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Another info packed post with some exciting news making waves in the technology world.

• 3G iPhone update
• Vista - uptake inevitable
• Twitter rising
• Javascript curvy corners
• Worthy mentions

3G iPhone update

We have reported previously on speculation regarding the launch date of the 3G iPhone, now more information is starting to filter through. One hot topic drawing much attention is the price the new model will go on the market for. $199. While this price is contract dependant, it is still a hefty saving of $200. Apple are also expecting huge sales, with reports coming in that they have ordered 25million units to be manufactured by the same company, Foxconn, that put the first gen iPhone on shelves. 3 million of which will be ready for sale by the end of May.

the author of the story also says that the new phones will be available in “8-gigabit-memory and… 16-gigabit-memory” versions (for $399 and $499, respectively), so take that as you like. In addition to these discounts, the source says the new iPhone will be 2.5mm thinner than the previous iteration, although we understand that right after telling Fortune this information, the “person” burst into a cloud of rainbow-colored sparkles and went flying off into the night sky.

Vista - uptake inevitable

Let’s not beat around the bush on this subject. Vista has been a disappointment. I personally prefer it to Windows XP, but I am not the majority in this issue. XP is end of life with it being pulled from sale in the near future. Once this happens what choices do consumers have other than linux distros? You can order a new pc with Ubuntu, for example, installed. While Ubuntu is a worthy alternative, you must again remember about a corporate roll out of a new desktop environment. I know that companies have switched to linux over windows solutions, but the majority have been in the server market. We are talking about the average employee having to make the change and with that comes training (read expenses). I find Ubuntu quite easy to navigate and fx uses it on his laptop, but not everyone adjusts well. A computerworld article goes into more detail on this topic, while another reminds us about current uptake problems.

“They are sort of in a ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ situation,” said Gray. Administrators may not want to move to Vista, but neither of the alternatives — the older XP and the not-even-officially-scheduled Windows 7 — is attractive, he said.

Twitter Rising.

Seen as pointless by some and indisposable by others, the stats don’t lie. Twitter usage is rising. I think the number of mashups using the API to do abstract things with what users are pumping into the system has a direct influence on the stats. Repeat users loyal to the service are also a big  influence in the increase of market share seen by Twitter, which is a healthy sign the site is gaining a strong foothold in the social network arena. fx and I were actually throwing around an idea for a Twitter mashup, so you might see something from us in the future putting a spin on what people are doing.

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites. Twitter’s size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular). However, the website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service still hasn’t reached mainstream adoption.

Javascript curvy corners.

The rounded look of Web 2.0 designs can be a pain at the best of times. Most of the time you will need a few images combined in a bit of CSS to pull it off.  Being able to apply curvy corners on the fly is a huge step in the right direction, and Curvy Corners offer just that.

curvyCorners will automatically pickup style information from the DIV element. So for example if you give the DIV a 2px black border in a stylesheet then the borders will be automatically added to the rounded corners.

Worthy Mentions

Seeing as we have covered some news on Twitter, why not give you the Linux desktop options to make Tweeting easier - 6 Twitter clients for the Linux desktop and one for the road.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that’s gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages — also called Tweets — via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely.

Cool web stuff for April 2008 brought to you by WebKak - April 2008 round up of cool web stuff.

Well before we kick off with yet more cool web apps & stuff next month, it’s time for a round-up of the most popular posts for the month of April

Mighty Mouse Easter Egg

Since it’s Easter for a lot of people, and there are still things to be done, I don’t want to keep you waiting. Today, I just found an older picture of Apple’s Mighty Mouse, and I think it’s something great to see. Yes, it’s a hardware Easter Egg. No, this is not a fake image, is a picture made more than 2 years ago, but I guess this is still true today.

Image via Wikipedia

LifeHacker has a post up today for creating a live (encrypted) backup of Outlook Mail –

Unfortunately Outlook isn’t great about backing up your PST file while Outlook is running, but Vinod has found a simple solution: Set a rule in Outlook to keep a separate copy of your incoming email in a separate PST file on an encrypted, external thumb drive. The encrypted part is optional, but it’s a smart move if you want to keep that data secure (check out our guide to encrypting data with TrueCrypt for details on how to set up an encrypted drive). Head to the post for specifics on what seems like a perfect Outlook backup solution. For a different approach, check out previously mentioned Outlook Personal Folders Backup Tool.

Read the full article at LifeHacker.

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Syncplicity [LifeHacker] is a freeware, Windows only (currently) application which keeps folders and files on your computer synchronized across a network. Example uses include tasks such as

• Code: synchronize your code automatically between your home machine and work laptop without commiting it (to svn etc).
• Automatic backups: synchronize your important data to a backup machine automatically without the need for exporting etc.
• My Documents: sync your various my documents to your work computer and your laptop which you use for travelling

As you can see, the uses of a tool like this go beyond simply sharing documents. I, however, am waiting for DropBox.

FastStone Capture is a screenshot taking and editing application. It allows you to take a screenshot of your desktop (or a portion of it) and edit that. For example, in the image below notes have been added and sections highlighted.

LifeHacker points out that the latest version of this is no longer free, but the link below is for the “handily portable freeware version“, which is.

FastStone Capture Freeware v5.3

Notepad2 is a notepad.exe replacement for Windows; with a whole lot more features. The key here is that its still very much a notepad - no huge memory usage, no long loading time, and its simple to use.

“Get code syntax highlighting, regular expression search, better text selection options, and support for Unix and Mac-created text files in Notepad2, which can run standalone from a thumb drive. You can even replace Windows Notepad entirely with Notepad2, though it takes a few steps—here’s a tutorial on how for XP users, and one for Vista users.” Read on at LifeHacker ..

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If you’re rocking dual (or triple/quad) monitors like the staff here at Entropy you’ll no doubt need to rock out some kicking wallpaper. Tips like making one an active desktop so you can have different backgrounds etc are just too 2007 for us - so we’ve found DisplayFusion.

DisplayFusion is the ultimate dual-screen background tool, and is capable of a junkload of kicking features, mostly focused around being able to pimp your background of course.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with DisplayFusion:

• Set a different desktop wallpaper on each monitor (either a picture or solid colour)
• Set a desktop wallpaper that spans all monitors (either a picture or colour)
• Change your desktop wallpaper on a timer
• Easily manage application windows with fully customizable hotkeys:
  • Move windows to the next monitor
  • Move windows to the next monitor and maximize them
  • Move windows to centre of the screen
  • Move windows to centre of the screen and size it to 75% of the work area
  • Tile windows along the top, bottom, left or right side
  • Maximize windows so that they span all monitors
  • Customize your own hotkey to do anything you can imagine
• Integrated Flickr image search & download
• Drag maximized windows to other screens

Download

DisplayFusion v2.0.2 ~ With Installer ~ Recommended ~ February 18, 2008
DisplayFusion v2.0.2 ~ No Installer ~ February 7, 2008

Image via Wikipedia

LifeHacker has the uberlist on tweaks and apps to pimp your desktop out. There are some great ones for Mac and Windows actually, my personal favourite being the tip to embed text documents onto your desktop.

For something that you look at every day of your working life, your computer desktop doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. That’s too bad, considering that the desktop can do a lot more than display wallpaper and hold shortcut icons. From widgets to workflows, from calendars to computer stats and beyond, you can do a whole lot on your desktop without manually starting up a single program. Hit the jump for our top 10 list of applications and tweaks that make your desktop a truly useful place to land. Read on…

Image from Wikipedia

So you’ve got yourself a nice little iPod; and now you can’t not get yourself Safari. Safari (if you don’t know) is Apple’s web browser - like IE, or Firefox. What you might not know though is that they try to force you to install it when you get your next iTunes update - here’s how to turn it off permanantly thanks to cybernetnews!

The Big Trick!

Go to the Tools menu that there was an Ignore Selected Updates option.

Ye.. I know…

Zemanta is (currently) a Firefox plugin which throws your blogging into overdrive - it automatically suggests and inserts images, links, related links and tags into your blog posts in (currently) WordPress (even 2.5), Blogger and TypePad. Oh, and we love it.

Functionality

Zemanta works exactly how you’d want it - without any changes to your blog, no extra plugins, no settings - it inserts itself in the page and automatically gets suggestions.

After every 300 characters (or when you click it) Zemanta goes off and does its thing, finding images suitable for your content (from Flickr, Wikipedia etc) and related articles for you to insert. As I’ve said, this is all content based and works very well - have a peruse around the latest posts on the site to see some examples.

Once it has a set of data, you can click an image to have it automatically inserted into your post (formatting included), links to have the text in your page its discovered sent to their homepages (very snazzy) and articles to fill in a nicely formatted related articles page.

Functionality Gallery

Support

The Zemanta support staff and systems are both great. I recently queried (on their blog) WordPress 2.5 support and within hours there were comments here, on Entropy, explaining that it should work shortly. Zemanta automatically updated itself and my WordPress 2.5 began to work later that night!

See for yourself: The Post and Zemanta’s Blog.

Coming Soon

As if the functionality thats currently there wasn’t enough; Zemanta has also published a list of features that are coming soon! Correction: these are feature requests (which we hope will come soon

• Browsing through images and articles.
• LiveWriter plugin (this was massive)
• Zemanta logo at the bottom of posts being optional
• More links to different sites (apart from Wikipedia)
• Ability to prefer your old posts and blogs from the blogroll
• Spanish, German, Swedish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindii and other languages support
• Cleaner and nicer HTML we insert

A.viary.com has an awesome article comparing its product to FotoFlexer, Splashup, Picnik and Adobe Photoshop Express.

The biggest difference between Phoenix and the other online editors I tried was that Phoenix was created with the serious artist in mind whereas the others seemed to be geared more towards the casual user, the user who needs a quick image crop/photo processing for web.

And in that regard, applications such as Fotoflexer and Picnik, do excel.

Of course, Phoenix still allows for minor image enhancement features and cropping as in the other programs, but the depth of the features in Phoenix and potential to create in-depth composite art puts it in a separate class more akin to desktop software. Aviary’s unparalleled collaboration system, rights management and built-in storage gives the user added incentive to use the program over its desktop predecessors.

I also came across an article stating that 60% of Photoshop users are pirates. That is an insanely high amount of people pirating Adobe’s software. I would think that the majority of users pirating it are using it for basic tasks and hopefully with the release of the online version these figures will come down.