When I bought my 32GB Wi-Fi only iPad, one of the first apps I downloaded was Netflix. With the added screen real estate and the capability to use the Netflix Watch Instantly library, the iPad became a great device to watch a movie on the go. I quickly found that the iPad-Netflix combo also works great as a personal movie screen when the rest of the people in the house are watching something else.

Just this week, Netflix announced they updated the Netflix app to work on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Now, along with being able to update your Netflix queue while away from your computer (previous iPhone app functionality), you'll be able to watch full-length movies and TV shows right on your iPhone as long as you're a Netflix member. The free Netflix app even works work connected via a 3G network,  so you can watch on your commute or really anywhere as long as AT&T's 3G coverage is strong in your area.

With the iPad I think this functionality made a little more sense because of the size of the screen. I wonder whether watching movies and TV on the iPhone is something that will really take off. Let me know in the comments what you think about watching Netflix on your iPhone. Will you use it?

This week's apps include a photography app that lets you organize multiple images into a collage and a big-name ice hockey game that's both fun and loaded with features.

Diptic ($1.99) is a fairly simple program that lets you make cool-looking collages using photos you take with your camera or what you have stored in your iPhone's photo library. You start by selecting from 20 different layouts, such as one photo across the top with three smaller ones across the bottom, or one big image on the left with four small shots down the right side, as examples. Then, just add images to each frame and move or zoom each one to make it fit just right. From there you can rotate an image 90 degrees within a frame or create a mirror image of the shot using the Transform features. Finally, you can adjust color, brightness, and contrast to bring out certain shots or make them similar to the others.

Diptic is a great idea for creating quick collages, but it seems like it needs a couple more things for it to be a great app. For one thing, you can't add text to your collages or individual images, which could be useful for calling out each picture. You're also limited by your sharing options with only the capability to e-mail your finished collage or saving it to your library. Something like Facebook (or other social site) connectivity would be better. But even with these minor issues, Diptic offers a fun and easy way to make neat looking collages quickly, and is a good option for people who want to do something more with their iPhone images.

2K Sports NHL 2K11 ($1.99) brings console-like hockey gameplay to your touch screen and manages to pull it off well with only a few annoyances. If you've played console hockey games, you'll feel right at home--pick from any of the NHL licensed teams (with all your favorite players) and hit the ice for an Exhibition game, play an entire 82 game season, or you can practice in the Free skate and Shootout modes. There is no multiplayer option in NHL 2K11 (Wi-Fi or otherwise), but hopefully that's slated for later versions.

The control system consists of an onscreen joystick on the left and buttons for passing, shooting, checking, and turbo boost on the right. For the most part, it works well for controlling your players, making quick passes, and getting around the ice, but can feel a bit muddy in fast break situations and shootouts (it's hard to replace a console controller for precision). At the same time, NHL 2K11 for iPhone shares a lot of the depth of console versions, letting you sub in any player, adjust strategy, switch your matchups, trade with other teams, check for available free agents, and much more. You also can browse individual and team stats (including shot charts and penalty summaries) as you progress through an 82 (or 41) game season.

With great gameplay, and tons of extra content, NHL 2K11 is easily the best hockey game for iPhone on many fronts, but it has a couple of annoyances. As a longtime console hockey gamer, I like to manually make line changes, and it is admittedly amazing that it's even available on the iPhone version at all. Still, the interface is less than ideal. The selection method sometimes results in face offs where your line will leave the ice right as the puck is dropped--I turned the feature back to "auto" pretty quickly. Also, the graphics are mostly smooth during normal gameplay across several available camera modes, but suffers during replays where the camera is close to the action. Perhaps the trade-off of having all these options and content means the player graphics take a hit, but it seems like it could be better.

Overall, 2K Sports NHL 2K11 is an excellent way to get your hockey fix on the iPhone, providing fun and challenging gameplay and all the big hits and satisfying slap shots you could want. While the game has its issues, it's a must-have for any hockey fan.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Will you watch movies on your iPhone or iPod Touch? What do you think of Diptic? Am I being too hard on the details of a full-fledged hockey game that I can play on my phone? Let me know in the comments!

Chrome programmers have begun experimental work to endow Google's browser with a full-screen tab-management interface similar to the Panorama feature Mozilla is adding to Firefox.

As browsers have expanded to accommodate ever larger amounts of computing tasks, separating different tasks into different tabs across the top of the browser window, managing them has become more onerous.

A list of five or six tabs isn't so bad, but when there are 20 or 40, it's a different story. Mozilla's Panorama, nee Tab Candy, provides a full-screen view of all a browser window's tabs, grouped how the user desires into sets.

Chrome could get a similar feature, at least on Mac OS X, called "Tabpose." Work on the project began in July, but is labeled "experimental."

Dealing with larger numbers of tabs is a bigger issue as people spend more and more time in the browser, said Linus Upson, Google's vice president of engineering for Chrome and Chrome OS. "I think Mozilla is doing interesting things there," he said. However, he cautioned, Google tries a lot of things that don't necessarily become permanent.

"We try lots of things and experiment. We put things out in the developer channel and take them back if we don't like them. The key to building a great user interface is iteration and velocity," Upson said. "We try something, throw it away, and try it again. We put [something] on a shelf, maybe pick it up a few months later."

Chrome gets 'labs' ability
It seems likely people will be able to try it relatively easily, though. Tabpose is one of the features set to be enabled by a new "about:labs" mechanism to enable experimental features. Google likes the "labs" approach to letting people try new technology, with labs projects for search, Gmail, Maps, and more.

That contrasts with today's much more user-unfriendly mechanism, launching Chrome with specific options enabled via textual command-line "switches" or "flags." Changing Chrome options by using a regular browser interface is similar to Mozilla's "about:config" command, which exposes many options for tweaking Firefox behavior.

But Google has a little more on its mind than just convenience, Upson said. That's because Chrome OS doesn't expose any underlying operating system to make the change.

"With Chrome OS, it's challenging when it's the whole operating system and there is no command line you can launch it from," Upson said.

On Windows, the "about:labs" mechanism also will be used to enable a feature to put tabs on the left side of the interface.

Graphics chip acceleration
After a few months of planning, Google also revealed Friday its full plan for Chrome's hardware acceleration technique. Hardware acceleration lets faster, more power-efficient hardware handle tasks such as scaling images, drawing vector graphics, processing Web page display instructions, and rendering text, and it's a big performance overhaul under way in the browser market.

Google had a trickier time implementing hardware acceleration than some rivals because Chrome isolates browser rendering chores into a separate process that for security reasons isn't permitted to talk directly to the operating system's hardware interfaces. Thus, Google needed to create a separate process with appropriate authority to enable hardware acceleration.

It's not yet clear when exactly hardware acceleration will arrive in Chrome. Many features, such as accelerated compositing of two-dimensional Canvas graphics, were just pushed back from Chrome 7 to Chrome 8. The move happened about the same time that Google began working on the development version of Chrome 7.

Updated 3:22 p.m. PDT with further Google comment.

Via unofficial Google Operating System blog

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Just a few weeks after the Chrome beta updated to version 6, Google upgraded the developers version of Chrome to 7 on Thursday. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Chrome dev 7.0.503.0 comes accompanied only by minor bug fixes.

There are some small tweaks to the Wrench options menu on Mac, and IP addresses typed into the location bar work when browsing in offline mode. There are several anticipated changes planned for Chrome 7 that either haven't yet been implemented yet or require manual activation. These include the Native Client support for Web apps, which can be activated with the command line flag "--enable-nacl". Mac and Linux users will need to include "--no-sandbox". Google recommends only using this to test the Native Client feature, and not for standard Web browsing. While the company doesn't specify why, it's reasonable to speculate that disabling the sandbox is something that will decrease the average user's security.

Bugs are nothing new to the developers version of Chrome, which is intended to be a rougher version of the browser than the beta or stable channels. A new bug indicates that the new developers version is incompatible with streaming Netflix movies, while another appears to be affecting the rendering of extension fonts. Some users are reporting that the search function in the location bar is no longer working for them, although that doesn't appear to be affecting all users at this time. Because these bugs are in the developers version, it's expected that they'll get fixed before the beta and stable versions receive updates.

One interesting bug from the previous version of Chrome dev that introduced a severe security risk in conjunction with the LastPass encrypted password manager extension was repaired in the new version. Google did not mention this in its changelog.

Mozilla is one step closer to getting its Firefox browser surfing on Android phones, and on the Nokia N900. On Friday the company issued an alpha version of Fennec, the code name for every instance of "Firefox Mobile" that's still in development stages.

Features-wise, Fennec alpha is very similar to the Fennec prealpha we got a peek at in April, but with the notable exception that Firefox Sync is now baked in. Firefox Sync is an account-based Web service that stores data on your currently open tabs, bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and form-fills in the cloud, on Mozilla's secured Firefox servers. When you use Firefox Sync on Fennec or any other Firefox Mobile app, you'll be able to access URLs you've visited on your desktop from your Android phone. Firefox Sync spells out less typing on that comparatively cramped keyboard.

The fact that Firefox Sync now comes wrapped into the installation will help keep users' setup of the service to a minimum, which will encourage its adoption on mobile phones and on the desktop. It's also what drives the Firefox app on iPhone.

In addition to Firefox Sync, Fennec's support for browser add-ons is another important differentiating factor, especially as these add-ons have made Firefox the most mainstream alternative in desktop browsing to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Fennec's design also keeps the settings tools and open browser tabs in the "gutters" of the screen real estate, which means you swipe left or right to access the controls. This declutters the screen of its buttons and makes your content the main focus.

Fennec is now available to download and test on Android phones and the Nokia N900. We advise that only experienced or intrepid users should download the Fennec for Android alpha release, which is intended for testing and feedback purposes, not for widespread use. Testers may encounter bugs and instability.

Interested parties can find the technical release notes here. You can find additional technical details and watch the demo on Mozilla's blog.

Originally posted at Android Atlas