Media center application Boxee has grabbed a lot of headlines over the past year or two, and for good reason: Boxee provides Mac, Linux, and Windows users with an excellent solution for watching internet video on a TV. While web browsers were generally designed for viewing text and images with video thrown in as an afterthought, Boxee was designed to look and feel more like a consumer electronics application that you can navigate from the couch with a remote control.

Boxee can access online video from services including Hulu, Joost, and BBC's iPlayer. You can use it to enjoy audio and video podcasts. And you can access local media stored on your hard drive.

But despite all of its features, Boxee is still alpha software. That's going to change next month. Boxee is set to launch the first beta version of its software at an event in New York on December 7th. I suppose the day will continue to live in Infamy, although I doubt that decades from now we'll still be talking about it as the date that Boxee went beta.

The new version will have a new user interface, improved navigation, a user-controlled queue, and a new TV and movie search function among other changes.

The latest Windows version of Google Chrome, version 4.0, is now in beta. It's reportedly a scorching 30% faster than the current release, and it includes a bookmark syncing feature that's been floating around in the developer preview version of the browser for some time.

Activate bookmark syncing on each of your computers, and Chrome will automatically synchronize any changes to your bookmarks across all your machines. It's made possible by the magic of XMPP, which also powers Google Talk. Sound good? Go ahead and download Chrome 4.0 Beta.

This beta version of Chrome is also notable for what it leaves out: extensions support. According to Stephen Shankland at CNET, Google is reworking the extensions interface for Chrome, so that feature is disabled for now. Shankland also tracked down some news on the upcoming Chrome Mac Beta. The team working on it has been instructed to fix all their high-priority bugs by the end of the week, and it looks like getting the Mac version out is near the top of Google's to-do list.

[via CNET]

Four years after the service opened to the public, popular web-based task manager Remember The Milk is finally out of beta. What does that mean? Nothing really.

The company isn't going to start charging for access to its core services. And the developers aren't done adding and refining features. It's just that after four years, the Remember The Milk team decided the product was probably robust enough to remove the beta label... you know, kind of like Google did with Gmail not too long ago.

Of course, companies like Google and Remember the Milk have stretched the meaning of the beta label beyond any semblance of recognition. Once upon a time, if you were using a beta product you knew it was a pre-release version that hadn't been extensively tested and which may be unstable. These days, alpha is kind of the new beta, although some companies still release public and private beta versions of software that are still untested and unstable. Since there's no regulator tasked with enforcing alpha, beta, and other labeling rules, the words have kind of lost their meaning.

Still, congratulations to the Remember the Milk team on reaching four years!

Online video site Blinkx is branching out into music with the launch of Blinkx Music Beta, a search engine for online music videos. The front page is simple enough. You're greeted with a search box, a list of top artists, and the ability to click a letter to see results starting with A through Z. You can search for artists, albums, or songs.

Unfortunately, the search index is pretty sparse. There are a number of songs, artists, and albums that return no results. And the search engine's not that intelligent. While a search for Coldplay returns a fair number of results, searching for Cold Play or Caldplay results in a "no results matching your query" message. So you'd better not include a typo or not know the proper phrasing of your favorite band name. Heck, on a whim, I tried searching for Hootie and the Blowfish and got zero results, which normally wouldn't upset me in the least. But Hootie & The Blowfish actually did return results.

Blinkx doesn't host the videos on its own site. Instead, when you click on a song you'll be taken to the page where the video rests, whether it be on YouTube, Last.fm, or another site. A Blinkx toolbar hangs out at the top of the screen to take you back to where you started or let you begin another search.

A fairly large number of videos I did find were cellphone recordings shot at concerts rather than professional music videos.

That's the bad news. Here's the good news: the Blinkbox online video service keeps getting better. I got an email today letting me know that Blinkbox had added a number of BBC TV shows which are now available to watch for free including episodes from the first two seasons of the original (William Hartnell) Doctor Who as well as episodes of The Young Ones, Hustle, and The League of Gentlemen. Update: It's just been pointed out to me that Blinkbox (which I mistakenly referred to as Blinkxbox at first) is not actually related to Blinkx. I'm still excited about the BBC content though.

[via VentureBeat]

The lead designer for Mozilla Messaging describes Mozilla's new communication tool, Raindrop, this way: "Raindrop is not another email client. We started from scratch with fresh ideas about what a communication application should be ... " Sound familiar? That's the same promise we heard from Google Wave a few months ago. Raindrop is similar to Wave in some ways, but it takes a completely different approach to dealing with integrating different kinds of communication into one service.

Raindrop's main goal is to separate personal conversations from bulk email that's less relevant to you. To that it, it pulls out all of the notifications you get from various web services, as well as messages from newsgroups, and sorts them into separate places. It also brings in Twitter, and separates out replies and direct messages. Other social networks will eventually be integrated, and the UI is still in the draft stages, but Raindrop looks pretty promising for a version 0.1 product. It's not as hard to get your head around (or "revolutionary," depending on who you ask) as Wave, but its focus on the problem of bulk vs. personal communication might make it more useful to the average Internet joe.

[via Slashdot]

There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp.

A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".

Three possibilities crossed my mind:

1. Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
2. Twitter phishing scam
3. (remote possibility) an actual app.

Possibility #2 was confirmed in my mind when I saw the following tweet:

The good news is that there's now a Google Wave desktop client for the Mac. The bad news is that it's not yet that much better than the web interface or a Fluid app. The app is called Waveboard, and it looks quite promising, although it's still in its early stages. In case a prototype for Wave on the desktop isn't cool enough for you, there's also an iPhone app in the works.

Waveboard offers a handful of features that you won't get by running Wave in Fluid. It alerts you to changes in your waves using a badge on the dock icon, and also supports Growl notifications. It also allows you to copy a link to a public wave so you can share it with others. Any wave links you run across in your browser can be set to open in Waveboard by default. True, the look of Waveboard is still identical to the Wave web interface, but the additional features at least start us down the path toward an awesome desktop version of Wave.

In the mobile browser wars, Webkit-based browsers seem to be pulling away from the pack. Don't count Firefox out yet, though, because the CEO of Mozilla says that Firefox has put together "the most advanced mobile browser," and it's due to hit Android phones soon. Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, is based on Firefox 3.6, which is a generation ahead of the current desktop version of Firefox. As CEO John Lilly told Om Malik of GigaOM, this browser does "everything - Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio."

Like the desktop version of Firefox, the mobile version uses the AwesomeBar, which provides quick access to bookmarks and browser history, right from the address bar. Mozilla also plans to support add-ons for Firefox's mobile version, which would make it the first mobile browser to do so. Add-ons might be the sole factor keeping Firefox competitive on the desktop. In the mobile space, they'd give it an edge. Along with Android, Mozilla is also developing for Nokia's Maemo OS, which isn't too widespread in the US, but is growing in global popularity.

With a cheeky tagline like "It's business time," you get the feeling that the folks behind the online service Bedpost like to keep things lighthearted. Beta service Bedpost is a site that allows you to create an account and then track how often you have sex. Unlike I Just Made Love, there are no social media features in Bedpost; it's intended for your eyes only, though they are working on allowing partners to access the same data.

There's a sort of brazen appeal to Bedpost. Realistically, if you felt the need to track your sex life, you could always do it in your personal calendar. But Bedpost offers a spicy interface that feels, somehow, a little more sexy than Google Calendar or Outlook.

It would probably be statistically irrelevant but interesting to see anonymous statistics garnered from the users of Bedpost. Questions like "How often do couples really do it?" or "What's the most popular day of the week to have sex?" would be fun, though I suspect we'll never see them. Bedpost seems intensely aware of the privacy concerns involved with tracking intensely personal data online, given that they put their privacy policy right on their homepage.

The gist of Gist is that it's a web service that connects your various social media networks with your personal contact information to give you an enhanced view of your connections, and hopefully let the most relevant information rise to the top. It's a sort of filter, with the goal of helping you manage the information overload that is inherent in belonging to multiple social networks.

Okay; the temptation to abuse the word "gist" in this post is overwhelming, but I will now do my best to fight it off.

The power of Gist is its ability to import all of your contacts from your networks and personal contacts. It can then analyze them for overlaps, and surface news about the companies that are associated with your contacts. Currently it can import from LinkedIn, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail, Email/IMAP, and even simple CSV files of contacts.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Kitschy soundtrack, good voiceover and an intensely thorough demo add up to one cool re-imagining of our conventional human/computer interaction. In other words: this looks as close to the UI in Minority Report as I've ever seen. The key seems to be rewarding the user for having 10 fingers, and using all 10 to do a high number of operations in clever ways. This is really, really clever, too, just check out the name: 10/GUI. Check it out, you won't be disappointed. Well, if you hate using your fingers you might.

While it's slightly behind schedule -- having been originally slated for a mid-September release -- Firefox 3.6 has reached beta.

Version 3.6 beta RC1 is now available for download from Mozilla's servers. As Softpedia mentioned a few days ago, Mozilla is pondering an early exit for Firefox 3.5. Mozilla's Mike Beltzner stated, "It's not 100% decided yet, but if we issue a Firefox 3.6 as a minor update, then yes, we'd stop supporting the 1.9.1 branch at that time." He's referring to Gecko 1.9.1, on which Firefox 3.5 is based. 3.6 is based upon version 1.9.2 of the Gecko engine.

It may not benchmark in the same league as Google Chrome, but Firefox 3.6 certainly feels speedier. Our content management system runs more smoothly than it did for me under 3.5.3, and my go-to web apps like GMail and Seesmic are also more responsive.

A couple of features that appear in the 3.6 beta candidate: control-tab previews (as previously mentioned) and taskbar thumbnail previews on Windows 7 (not just for FF3.7 apparently).

Testers - if you've given 3.6 beta 1 a go, tell us what you think in the comments!

Those of you running Windows 7 and prepared to tiptoe through the Minefield, Firefox 3.7's most recently nightly build has added another taskbar integration feature.

Now the latest trunk build includes support for per-tab thumbnail previews just like Internet Explorer 8. And just like IE8, the magic works across multiple instances. If you have two Minefield windows open at the same time, you'll get previews for both.

When Opera 10 launched without one of its most-hyped features, Opera Unite, browser geeks had to install a separate build to test it out. Opera developers have now merged the two, integrating Unite into the main browser in Opera 10.10 Beta.

As we've reported before, Unite is a "web server within a web browser" that allows you to download and run various web applications. What does this mean for the average user? You can access your files from anywhere, and easily share them with friends.

The first Unite apps are all about sharing. There's a media player to share music, a general file storage app, a web server app to host sites, and even a "fridge" app where you can leave notes for your friends. Media Player will probably get a lot of the early hype, as it lets you stream music from your machine to another computer with iTunes, WInamp, or your other player of choice (as long as it supports streaming playlists). Unite is still in the early stages, but no other browser has even attempted to do what Opera is doing in this space.