Apple’s latest version of Safari is out (in beta), with some evolutionary interface changes, and a dramatically faster javascript processing engine. The release of Safari 4 was not anticipated by any of the typical rumour sites, so it came as a surprise to just about everyone. As always, though, it was no surprise to see Apple’s bright and simple marketing pages selling the browser as the best thing since sliced bread.

The Mac maker’s marketing team appear to have had a field day promoting all 150 of the fantastic new features of their latest browser. But is everything they say completely true? Have they pushed the boundaries of honesty with their sensationalist slogans? Taking a look at the list of new features, I started to get a little suspicious. Just about none of the new features listed on Apple’s website are original – most are already out there in other browsers, having already been invented by the likes of Google, Mozilla, and the open source community. Or they’ve actually been features in Safari already, but Apple are drawing more attention to them in this release.

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280 North, the guys that brought you 280 Slides (the slickest web app yet for building Keynote style presentations) and the next generation web app development framework Cappuccino, have just announced their latest creation – 280 Atlas.

280 Atlas is a web app, built with Cappuccino, designed to make it easy for others to build advanced, beautiful web apps with unrivalled ease. Check out the video to get an idea of just how simple they have made the UI design process. It in some ways makes me think of Interface Builder in the development tools that come with OS X, but I have to remind myself that these are online. It’s not this easy to build web app interfaces in any desktop apps I can think of.

When you think of what Adobe is doing, attempting to make it easier for design professionals to get building applications on the web and the desktop (via AIR), this puts them to shame. The web will be a better place with more web apps built on open source technologies like Cappuccino. If the next round of web apps are anything like 280 Slides, then things are going to get very exciting around here.

Keep your eyes on 280 Atlas, and the 280 North team. They are moving the industry forward at a staggering pace, and it’s up to us, the developers and designers, to start building web apps that not only compete, but outperform what’s on the desktop.

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Managing multiple photos on the iPhone, here’s a suggestion of how much better app sorting and selection could be via iTunes.

We didn’t come up with this concept, but it’s impressive to see what could be done. Recent findings (after asking around on Twitter) showed the majority of people seem to download their apps directly to their iPhone (rather than download to iTunes and then sync) but this way of sorting could encourage people to plug in their iPhones a little more often.

The current method of organising and syncing apps with your iPhone in iTunes is not good enough right now. Apple, in a way, had to guess the way millions of people would download, organise, use, and delete apps on their iPhones an iPod Touches, and they did a pretty good job given how well things work right now. However, organising apps in iTunes has always been one of those areas that has seemed like an after thought.

Perhaps Apple have more in store? I have a feeling the Home Screen might change more than we expect in OS 3.0. Will we see a more effective way of organising our growing numbers of applications? It’s been a long time since a major iPhone OS update, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Apple haven’t been sitting around waiting for the competition to catch up.

If we can select multiple emails in Mail, and delete or move them to another folder in one go, then why can’t we do the same with our photos on the iPhone?

Deleting Multiple Photos

This puzzled me the other day when I had been on a little photo taking spree. I ended up with a load of shots that were great. But an even greater load of shots that were dreadful. Deleting the multitude of dreadful photos was a real pain – the only way to do it at the moment is to touch each thumbnail, hit the trash icon, and then “Delete Photo” on the slide up “are you sure?” pane.

So, for me to delete 10 photos, it takes 3 touches (or taps?) each. That, for those without a calculator to hand is a whole THIRTY touches. And that’s assuming all of the photos you wish to delete are next to one another. If they’re not then you might have to touch the “back to camera roll” button at the top and then scroll to find another dreadful photo, then touch that. A real pain.

If we could delete photos in my proposed way, then we would reduce it down to 3 clicks plus one click for each photo you wish to delete. Touch the “Edit” button at the top > Touch the thumbnail image of each photo you wish to delete > Touch “Delete (#) > Then confirm with “Delete Photos”.

Sending Multiple Photos

Similarly, it’s pretty annoying if you ever need to email more than one photo to someone. There is at least one app currently available that is solving this problem, aptly named “Multi-Photo Email“. That app is pretty much as good as it’s going to get from 3rd party offerings, but it’s not what I would call a complete solution to an integral missing feature. To send multiple photos with my proposed solution, you would do the same as for multiple delete, but hit “Send” rather than “Delete” (pretty obvious that one).

Rearranging Photos

A third useful, but not essential feature would be the ability to rearrange photos. Currently, photos are arranged in chronological order which makes perfect sense. Since the ability to take screen shots on the iPhone though, I have often found that I would prefer to be able to rearrange my Camera Roll to group screen shots separately from actual photos. Maybe that’s just me, but it wouldn’t be too much of a crazy idea seeing as you can rearrange Apps on the Home Screen, re-order towns in Weather, ticker symbols in Stocks, time zones in Clock, etc. etc.

All in all, it would make me that tiny bit happier to have the functionality to manage multiple photos easily in such a regularly used application.

Just a last minute idea, but being able to share photos via Flickr and Facebook (as you can with MobileMe) would be nice too. iPhoto 09 is ahead of the iPhone in that respect. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for iPhone OS 3.0 before we start cluttering that slide-up menu too much eh?

Update

Hey, it looks like Apple are on the same wavelength as us (again!) as the new iPhone 3.0 firmware allows you to send multiple photos via email with a method almost identical to the one we’ve suggested here. They’ve even gone for the same red “tick” icons. I’m not sure if there’s a way to rearrange photos yet, but this is definitely a very welcome feature addition to see.

We post a lot of links to some really useful, surprising, and sometimes just plain funny sites on Twitter. Until now, we haven’t shared much of our Twitter chatter on Liquidicity, but we know you’ll find (at least some of) what we share useful, so now you can pick up the best bits from the same place.

• We’ve been working on our Legal pages a bit. Homepage isn’t quite there yet, but tell us what you think so far: http://is.gd/kbub
• YouTube-to-iTunes in 1 click: http://is.gd/BAi (via @chrisodonnell)
• Some awesome typographic tees: http://bit.ly/a9tUP
• Very interesting and smart piece about why the iPhone will continue to have the upper hand: http://is.gd/k7W8
• Blogosfear – the adverture game (an idea by Ironic Sans): http://is.gd/k7FW
• Really nice screencast – makes me want to sign up instantly to Krop: http://is.gd/jlcE
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes – from Smashing Mag: http://is.gd/k2wt
• Oh sweet the new Virb is looking insanely good – I want to eat it. Check it out: http://virb.com/

If you found any of this vaguely useful, you may want to follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/gosquared

Stay up to date with the team:

James – twitter.com/gosquared
Geoff – twitter.com/TheDeveloper
Caspar – twitter.com/MediaD00d
And JT needs to get Twitter!

P.S. We’re trying these brief “link roundup” posts out. If you want us to follow you on Twitter, wanna share your Twitter finds, or have any suggestions on ways we can improve these posts, shout out in the comments!

There’s a site I’ve been following for a while that has been a great inspiration for some of the changes we’ve been making to GoSquared. Over the last few months we’ve paid a lot more attention to the design of Liquidicity (this blog), and more specifically, we’ve been looking into how to improve typography around the site.

I Love Typography is a really useful, inspiring site run by a guy named Johno all about typography. Covering the latest free fonts, type news, tuition on typographic terms, and a bit of humour to lighten things up, I Love Typography is a useful resource for anyone with an interest in making letters and words look as awesome as they can.

I’ve decided to write a little about the site because a) it’s been a great source of inspiration to me, and b) it recently had a redesign that some of you may not have seen. The old site used to look great, but the improved design is much cleaner and easier to navigate – usability is paramount.

Just a few examples of the kind of stuff that gets featured on I Love Typography include a limited edition Helvetica Moleskine (up for grabs!), tuition on vertical metrics, and a lovely leather ‘type bag‘ for the other half.

Of note, every week you can be sure to be updated on the latest, best, and weirdest examples of type in the world in Johno’s “The week in Type” set of posts. A huge amount of work goes into these hugely informative, inspiring posts that can only be produced by a true type fanatic. What would we do without him?

All in all, if you’re ever stuck for typographic inspiration, you know where to look!

Today we’re introducing GoSquared Services, a sparkling new area of the site to market our design services.

Since we started GoSquared, we have always been taking on design work for various companies – we have designed logos, websites, and icon sets for some great, fun people. Before, the only way people knew about us was through word of mouth, and the only way people could see our previous work was to email us and ask us about it.

These past few months, though, we’ve seen an exciting increase in the number of people interested in our design services. This is fantastic, but it started to become tedious and time consuming to send every potential client an email with a sufficient selection of work attached. Especially when you find they only had $15 to spend.

With the new GoSquared Services, we can show prospective clients a selection of work that demonstrates our skills, and provide information about the disciplines we have to offer. We are also very open about the rates that we charge, so people can see from the start exactly what to budget for. Our rates are negotiable, so email us if you have any questions.

Our portfolio of work will expand over the next few months as a few of our current projects reach completion. Many of our clients like to keep work confidential until they have launched their project, so we are more than happy to work to their rules when it comes to secrecy.

Overall, we are pleased to finally bring you an area of the GoSquared site that will inform you of a service we have actually (secretly!) offered for a while.

We hope you enjoy Services, even if you don’t want to get anything designed just yet. Have a look around and tell us what you think.

GoSquared is 3 years old today. Wow time flies.

Usually, people take the opportunity to talk about their past when they are asked to speak on their birthday, without spending too much time dwelling on last year, I would like to spend a post on telling you about what we are doing right now, and will be carrying through over the next few months at GoSquared.

As you know, GoSquared owns and runs Liquidicity – this blog. We post as frequently as we can to feature design and technology news, and, when we have too much time, icons and other free resources for your enjoyment. We are very pleased with the growth of Liquidicity – it is our biggest source of traffic and has helped open many doors for us in the design world.

However, we started GoSquared on this day in 2006 to build a site where advertising could be as easy and as attractive as possible. We set out to build a simple way of enabling anyone to get seen online. 3 years on, 3 major updated versions overhauled, we still have the same aim.

In the first half of 2008 we introduced the most intelligent system we had ever built. Crucially, we introduced the ability for other websites to sell Squares via the GoSquared Network. People could suddenly purchase ads on other Sites with the same ease as before – uploading a 140×140 pixel image and assigning a title etc. then submitting. This is the system that is currently running for all members of GoSquared. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but we owe it to our constantly growing network of Sites to deliver more. We owe them more traffic, we owe them more advertising revenue. At the moment, the combination of Squares and the GoSquared Network is not good enough.

Since the first half of 2008, we’ve been working to improve on what we built. We’ve changed a lot, and there’s a lot still to do, but you can already see what has been keeping us so occupied by applying to the Private Beta now.

Changing the way we Price Advertising

Today, we will be introducing a major change to one of the most important factors for selling ads online – Pricing. Available tonight, we will be giving Private Beta testers the ability to choose between the current method of pricing (based on GoSquared Reputation) or to manually input prices that they believe their Site’s advertising space is worth to advertisers.

One of the problems with the way we currently charge for advertising is that we often don’t charge enough for some of our higher traffic Sites. By allowing Private Beta testers to manually input pricing figures, we will be able to utilise this information to improve the way we automatically price other Sites. In a way, we’re crowd sourcing ad prices – but it’s up to you whether you take the automatically calculated price or set your own values.

We have a couple of other things to show you today, but that’s just a small update on what’s going on with our core business – selling advertising.