By the time you're reading this, the download number for the latest version of the popular VLC Media Player is well past 81,297,899. And for good reason.

As cross-platform, plays-every-type-of-media-file, and-for-free players go, it's tops in a lot of people's bookmarks. It's one of those toolkit apps that we have ready to go for the right occasion. You know, those moments when a friend gets a new Macbook and wants to play AVI (or MPEG, MOV, MP4, and many more) files. They ask you, and you fire back "VLC" without hesitation.

It's tough to get this type of mass following and community around an application, but VideoLAN has done it.

With really easy installs on Windows, Mac, and all of the popular flavors of Linux, there's no excuse not to give this a try if you haven't yet.

The major knock on VLC has been its bland interface, which obviously isn't their main focus with this app. But with skins you can liven it up a bit. It even works with Winamp skins. Remember Winamp? Of course you do, heck, some of us still use it (but refuse to admit it).

Give it a shot, put it in your toolkit. Pretty or not, it gets the job done.

If you happen to be on Facebook and find yourself bored with life since you were really destined to be the ruler of your own nation, a second best alternative has just revealed itself. It is called Nations, and as the name implies, it puts you in charge of your very own nation.

It works like this: once you get the application, you get to name your nation, choose your title, and how often you would like to have new issues come your way for you to deal with. You can have these issues come as often as everyday, or as little as not at all. But, more about those in a moment. Next, you pick a flag, and are then presented with a short series of questions ranging from whether or not you think health and citizen welfare is a government priority to the importance of free markets in your nation.

Once you've answered the questions, a summary appears, based on your answers. This sort of becomes your home screen, and as you make decisions on issues, the summary changes to reflect those decisions. So, if you make your nation for the first time, you will have an issue waiting, asking you about something of the following nature, such as whether small businesses in your nation should get tax breaks because they are having difficulties competing with larger corporations. There are multiple responses you can choose from, which then affects your summary, your population, military size, wealth, and unemployment. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course, since this is Facebook, you can invite your friends to build nations of their own, a condition upon which you will be granted with more titles to adorn yourself with (such as Lord, General, or Supreme Commander). And, as expected, there is a nice ranking system where you can see how your nation fares against others. Our only gripe: you can't choose your own custom flag. But, besides that, a great way to waste a little time everyday.

[via All Facebook]

Now you can stay in touch with friends using Facebook for Blackberry, a standalone application. Sure Facebook can be accessed normally through the likes of mobile browsers like Opera, but this new application provides more streamlined and optimized mobile access for Facebook.

After installing the application, users can send and view messages, photos, pokes, and wall posts. They will also be able to take a picture and directly send it to their profiles complete with tags if their Berry's have cameras. Although this is good for long commutes and waiting for meals to be served, it could be encouraging a new level of unproductiveness in the workplace!

There have been reports of Facebook for Blackberry not working with older handsets and on some mobile networks.

You can download the installer from Blackberry or Facebook.

As the shift towards online applications grows strong, so do the conferences and events that promote working online.

The Office 2.0 conference is just around the corner in San Francisco, September 5-7th 2007. The event is aimed at the discovery of future online productivity and collaboration efforts brings together leaders and visionaries in the field to discuss innovative online services, and ways to get things done both at home, and in the office. Speaker's sessions include: The Future of work, mobile productivity, death of the app., and GTD with Office 2.0.

A very cool part of the event is that conference attendees will get an Apple iPhone, or PS3 running on Firefox with Linux, to play with and connect during the event. The iPhone experiment will allow conference go ers a way to easily check out the conference schedule, map the area, utilize the facilities WiFi and to lookup conference speakers and biographies. Of course the device is built in to the $1695 registration fee, and users are responsible for activating the iPhone with an AT&T plan. Nonetheless a very intuitive idea from conference organizers.

There is also word that Google could be announcing Google Presentation, and Google Wiki at this event.

The iPhone has been anticipated for a long time. A very long time. It's finally coming out, and could have the potential to be better than we could have ever imagined with a surprise turn of events.

Apple's Wordwide Developers Conference is today in San Francisco, and some exciting news has been rumored to be dropped at the event. Steve Jobs may announce that they will be letting developers write programs for the iPhone to broaden the appeal of it. The phone does run on OSX, making it more than highly possible to open up the device for outside applications and many other issues as well. Jobs had said a while ago that they will not be opening up the device in the near future until Apple had monitored it due to possible security concerns that could arise, but has since changed their minds.

If this 3rd party accessibility news does indeed get released today, the possibilities for the iPhone are endless as a full and complete mobile device. The phone will get released on June 29th, ranging from $499-$599 for an 8GB device.

What would be your first application wish for the iPhone?

UPDATE: Its official, the iPhone has been opened up for developers. Developers can now write Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone.

As the web application world heats up, companies that were once offering locally installed software only, are slowly delving into the online world. Recent news says that Adobe will be offering an online version of Photoshop in the next six months. A decision they base on numerous consumer demands.

Adobe's CEO told CNET news that the online service will complement their existing product range, and reach new customers across the online marketplace. The free entry level online hosted application will have fewer image editing tools, but will suffice online photo editing junkies. Adobe has been watching Google and other online application companies closely, and wants to ensure that they hit that market before others take control. Adobe currently has Adobe Remix, an online video remixing tool, which is set to launch soon.

We've asked you which blog editor you prefer (and so has Lifehacker), but for my money you simply can't beat ecto, at least on Mac OS X (I've honestly never used it on Windows). It's a powerful editor with strong integration with other tools and software, and Adriaan Tijsseling has just updated it to version 2.2 with quite a few new features and fixes, including:

• Flickr Search support for image upload
  
• support for CSS style/class for image upload
  
• support for generic tag format (e.g. Ultimate Tag Warrior)
  
• GoDaddy.com's Quick Blog to the preset list of blog type in Profile Creation Wizard
  
• initial support for the new Google's Blogger beta using the GData library
  
• profile backup and restore to file capability
  
• Paste Special option to Post window with capability to paste text as unformatted text or strip out MS
• and much, much more

This looks like a strong update to a killer blogging app, and if you're in the market for more blogging power than a simple web form, I highly recommend it whether you're on Windows or Mac OS X. You can learn more about ecto here and download a demo. A license costs $17.95, with discounts for cross-platform and bulk purchases available.

I don't know how you feel about blue collar, but if you want, need, or simply must have yet another email account, BlueTie is one to check out. BlueTie however, really is much more than just an email account. Not only is it free email with 5GB of storage per user (yes, more than Google so far), but provides unified calendar and other collaborative tools including shared file storage, an "enterprise" user manager, tasks, and a frighteningly Outlook-like calendar. Many features of BlueTie remind me of Outlook's meeting requests, contacts, calendar, and other features in fact. The free account limits you to 20 users, but who's counting? Small business owners and groups will love this app. It is AJAX based and looks good enough that I am considering putting my business on it entirely, since most of the app can be shared with all your people, contacts, calendar, and file storage. Did I mention that you can use your own domain with BlueTie, as well as the fact that it has Virus and Spam protection built in? Oh yeah, it has that too.

[Via TechCrunch]

Google has announced what is quite possibly the largest update to Google Reader since its inception, bringing an entirely new UI, more keyboard shortcuts, new bookmarklets and a whole lotta results from user feedback to the table. Overall, as a Google Reader fan for some time, I am pleasantly surprised by this wholly positive and usable update, but it isn't without a few confusing quirks.

The first and most noticeable update is the radical change to Google Reader's UI, bringing it more in line with the tried and tested UI of many other online readers, but still with much of the Google engineers' unique genius baked in everywhere. Above you can see Reader has adopted the typical folder/grouping system on the left, while headlines can be listed on the right.

Steven Frank, founder of Mac software company Panic Inc., certainly thinks so, and I agree. With the slew of new web apps that are being introduced almost on a daily basis, it's becoming a pain to create a registration for each one, verify, then jump back in to finally start playing. Not to mention this process completely breaks that initial 'ooh, a slick new [insert service here]!!' excitement.

I think it would be great if these hot new web 2.0 startups would offer a public, no-registration-required sandbox to further boost their convenience and cool factors, but what about you, DLS readers? Are we splitting hairs here, or might this be a good idea? Sound off.

We asked you which RSS readers you use, and we even asked why you might not use RSS at all. Now Lifehacker has gone and posted the results of a poll they ran of which blog editors their readers use to create content for all those RSS feeds. Not surprisingly, online editors (what I would assume are the editors from each respective blogging service) won by a landslide. With the easy option out of the way, however, desktop blog editors followed in this editor: Performancing, w.bloggar, ecto (my personal favorite, since it fares a bit better on Mac OS X) and BlogJet.

What do you DLS readers think? Does Performancing simply not cut the cake, or is ecto the last editor you'd ever touch? Sound off.

Filelight is a Linux utility that creates a concentric graph of your computer's disk usage. Each color represents a different type of file, such as documents or apps, so it's easy to tell which is the biggest bully on the block. I found a utility like this for Mac OS X over on TUAW by the name of Disk Inventory X - has anyone seen a similar app for Windows?

No specific OS flavor is required, though Qt 3.2 and KDE 3.2 are. Filelight is available from MethyBlue and is released under the GNU General Public License.

I think "mouse odometer" apps, which track how far your cursor has traveled plus other useless but somehow fascinating data, have been around about as long as the mouse itself. OdoPlus such an app for Windows. In addition to tracking your cursor's travel in pixels and meters and counting how many times you click with each mouse button, OdoPlus generates a cool graphical click distribution map that shows what regions of the screen you click on most. You know, just in case you need one.

[Via Joey Day]

So you put all these portable apps installed on your USB drive only to discover what a pain it is to start them? Try PStart. It's a freeware Windows app launcher that you can run from your USB drive that remembers where to find your portable apps even if your portable storage device gets assigned a different drive letter. When you're not using it PStart hides behind a tray icon out of your way, and it looks fairly customizable. As a bonus, it has a built-in notes function so you can take your shopping list or mad scrawlings with you wherever you go.