Almost every year, Apple releases a new version of iTunes with some new feature. Last year it was Home Sharing. This year, it’s Ping. Apple also usually tweaks the UI, many times creating a backlash. This year Apple has outdone itself.

Vertical Buttons

I’ll start with the most obvious UI tweak: the close/minimize/maximize buttons. I understand why Apple made this change: it saves space. When you hit the maximize button in iTunes, you get the mini-player, which has vertical close/min/max buttons in order to save space. Apple used the same reasoning with the main iTunes window.

There is a way you can disable it. Fire up Terminal and enter the following code:

Until now, the state of Twitter on the iPad hasn’t been great. There were a few pretty good apps (I’ve been using Tweetdeck), but the field needed a champion. Enter the official Twitter for iPad app.

Early this morning, Twitter for iOS was updated as a universal app, bringing a new iPad-specific format to the existing iPhone one. Loren Birchter, the man behind the Twitter app, and Twitter itself has long heralded its arrival. So is it worth the wait?

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox 4 Beta 2 was just released, and you can grab it from the Beta page.

Every tab now has a "Make into App Tab" command in the context menu, which shrinks the tab down to just the favicon and puts it on the leftmost position (similar to Chrome's pin tab feature). Also, tabs on top have arrived in the Mac version. I couldn't test it myself - share your thoughts in the comments, Mac users!

Mozilla made a snazzy video showing App Tabs, which you can watch after the jump.

Commenter Apps:

• Feedsquares by Qikon
• Grooveshark by Qikon
• MyFav.es by Qikon
• Pandora by Dave
• Yahoo Mail by pat_boy2008

The Google Apps, in case you had trouble with the

• GMail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs

Bonus:

• Spark Chess and Trillian's web client are available from Owen Campbell-Moore: download here

To create your own app, here's what you do:

1. Find nice looking icons and make sure you have at least two sizes (24 and 128 pixesl)
2. Modify the manifest.json from one of my apps or one of the Google apps in your resources folder. If you're only creating two images, strip out the lines which reference the 32 and 48 pixel images.
3. Make sure you input the correct URL and change the name of your app.
4. Load it into Chrome via the load unpacked extension button

That's it. Simple, huh?

Chrome apps are capable of a lot more than pretty icons -- including things like running offline and notification support --but for now I'm happy with the eye candy.

The Download Squad staff loves their Gmail, and so do our readers (according to Sebastian's recent-but-not-at-all-scientific poll). It's an excellent app, and I can't imagine ever changing back to a desktop email client.

But Google wants to deliver a more desktop-like user experience in Gmail, and they're planning to lean on HTML5 to do it. Recently Google added drag-and-drop support via supported browsers, and it's a feature some of my less-technical friends love. Google is now working on reversing the process -- allowing us to drag files out of Gmail messages and drop them onto our local folders.

Apart from making user interaction in Gmail more like our desktop apps, Google also hopes to use HTML5 tech to turn on the afterburners. In a discussion with Technology Review's Erica Naone, Adam de Boor talks about possible performance leaps with the upcoming extension app support in Google Chrome.

Extension apps will further blur the divide between Gmail as a Web app and desktop email with permission to access additional local resources, and Boor hopes that it will eventually lead to Gmail startup times of "less than a second."

That'd be sweet... you know, if I ever closed my Gmail tab.

Stopwatch image by Flickr user Erika_Marshall

Filed under: Office, Microsoft

Historically I have always been a loyal Safari user. Sure, I’ve flirted with Firefox occasionally, but I always came back to Safari eventually. I’m afraid, however, that I’ve finally found a browser that has led me to leave Safari for good: Google Chrome.

I started using Chromium, the open-sourced branch of the browser, a few months ago and switched to the developer branch of Chrome when it got support for extensions. Even though the Beta version of Chrome for the Mac now has extensions support I’m sticking with the developer branch just because I like getting new goodies before other people.

Whatever version of Chrome you’re using on the Mac, you now have access to most of the features that people will want from a browser, so if you’re ready to take the plunge and make Chrome your default browser here, are a few hints and tips from you from someone who’s been using it for a while now.