroyers, bomb six energy reactors, etc.) that you'll need to complete to finish each mission. Meanwhile an endless barrage of surface to air fire will slowly eat away at your airplane's health.

I had already seen a preview video for iBomber some time ago, and at the time I thought it would be a beautiful, but fairly simple game. Now that I've played it, I realize it's actually very challenging, making it necessary to hit your targets efficiently before you get blown out of the sky. Fortunately, you can choose from three difficulty levels, so it might be good to start at the easiest level to get used to the controls. Overall, iBomber is definitely worth the price, with great-looking graphics, solid controls and gameplay, and plenty of replay value.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you an artist who appreciates Brushes? Did you just download Brushes like me in the hope you could become an artist? What's the secret for completing those challenging levels in iBomber? Let me know in the comments!

(Credit: CNET)

For the past two years, several independent Mac software developers have teamed up to put together a bundle of award-winning Mac apps at a vastly reduced price--with 25 percent of the purchase price donated to the charity of your choice (chosen from a list). The whole thing takes place at a very well-designed site called MacHeist.com and over the past two years, thousands of Mac users have snapped up the limited time offer--it's really a great deal! The fun part about the MacHeist offer is the developers of MacHeist make it into a kind of scavenger hunt. They let users search for clues by watching entertaining videos and solving puzzles to win software and other prizes before the final bundle is announced.

This year, they've done it all over again with MacHeist 3 featuring a new bundle of indie software, the contents of which were announced yesterday. If you were to buy these programs separately, it would cost you almost $1,000. The list of software has products from all categories including a cooking app, photo-retouching software, an audio editor, Web-design tools, and 3D-modeling software. The scavenger hunt part of the offer is already over, but at least you're here in time to take advantage of an awesome deal. The bundle of a dozen Mac programs will only be offered at the reduced price of $39 for the next two weeks, so make sure not to wait too long!

Apple updates its popular production suite, iLife, that aims to corral your video, photo, music, and Web needs inside one big fence.

Facebook compatibility, facial recognition algorithms, advanced editing features, and music lessons from the stars are just some of the improvements made to iVideo, iPhoto, GarageBand, and iWeb. Check out what's new in this First Look video. We've also got a slide show with even more iLife '09 goodness, and an in-depth review for iWork, Apple's productivity suite.

The Electric Sheep screensaver can turn your desktop into a psychedelic wonderland.

(Credit: Chris_Ursitti/Electric Sheep)

We all know what fractals are, even if we can't explain them very well (myself included). In simplest terms, fractals are geometric shapes that can be split into increasingly smaller, yet identical, fragments.

In 2002, Scott Draves created something called "fractal flares," which are a class of fractals that use nonlinear transformations and color in a way to create spectacular images. His work was put into a free, open-source fractal-flame called Apophysis.

I've been playing a bit with Apophysis this week, and be warned: once you get started, you may find yourself spending hours creating increasingly impressive artwork and tweaking your inventions. The learning curve for Apophysis is fairly steep, but there are plenty of tutorials online to get you started.

Once you get comfortable with two-dimensional creation using Apophysis (and your computer can handle a somewhat intense processing demand), you can take the fractal madness up a notch with the "experimental" 3D version of the software, one of several beta versions of Apophysis.

For lower-maintenance fractal flames on your desktop, Scott Draves also created an open-source screensaver called Electric Sheep. This most excellent software uses your computer's down cycles to generate fractal flames and share them with the community at large.

You can even vote for other users' creations, or "sheep," to increase their lifespan and ensure that they "mate" with other sheep to create beautiful children. You can also create sheep using scripts built into Apophysis and then submit them to the Electric Sheep Web site. A gallery of the user-generated fractal flames displays all sorts of images, as well as useful and trivial data about both living and dead sheep.

What other software do you use to create cool-looking fractals or any other digital art? Tell me about it in the comments.

At the Macworld 2009 keynote presentation this morning given by Phill Schiller (Steve Jobs was absent this year due to widely reported health issues), one of the more exciting new software developments was to the iLife suite of software for Mac.

(Credit: Apple)

Long touted as the comprehensive suite from Apple to manage your digital lifestyle, iLife includes the popular Mac apps iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD, and iWeb. Over the course of the speech, several enhancements to each software were given screen time, and many of the new features were those long requested by fans as well as innovative new features from Apple's developers.

New enhancements to iPhoto included two new ways to organize photos. Faces, which includes face recognition technology, lets users search across folders of photos by matching with the face of a friend or family member to get all the images that include a specific person. Places uses the location technology now available in iPhone 3G and in some digital cameras to organize where your pictures were taken. Along with the new search and organization capabilities, iPhoto now lets you quickly post to Flickr and Facebook, offers more advanced image-editing tools, and lets you illustrate your vacation photos using a slick-looking feature called Travel Maps. The Travel maps can also be used to make photo books using Apple's previously announced paid photo album making features.

iMovie also received several new features and enhancement tweaks including more themes to give your movies a different, elegant feel and a precision editor for more professional-looking digital movies. One of the more amazing parts of the keynote speech was the demonstration of iMovie's new video stabilization features which takes a user's shaky handheld video recording and makes it a almost as smooth as if the camera were riding on a rail. New title fonts and transition effects will delight iMovie hobbyists and a new browser makes it easy to find the recordings you want for your movie.

One of the more interesting feature enhancements involved GarageBand's new learn-to-play instrument features. Interactive piano and guitar lessons let you learn at your own pace, showing finger positions and HD videos of instructions so you can practice playing along. But the more interesting addition was the ability to learn songs from the actual artists who played them. Artist lessons (sold separately) lets you learn songs by watching videos of the artists themselves as they take you through the process of playing some of their songs. Famous artists like Nora Jones, Sting, Ben Folds, Sarah McLachlan, and others take you through each step. New sounds and amps were also included in the update to give you more variety in your music.

The iWeb application added better drag-and-drop Web design capabilities and several dynamic widgets you could include on your Web site. Improved features included easier page management and publishing options as well as fun additions like the ability to notify your Facebook friends when your site has been updated.

Overall, we think the expanded feature list for each program and usability tweaks make this updated suite worth looking into if you have interest in this project- and hobbyist-based suite. Single users who already own iLife '08 will be able to update for $79, and if you want to be able to install it on up to five computers, you can get the family pack for $99. iLife '09 will only work if you have Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard installed, so those with older systems might like the Mac Box Set, which includes iLife '09, Leopard, and iWork '09 all in one box for $169. iLife '09 will become available at the end of January.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Now that your new Mac is set up and you have the Internet hooked up, how about some software? Out of the box, your Mac is loaded with cool apps to get you started on stuff like uploading and organizing your digital images, creating a music library, making your own movies, and surfing the Web. But it doesn't come with everything.

New Macs come with a ton of goodies already, but there are several cool apps Mac users count on every day that aren't included in the initial setup. To get you started, we've rounded up our must-have downloads for your new Mac. From Web browsers and useful utilities to fun and games, these top Mac downloads are perfect for your new computer and a great way to start exploring the world of Mac software at CNET Download.com.

Get started right here with our Mac Starter Kit.