Update: The Agile Web Solutions guys have been nice enough to extend beta invites to another 100 TUAW readers. Those that don't make it into the first round, don't worry, the guys said they will be putting you on a waiting list and accessing that over the next couple of months, so with any luck, everyone can get in on the fun! Check out http://switchersblog.com for details in the coming weeks. Once again, send an e-mail with the subject "I want my 1P3 beta!" to 1P3Promo [at] agile [dot] ws!

I am a huge fan of Agile Web Solutions's 1Password. It's always one of the first applications I install on a freshly formatted Mac, and I use it countless times a day to manage my logins to various web sites, forums, shopping sites and more. I used to be really, really bad about using the same few passwords for every login, but the strong password generator coupled with support across browsers (and on the iPhone and iPod touch) makes it easy for me to have distinct and secure logins all over the web.

Last night, the Agile Web Solutions team released the 2.9.19 beta (with support for Safari 4), and if you subscribe to the 1Password newsletter, you know that 1Password 3.0 is gearing up for testing before being released later this year.

We've got some juicy details about what to expect in 1Password 3.0 and a chance for current 1Password fans to get in on the private 1Password 3.0 beta! Read on...

Digg's Kevin Rose, perennial purveyor of information that just "fell off the back of the truck" shared a link early this morning to Google's new, supercharged, Webkit-based browser -- for Mac.

The new browser, Chrome, is clearly marked as a developer preview, and not meant for general browsing. In fact, as a good Mac citizen, it will refuse to set itself as your default browser.

It scores a 100 on the Acid3 test straight out of the box, but doesn't pass: it fails something called the linktest, which involves interacting A tags and IFRAMEs. A little research suggests that it could be a bug with Webkit. If that's true, then it's a bug that Safari 4 beta has fixed.

Chrome appears to have Flash (and other plugin) support disabled as well. JavaScript support, however, is fully functional. While Chrome performed much better than Firefox on this cursory test, it still didn't beat Safari 4 by a long shot. While only a beta, its performance is respectable and sure to improve.

Again, Google Chrome isn't for everyone, but if you're a web developer who needs to keep up with the bleeding edge of browser development, then this preview should be stable and reliable enough for you to test what you need to.

Read through for the full JavaScript test details.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

While still in beta, Evom (from The Little App Factory, makers of iPodRip) looks ready to pick up where iSquint left off. It easily and quickly converts videos to formats compatible with iTunes, YouTube, your iPod, and Apple TV.

It couldn't be a simpler drag-and-drop operation: drop the video on the Evom window, and select a destination. After that, Evom does the heavy lifting and (optionally) adds the finished video to iTunes. The output quality is good -- it uses the same technical foundation as ffmpegX. You get the same high quality without all the fiddly controls of ffmpegX.

Evom also includes a bookmarklet that lets you save off YouTube videos to your computer with a single click. The quality of the output there mostly depends on how good the source video is, but it couldn't be easier.

iSquint, my favorite "as if by magic" video conversion tool, was discontinued after Techspansion (also the makers of iSquint's bigger brother VisualHub) shut their doors last October. The VisualHub codebase is still being developed, however, in a new project called Video Monkey that Aron covered in March, which is also well worth a look.

Evom is in beta, but unlike iSquint, it appears like it may cost something when the final version is released. It also appears limited to converting 60 items until it's registered, and trying to register the app leads to a non-existent shopping cart area. Even so, the simple interface and easy installation will be worth a few bucks to me.

[Via Daring Fireball.]

Gee, quite a day for Apple software updates. Apple has put out an update to Safari beta 4, and the Leopard version requires OS X 10.5.7 which was just released today. There is also a version for Tiger that requires OS X 10.4.11 and security update 2009-002.

Here is a download link. As is often the case with Apple, no details on what this brings. I installed and used it for awhile and nothing new jumped out at me. The installer also comes with an uninstaller in case things get ugly. Let us know what you see, or don't see.

Thanks to Barry for spotting this update.

The concept of a single-site browser or site-specific browser (SSB, either way) is simple: give me a window with one website in it, preferably a desktop application replacement like Gmail, RTM, Basecamp or Zoho, and let that window behave like a regular application with its own Dock icon, notifications, etc. If you're spending a lot of your time on a particular site, this can simplify your life quite a bit; if you're mixing up GTD with ADD (as so many of us seem to be), an SSB can help limit your distraction horizon while you're trying to maintain focus and flow.

The inspiration for many SSB offerings was the Firefox offshoot Webrunner, and the descendant of that project has now earned a 1.0 beta designation and its own website: Prism, from Mozilla Labs, gives you a power tool for creating your own SSBs at will, either via a Firefox extension or by launching the Prism config app and typing in the target URL.

Aside from having a dockable icon for each website you convert, you can also set your SSBs to launch at login, or assign mailto: links to open your web email client (similarly achievable for Gmail with the Gmail Notifier tool). If you have to keep separate sets of credentials for work & personal accounts for web services, no need to log in and out repeatedly -- just set up a Prism SSB for one of the accounts, and the passwords & cookies will stay as they need to be. In my brief testing this morning, several sites worked just as expected; the only sticking point is that the Choosy extension gets confused about whether or not Firefox is running when an SSB is open.

Safari 4 developer seeds had offered a "Save as Web Application" feature for creating SSBs, which has been stripped from the File menu in the current public beta but still looks to be part of the final release; meanwhile, you can still make WebKit-centric SSBs with the excellent and free Fluid.

What site or webapp would you put in a single-site browser?

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

[H/T to Lifehacker]

Version version, who's got the new version? iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 is now downloadable, along with a new build of iTunes 8.2 -- log into developer.apple.com to pick up the latest build.

What's tweaked and changed? Well, editing the carrier file in iTunes to enable tethering is now apparently blocked, and MMS support on AT&T is also 'hidden' per the iPhone Blog. It's not 100% clear whether these feature drops are deliberate, as some reports say a clean install preserves the capabilities. Parental control features for apps now seem to be visible... and yes, the new beta has already been jailbroken.

Got more observations and tidbits? Let us know below.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

The Mac OS X Dock is a great UI invention, but it doesn't have all the functionality that it could have. That's why one developer is looking to expand the functionality and make it even better with an application that he calls "Dropzone."

Dropzone is a small application that you can install on your Mac, and as the app name suggests, drag stuff onto. When you drop a file on the icon, you will get a list of options depending on what type of file you just dropped. For instance, you could drop a picture onto the icon and get an option to email, send to Flickr, or upload to an FTP server.

Different applications can "register" to work with Dropzone by using a simple API, the documentation for which can be found on the Aptonic website. The more applications that decide to work with Dropzone, the better (developers, did you hear that?). There is currently no shipping date set for this handy little Dock tool, but you can check out a teaser video on the Aptonic website, and also apply to be a part of the beta program.

It might seem like a big leap from a phone with no real video capabilities to one that will trim and clip your creations on the fly, but that's the implication of a few graphic elements sussed out of the iPhone 3.0 firmware by Ben at benm.at (original site in German, translation here). He's spotted some art resources that seem to show editing, scrubbing and clip functions in the next version of the iPhone's firmware.

Note that Engadget Mobile pointed out an "Upload my Video" button in the MobileMe area of a 3.0 iPhone last month.

Even though there are jailbreak apps now that leverage the iPhone's camera for video use (ustream and Qik, in particular), Apple hasn't yet shown its hand on video directions in 3.0. Giving users the ability to edit their video on-device before uploading, emailing or MMS-ing would be a spectacular feature, and there's a lot to like about the idea of a pinch/stretch UI for managing a video timeline. iPhone, meet iMovie? Still, if you planned to do a lot of video work on your phone, a 32 GB model with a faster processor and better camera would be ideal...

Thanks, Ben

In the history of marketing battles, The Cola Wars have nothing on the Twitter App War that's currently raging online. Twitterrific, TweetDeck and others (popular with commenters: Pwitter and DestroyTwitter) are waging the ground battle, while Twitterrific (mobile), Tweetie and TwitterFon (to name a few) are fighting it out in the air.

Today we got our hands on a beta of Lounge, a new client for Mac OS X (and iPhone/iPod touch). It's definitely got a way to go (I saw more beach balls than Memorial Day at Hilton Head), but I see where they're going and I like it.

First off, there's support for multiple accounts, and switching between them is easy. A series of buttons appear horizontally in the left of the window, including "My 2 Cents" (which displays just your tweets), Favorites, Friends, Replies and my favorite, Vanity, which finds all occurrences of your Twitter handle.

Mouse over a user's tweet to see options to re-tweet, copy the URL, open in a browser and more. I really like the option to view user details, which lets you see just that user's tweets, his followers, those being followed and profile and URL.

It is kind of wide (wider than Twitterrific but not TweetDeck, of course) so those with small displays be warned. Also, some may be put off by the pastel-colored icons. Still, it shows promise. Check it out if you're up for it, and provide some feedback to make Lounge better.

Since it's turned into Twitter Thursday around here... In a moment of sheer frustration with Twitterrific, I sent out a call on my Twitter feed for recommendations of a desktop Twitter client. Several folks replied with a nod to TweetDeck, an Adobe AIR-based client currently in development for OS X, Linux, and Windows.

TweetDeck is a pretty neat program. The selling point is the ability to split your main Twitter feed into subfeeds that you can then organize into different groups. You can have Twitter be as narrow as a single column while you scroll back and forth in it, or you can make it full-screen and have your monitor filled with nothing but tweeting goodness.

There's a lot of features as well. If you go over the 140-character limit, you can hit a "TweetShrink" button that will turn some of the words to LOL-speak in order to fit the limit. You can upload pictures -- clicking on the TwitPic button will upload the image file to TwitPic and give you the URL for your feed -- and you can shorten URLs via your choice of service by clicking the "Shorten" button.

Another very cool feature is the ability to translate your tweets into another language. The translation is pretty accurate -- even for more difficult languages such as the Japanese I tested with the application. The program itself is highly customizable, and you can tweak the colors and fonts to whatever you like. You can also set different update times for various feeds: for example, you can have your main friends update every minute, but your private messages every five minutes.

TweetDeck is extremely polished for a beta client and I've yet to get the error messages that plagued me with Twitterrific. If you're searching for a free desktop client for Twitter, it's hard to beat this one.

TweetDeck is in public beta and requires the Adobe AIR runtime, which is a Universal binary and needs OS X 10.4.11 or higher. AIR will be installed during the TweetDeck installation process if you do not already have it.

If you're in the market for a new email client to try, I mentioned Postbox a few weeks ago. Late yesterday, the Postbox team released beta 8, which features an improved conversation view, and new and improved support for QuickLook, Flickr, Hotmail, and Growl.

The beta also fixes many bugs found by users (including myself) and performance enhancements. Also, Postbox is heeding user suggestions to become more Mac-like, including keyboard shortcuts in menus, improved notification for unread messages in the dock, and the aforementioned QuickLook and Growl integration. Full release notes are available on the Postbox website.

Performance appears to be about the same -- which is to say pretty good -- and indexing on my 2006-vintage black MacBook still occasionally ramps the fans up to hurricane strength. I've been using Postbox as my primary email client for about three weeks, and its held up to my demanding workflow, but still has a ways to go before it becomes the killer email app.

Still, if you're a high-volume email consumer, Postbox is a solid option for you. Postbox is free (and will continue to be free, so far as we know), universal binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

After waiting a day for the dust to settle -- and for developers to catch up -- since Apple's release of Safari 4 beta, it looks like there are relatively few show-stopping bugs to talk about. Just about every problem we've heard about at TUAW, and every issue I've had personally, has been an issue with a plugin. Fortunately, for those of us who really depend on hacks plugins for surfing productivity, most developers have been preparing for the release using nightly builds and have already come through with updates.

Yes, plugins break when software is updated, when the software is beta, and when -- due to the lack of a genuine plugin architecture -- plugins are, in fact, hacks. The developers of our third-party goodies have our backs, in most cases, and I expect the ripples on the water to die down completely over the next week.

In the area of search plugins, I switched from Inquisitor to Glims a while ago because of the extra features Glims offers. I haven't seen an update to Inquisitor yet, but Glims came out with build 13 this morning. Unfortunately, my search-as-I-type functionality still isn't working, but the plugin loads and the additional functionality is there. It's quite possibly a conflict with another plugin ... not that I'm running that many.

Well, it's Tuesday, and that often means a software release from Apple. Today, both Mac and Windows users can scarf up a beta copy of Safari 4, with many new and desirable features. Here's a download link for those who are ready to go.

The new browser features:

• Cover Flow -- You can browse through your site history or bookmarks the same way you browse album covers in iTunes
• Top Sites -- look at renderings of your favorite sites, and open any one of them with a single click
• Full History Search -- A clever way to visit sites you have been to in the past. You can type a word or phrase into the history search field and you'll get a cover flow view of sites that match your criteria
• Nitro Engine -- Apple claims JavaScript now executes 30 times faster than IE7 and 3 times faster than Firefox
  
• Tabs on Top -- Allows Safari to have multiple pages open at the same time in a single browser window, and to switch back and forth with a click. The new Safari beta gives you more room at the top of the sceen when in tabbed mode.
  
• Windows Native Look and Feel -- The Windows Safari 4 beta more closely matches the look of other Windows applications and gives access to standard Windows fonts; Apple claims the same performance boost on Windows as in the Mac version

Other features include Full Page Zoom, a 'smart' address field, a 'smart' search field, and more robust phishing and malware protection.

Safari 4 beta also includes some improved developer tools. Details on those options can be found here.

The TUAW team is installing the new beta now, and will have some thoughts & impressions later today. Go get it!

Here's a look at Safari on Windows (from Download Squad)

As we've noted before Plex (formerly OSXBMC) is the open-source media center application derived from XBMC (as was Boxee). They've recently announced the release of version 0.78beta adding an interesting new feature: the Plex App Store. The Plex App Store (which actually doesn't seem to be a store per se, at least not yet) is an online repository of plugins for Plex which allow users to add content from a variety of online streaming sources including, you guessed it, Hulu (which was working at least as of this writing).

Apparently the framework for writing these plugins is in Python and "provides an easy, XML-based method to display Flash or Silverlight content to Plex." The plugins themselves are relatively easy to write, with many requiring only "20-40 lines" of code. This means that other developers will be able to write plugins relatively quickly, perhaps circumventing technical restrictions from the streaming sites. There are a few rough edges with the new functionality, but they expect they will all be fixed "shortly." Nonetheless, if you were running Boxee on a Mac (not Apple TV) and are bummed by the loss of Hulu, Plex is worth a look.

Plex 0.78b is free download from Plex.

Thanks, Jayman.

Postbox, the email client built for heavy email users, entered Public Beta on Sunday. Postbox is designed to allow you to search, organize, and manage your email more more efficiently.

Postbox includes a powerful search tool that lets you use Gmail-style search terms (like "from:Steve" or "before August 2008") to easily find messages. The Gmail-like features don't end there: Postbox automatically organizes threaded emails by subject. Messages can be tagged with one or more topics for easy recall later.

Perhaps Postbox's greatest feature is its ability to recognize what's in your email, and keep it front-and-center. For instance, if you're composing a new message, you can use the Compose sidebar to find attachments in other messages to drag into your new message. The inspector panel on the preview window highlights links, addresses and attachments in the message so you can get to them easily.

For me, I use my inbox like a to-do list. Thankfully, Postbox has a built-in Archive utility that lets you specify an archive folder for each account (which I already had set up). Once you're done with a message, clicking Archive or pressing A moves that message (or many messages) right into your archive.

Add to this to-dos, integrated search, social network integration, message annotation, tabbed browsing, and a high-security Mozilla foundation, and you've got an amazing Swiss Army-knife tool for hard-core emailers.