According to Comex, “Frash can currently run most Flash programs natively in the MobileSafari browser. Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4.”

Frash is also neat in that it that it works like the tabs in Chrome; if the plugin crashes, MobileSafari will not be affected. The program is not yet stable though, and currently cannot play video or accept keyboard input. Comex says the latter is a simple task; unfortunately, video playback “will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone.” Damn… To cheer you up, watch as Comex burninates on the iPad:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Comex has posted the source code at GitHub, in the hope that developers would pitch in with Frash.  I don’t think there’s any chance that Apple would approve Frash as an app, so if it’s ever released, I’m pretty sure iPad users will have to jailbreak their tablet and get Frash from Cydia. Good luck Comex!

[via MacStories]

I found this hilarious, especially when I saw what he chose to represent Firefox. I use Firefox as my main browser, but it’s true that it can quickly become overloaded if you use too many add-ons or extensions. A fresh install is always nice when those memory leaks start to bog you down.

I do use Chrome sometimes, especially if I don’t want to open all of my saved tabs in Firefox, I’ve also noticed that it’s pretty fast, though in my unscientific tests, it’s not faster than Firefox. Still, Chrome and Firefox are getting more and more extensions and add-ons.

Which browser do you use most? And don’t say Lynx.

[College Humor via Presurfer]

Afrika has frequently been compared to Pokémon Snap and despite the simple gameplay, received positive reviews. The game centers on a photojournalist assigned to–you guessed–capture images of animals in the wild. Throughout, players also unlock facts about the critters they’re shooting.

Mostly, though, I think it’s just an excuse to scope out all the pretties.

[via Siliconera]

First off is Top Sites, a modified version of Opera’s Speed Dial. Like Speed Dial, Top Sites displays links in the form of previews of websites arranged in a grid; up to 24 previews can be displayed. Top Sites’ advantage over Speed Dial is that it tells you if any of the previewed websites have been updated by displaying a blue star on the upper right corner of the websites’ preview.

You can also “pin” a website to it’s current position so you’ll always know where to look for it. As cool as it looks, for me Top Sites needs to be tweaked: you can remove websites from the grid at anytime, but for some reason you can’t manually add websites like in Speed Dial.

Top Sites has to “learn” which websites you frequently visit. Bookmarks are enough for me, but since my 6-year old niece also uses my Mac to surf the net, it would have been nice if I could just click on existing previews and replace them by typing in the URL of the websites that she likes so she doesn’t have to do the typing.

Safari did not escape Apple’s Cover Flow mania, although this time it’s actually quite useful because it’s used to scan not only through your bookmarks but through your browsing history as well. It’s a great way to look up the tab of any obscure blog or website that you accidentally closed, and you can look at a page without having to load it again.

Safari 4′s Full History Search can even recognize captions, so for instance if you’re looking for a certain picture but you don’t want to flip through hundreds of previews, you can type in the picture’s caption and Safari will look for the page for you.

The next feature is immediately noticeable as soon as you open a new tab: Chrome’s tab-on-top look has rubbed off on Safari. You can snicker all you want, but the set-up really makes sense and makes you wonder why the developers of Firefox didn’t think of it before anyone else.

As you can see, having the tabs on top of the browser is less distracting, and it also frees up a significant amount of viewing space. Hackintosh Netbook owners will certainly thank Apple for that extra space. But like Top Sites, in my opinion this new (for Safari) feature still needs to improved.

You see, by moving the tabs to the top of the window, they also become the area that you drag to move the entire window. This quickly becomes annoying because whereas in Firefox you can click anywhere on a tab to drag and drop it to a new location, in Safari you have to click at the tab’s “handle”  - the tiny triangle on the right side edge of a tab – before you can drag and drop the tab. If you click anywhere else you’ll just end up moving the whole window, which is what happens when you click the “forehead” of any window, whether in OS X or in Windows.

Speaking of Windows, Safari now sports native interfaces on its Vista and XP versions.

Here’s the XP version:

Finally, Safari 4 uses a new browser engine that Apple has dubbed “Nitro”. Here’s what Apple has to say about the Nitro: “Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider. In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance — the best on any platform — loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3.”

Personally I didn’t notice any significant difference between the load times of sites in Firefox 3 and in Safari 4. But Safari 4 is fast and really stable for a beta. Okay so it’s not really stable, but it’s stable. I actually had to switch to Firefox to finish this article, because when I clicked the “insert hyperlink” button on WordPress, Safari rendered the pop up window (where the url is typed in) behind the black veil that also pops up when you click the button. The black veil blocks input to everything else except to the pop up window, but since Safari put the pop up window behind the veil as well, I couldn’t enter the hyperlink and I got stuck with the stupid veil. Hooray for auto save. So is Safari 4 beta good enough to be a default browser? I say try it out yourselves. You can download Safari 4 beta here.

But even if Apple manages to fix the things I complained about, I’m still not going to use the final version of Safari 4 as my default browser. Why? No add-ons. Apple still has time to fix Top Sites and the tab dragging, but without things like Noscript, Flashblock, Adblock Plus, Download Statusbar, Better GReader, Better Youtube – I could go on and on –  I’ll always think of Safari as a backup browser. IE, on the other hand, should only be used once: on fresh installs, to download Firefox.

It’s also optimized for faster loading on 3G and EDGE – for those times you can’t find a speedy WiFi connection. You can always toggle back and forth between the regular version of the site and the iPhone version if you don’t care for the new look.

To view the new version of the site, just head on over to the Technabob home page using your iPhone or iPod Touch, and it should auto-detect your device. Once you’re there, be sure to check the “+” then “Add to Home Screen” button on your device to save a bookmark and a spanking new icon for quick and easy access to our latest posts.

Enjoy… and post a comment if you have any feedback about the new layout.

[Thanks to the guys over at Brave New Code - their WPtouch add-ons for WordPress made it easy as pie to create this new version of the site.]

[Before you guys cry fake or foul (or fowl, in this case), the screenshot above is from testiphone.com since I couldn't get a good shot of my iPhone screen without massive glare.]

Developer Deron Dantzler has created a faithful, Safari-compatible version of the Nintendo classic Duck Hunt. Instead of a light gun, the game uses your fingertip to shoot down those pesky winged critters. It takes a little trial and error to get used to the finger presses, but eventually you’ll get the hang of it.

Deron did an amazing job getting all the pieces to look just like the orignal, and unlike many attempts to make iPhone arcade games in Safari, it actually loads quickly, even on an EDGE connection. Unfortunately, there’s no sound, but maybe someday Apple will just give us the Flash support we all want and we’ll be done with all this workarounds.

To play the game on your iPhone (or in any web browser), just point your browser to this URL.