As someone who manages whole metric scads of information in Google Reader, I was excited to see Byline, from Phantom Fish software, in the App Store.

Byline, as you might expect, fetches all your subscriptions from Google Reader and displays them for you to read. It also keeps track of the items you've read and starred.

The greatest thing, though, especially for iPod touch owners and subway riders is this: Starring or Noting an item saves it on your iPhone or iPod for offline reading. If you star an item either using your desktop browser, Mobile Safari, or Byline itself, it saves it for later. Noting an item is even better, because you can save pages that aren't even in your RSS subscriptions for offline reading with Byline. They mention you can do this very easily with a bookmarklet.

Now -- I can hear you screaming: NetNewsWire does all this, and it's free! Without boring you with detail, it's worth ten bucks to me to keep my Google Reader workflow the way it is, rather than spending time changing the way I work. Agreed: it's probably too steep for people who aren't heavily invested in Google Reader already.

Additionally on the downside, Byline doesn't allow you to browse by tag, instead opting to lump everything together in one list by date. Phantom Fish says this is for performance reasons, as people with many feeds would experience sluggish behavior. They're looking into it, though, and I personally hope they figure it out.

Byline is $9.99, awesome, and available through the App Store.

Google's Mac group has released Precipitate, a plugin which allows you to search Google Docs and Google Bookmarks from the same interface that you search you Mac. It works with both Spotlight and Google Desktop for Mac. Basically the developer's idea is to have a one stop search interface for information on your Mac and information in the Google cloud so you don't have to remember where you saved something. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Google's Precipitate is a free download from Google Code.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google's mobile phone platform, Android, is experiencing delays that may move the launch of Android-based phones into early 2009.

In a Monday article about the delays, the WSJ noted that at the launch of Android last November it was expected that the new breed of smartphones would appear in the second quarter of 2008. Due to developmental difficulties, the first carrier to have an Android-based phone -- T-Mobile -- may not see one until the fourth quarter. Google is focused on the T-Mobile launch, which is causing further delays for other partners such as Sprint Nextel and China Mobile.

What does this mean for Apple? A lot of good things. By the fourth quarter of 2008 or early 2009, the iPhone 3G, App Store, and development for iPhone will be well established, with tens of millions of the inexpensive handsets sold. It also points out the intelligence of Apple in owning all pieces of the puzzle -- hardware, software, development, and software distribution -- instead of relying on various open source development teams and numerous hardware partners.

Apple's won this battle, and things are looking good for winning the handset war.

Linkinus is the preferred IRC client for a lot of our readers, I know (personally I tend towards Colloquy, but only because I'm a cheapskate and it's donationware), and they kindly dropped us a note to let us know they'd updated to version 1.3. The new build includes the ability to split chat windows (as seen above), in addition to a revamped UI, "major" performance upgrades, plaintext and Spotlight support for logging, and a whole slew of fun things to play around with, including, we're told, a "Whisper" style that will actually embed images, audio files, and YouTube and Google videos right into your chat windows (a la Campfire). Apparently IRC isn't just text anymore.

In fact, at $20 for all these features, Linkinus really is a steal for anyone who spends any amount of time in an IRC channel. Colloquy still does everything I need it to when I jump into IRC periodically, but if you want to chat like a pro in there, Linkinus is a great choice.

Did last night's news of 10.5.3 boasting Google contact syncing with iPhone and iPod touch owners get you down? Well, LifeHacker hopes to lift your spirits as they tell you how to enable Google syncing in Address Book.app without ever syncing an iPhone or iPod touch.

The process requires you to edit some .plist files within Address Book.app. LifeHacker notes that the .plist entry only occurs when you sync some type of iPod first. So, you will need to do at least one sync for the entry to show up. Some of the comments seem to suggest that the .plist entry will change back to the original value once you sync an iPod a couple times. Even still, this is a cool hack.


[via LifeHacker]

If you have an iPhone synced with Address Book.app, then you've been able to sync your contacts with Yahoo for a while now, but something that has been missing is Google sync. Sure, you can always use Spanning Sync, but we all want something free and built-into the OS. Well, those dreams are now true according to a new Google blog post and the introduction of Mac OS X 10.5.3.

On the Mac you normally sync your iPhone with, you will see a new option when you open the "General" tab in Address Book preferences. When you check "Synchronize with Google" you can enter your Google credentials and syncing will proceed. Apple and Google did leave some people out, however, as this new feature works only on Macs that have an iPhone synced with iTunes.

Thanks, Nathan and Ryan!

Over at the Official Google Mac blog they've announced the release of App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X. Basically, its a Mac-native project manager for creating web applications to run on Google App Engine, which allows third-party developers to write web applications that run on Google's infrastructure. The Launcher makes it a matter of a couple of clicks to create and (when finished) deploy projects to Google. In the words of author John Grabowski, "with the Launcher, you can focus on your app instead of the tools."

The App Engine Launcher is available for download with the Google App Engine SDK at Google Code.

The guys over at the Google Mac blog have dropped a new little open source application called Visigami, which serves as a more "interesting" and "fun" way to browse and play around with images online. Basically, after installing the app, you can then pull in pics from Picasa, Google Images, or Flickr (iPhoto is just a suggestion so far), and then search, animate, zoom in or out on them, and even turn them right into a screensaver.

It's a pretty neat little application -- not exactly the kind of thing that anyone has probably been hoping for (it seems more fun than utilitarian), but if you find yourself often browsing photos online, this definitely seems like a more fun way to do it. And it's one more reason to praise all the great developers working on our platform -- it's little apps like this that make the Mac user experience so much better.

Just last week we noted that BusySync 2, which adds Google calendar syncing to the iCal sync app, is now shipping. Another 2.0 would seem to be around the corner, as a post on the SpanningSync blog shows a video demo of Address Book -> Google contact synchronization coming in the next version of the utility.

While Plaxo and other tools are lining up to take on the contact sync challenge -- most sync only in one direction right now, although with the Google contacts API in play that's going to change -- it's nice to see SpanningSync picking up the torch on contacts as the competition on calendaring heats up.

[via ars technica]

Apple's headed straight to the top with a bullet -- they went from 159 to 121 in last year's Fortune 500 ranking, and this year, they've pushed their way up to 103. On the list of the "20 most profitable tech companies," they are solidly at number eight -- Fortune says that the introduction of the iPhone and "record sales of Mac computers" have Apple on a rocket trajectory.

Of course, Google's sitting upstairs at number 7, and you-know-who (not the Harry Potter villain, but close) is up at number one.

But yes, there's no question that Apple has really been hitting it out of the park lately, and considering the future (the fruits of the SDK, another possible iPhone iteration, and whatever else they're brewing up in Cupertino), the trends will continue.

After six weeks in beta (not long at all in Google-weeks), the new version 2.0 of iCal-sharing tool BusySync is out. The headline feature for 2.0 is of course the new iCal --> Google Calendar synchronization capability, which opens up a wide world of cloud-based options for families and workgroups already using the LAN-based sync of earlier versions. You can keep multiple iCal users synchronized (even on the same machine), sync remotely via Google, and more.

There are plenty other options for syncing your calendars with gCal, but if you need to keep more than one user's iCal coordinated (think family schedules!) then BusySync may be the product for you, starting at $25 per seat. The guys behind BusySync have a long history with Mac calendaring (including creating the late great Now Up-to-Date, which actually saw its first update in over a year last week) and I've been impressed with the quality of the beta release. We'll do a head-to-head comparison of the iCal sync options soon.

Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to "call home" regularly in case of loss or, let's be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It's a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, it tells you the tower id, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of Google Maps.

Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it... but nobody else can... and without receiving a zillion SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.

To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).

Update: I've put an updated version of findme (findme-better) into the TUAW folder on my site. Please let me know if this works better for location for you. To use, just copy to your iPhone (you may have to use Firefox if you get errors after downloading with Safari), rename to "findme" and replace the original findme.

While some companies are busying trying to acquire other companies, big-wigs at Google are singing the praises of the iPhone. Sergey Brin, one of Google's presidents, is an iPhone toter and a happy one at that. Using the Maps application (which is, shockingly enough, powered by Google Maps) Sergey was able to find his way to a hotel rather easily.

Also worth mentioning is that Google is getting most of its mobile web traffic from the iPhone. This lead Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and Apple board member, to state that even though Google is developing their own mobile OS the iPhone will make Google money, in the form of web ad revenues.

Isn't it great when everybody wins?

The developers at Google are hot on the iPhone, due in part to something called the "Christmas cross-over."

The number of global Google queries (say that five times fast) from iPhones surpassed queries made from Symbian-based phones for the first time in December, probably due to all the iPhones that were activated over the holiday.

Earlier this month, Google released iGoogle for the iPhone as well as an iPhone-optimized Google landing page. Today at Macworld, they announced more improvements for iPhone users (beyond those made in December).

First all, Gmail features auto-refresh. Calendar is speedier and features a month view that isn't available at calendar.google.com, and iGoogle gadgets can be used with the iPhone. I've found that Picasa web albums are significantly faster, both over Wi-Fi and EDGE.

These are great changes. We don't know just how Google is rolling this stuff out, so keep checking google.com/m today.