Google To Acquire GrandCentral

techcrunch.com: "Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we've learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price...

The basic idea around GrandCentral is "one phone number for all your phones, for life." As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time."

Wow, Google grabs another one. I've been an early user of GrandCentral and it works as advertised. You can add any number of lines to ring, you can even upload a custom ring-tone MP3 for people to hear (I tested this by geeking out and adding the iPhone ring to my line). I have yet to put it to any rigorous use, but plan to leverage it quite a bit this summer.

Bandwagon: Backup iTunes to S3 or FTP

Bandwagon FTP edition (beta) available: "Bandwagon is an app service that automatically and continuously backs up iTunes to your online storage. Furthermore, Bandwagon is event driven, not scheduled backup (i.e. when you add tracks, it will automatically back it up)."

They have two versions of the service: an Amazon S3 edition called Bandwagon DIY (which has been renamed to Bandwagon S3) which, of course, backs up to your S3 storage. Then Bandwagon FTP is geared towards users that have unused web hosting storage or have their own homegrown ftp server.

This is great to see another developer putting a task-based intelligent front end onto S3 / FTP. With the various options for online storage out there getting bigger and cheaper, these kinds of utilities will help to decentralize data storage and keep more people from suffering the horrors of complete data loss.



Please note, while I'm genuinely into the Bandwagon idea, I'm also posting this in the hopes of getting the discount on their service that they are currently offering to bloggers ;)

Cover Flow and the scrolling horizontal subnav at the new Apple.com

37signals has a thoughtful post on the proliferation of the Coverflow UI metaphor: "As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection..." As they point out how aspects of the horizontal scrolling UI have been incorporated into the new Apple.com, they summarize it all well: "At least there’s more conventional text links in the footer."



I think that is an important takeaway. Coverflow is one of many 'views' that you can choose to enable within iTunes. As variations on these newer navigation models start to hit the web, it will continue be important to offer multiple ways to get to the same content. And IMHO, the Coverflow interface as demonstrated in the iPhone port is the most usable version I've seen. It skips the file list below the images, and allows you to interact directly with the thumbnails, flipping albums over to see their contents. Until iTunes can do this too, I will fully understand why Coverflow gets slammed so much.

read more | digg story

Apple Safari 3 Public Beta Fixes Flash Drop-menu Issue

Apple has released a Beta version of its Safari browser for both Mac and Windows. While this is news itself, I'm more excited about the following revelation.

Anyone out there who has done website work where the design called for drop-down navigation menus which overlap Adobe flash content will be happy about this announcement. In previous versions of the Safari Mac browser, there was a 'bug' where drop down menus would flicker badly if they overlapped Flash content. This issue even plagues www.adobe.com in Safari 2.x!

After testing both the Mac & Windows versions of Safari 3, Apple appears to finally have fixed this problem!



Check out the Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta

Adobe Launches Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) BETA

"Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop."