The latest from TechCrunch
- Gowalla Gets An Early Native Android App. Prettier, More Social Than iPhone Version.
- Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. Puts It On Death Watch For Firefox And IE.
| Gowalla Gets An Early Native Android App. Prettier, More Social Than iPhone Version. | Top |
| In November of last year, Gowalla finally extended its reach beyond its iPhone app with a version of its app that worked on the mobile web for Android (and the iPhone’s Safari browser). It was a pretty good web app but had some limitations, which founder Josh Williams accepted because his team was at work on a native app for Android as well. That wait is over. While it’s not yet in the Android Market, Gowalla has released a very early beta version of the native Android app to its most dedicated users that patrol the company’s Get Satisfaction page. Williams posted about the new app a few days ago, and noted that “ Technically, we are calling this beta release 0.1. We will release a more fully featured beta to the Marketplace before the end of the month .” Since it’s not in the Market yet, you can only get the app by visiting this static link — or by using your Android camera to scan one of the bar codes you can find in that Get Satisfaction thread. Note : To install the app, you have to have your device set up for the installation of “non-Market applications". This site runs through how to do that , but basically you go to Menu -> Settings -> Applications, then check the "Unknown sources" checkbox. So how is the app compared to its iPhone brother? Well, surprisingly, in some ways I think it might already be better. While, as Williams, notes, it is currently missing the Trips feature , and it’s not doing any image caching, the 0.1 build of Gowalla for Android is slick and lightweight. As you’ll notice right away, the app has a distinctly different look because it has ditched the iPhone’s green hues for a cleaner, white look. I can’t tell you how many Gowalla users I’ve talked to that hate the green look of the iPhone app and would like a way to change it (I’m included in that list). More importantly, the Android version of Gowalla flips the features of the service so that your friend check-in stream is now the first tab. This makes the Android version more social right off the bat than the iPhone version, which buries that information in the last tab. Gowalla’s Android launch is timely as the SXSW conference is less than a month away. Last year, both Gowalla and rival Foursquare launched their iPhone apps at the conference, with Foursquare able to take an early lead over the past year. Foursquare now has apps for all the major mobile OSes except for Symbiam. Meanwhile, Gowalla is also close to launching a BlackBerry app . Game on. Check out some early screenshots below. [thanks Wes ] CrunchBase Information Gowalla Android Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. Puts It On Death Watch For Firefox And IE. | Top |
| While digging through the Chromium forums back in November looking for clues about the then-unreleased Chrome for Mac beta, we stumbled on an interesting bit of information: Google was moving away from supporting Gears going forward. While this move was obvious for some given Google’s heavy investment in HTML5, Google hadn’t talked much about what would happen to their plug-in that allowed for things such as offline access to Gmail. They’re talking now. In a post yesterday on the Gears API blog, Ian Fette from the Gears team comes right out and says it in his title: “Hello HTML5.” Fette notes that the reason there haven’t been many updates to Gears in the past several months is because the team has shifted its focus towards implementing the same features into Chrome through HTML5. So far, this includes Database API, workers, local storage, and web sockets. And soon, LocalServer API and Geolocation will be a part of Chrome as well, Fette notes. In essence, all of these features make Gears unnecessary — well, at least in Chrome, which Google obviously wants you to use. Because of this shift of focus, Fette notes that support for Gears will be increasingly “constrained in scope.” What this means is that beginning immediately, they will no longer be supporting Gears on OS X Snow Leopard (and later). Meanwhile, Gears support in Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue in limited form for now. But both of those too will eventually be killed off. “ We will not be investing resources in active development of new features ,” Fette writes. Really, all Google is waiting for is an effective way to migrate Gears-enabled apps (and their users) over to HTML5. While there is currently no good way to do this, it seems as if Google just may wait for developers to drink the HTML5 kool-aid and then kill of Gears support entirely — even if there are still some who are using it. I’m all for this. As I wrote back in December, I’m of the opinion that plug-ins are perhaps the biggest inhibitor of a unified web . That is, a web where everyone sees the same content the same way, no matter what browser or which OS they’re using. It doesn’t matter if those plug-ins are made by Google (Gears), Microsoft (Silverlight), Adobe (Flash), or anyone else. CrunchBase Information Google Gears Up Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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