If you're reading this blog (or really if you read any tech news at all), you've certainly heard about all the reception issues with the iPhone 4's external antenna. When the news broke here in the CNET offices in San Francisco, people were running around demonstrating (mostly successfully) how the iPhone 4 drops its signal if you hold it in just the right "death grip." I haven't experienced the connectivity problems personally, because I'm still waiting for my iPhone 4 to come in the mail, but clearly this has become a legitimate issue.

A number of fixes have been floating around the Web for those who don't want to fork out 30 extra bucks for the Apple recommended "Bumper." Some people are using large rubber bands and even those 99-cent "Live Strong"-type wristbands that were popular a couple of years ago, but even these quick-fixes cause problems with access to those buttons on the sides of the iPhone 4.

The guys over at MacFixIt found an alternative fix that seems to be working for some users. If you're an iPhone 4 user who has been experiencing these issues, check out MacFixIt. It might be just the thing to fix your iPhone 4 issues and if you're a Mac user, there's nothing wrong with knowing about a great site for common Mac hardware and software problems (shameless plug for a CNET site, but they folks over there really do know a lot about Apple hardware). Go ahead and check out the fix to see if it works for you, then report back here!

This week's apps include an iPhone 4-exclusive photo-taking app and a puzzle game remake that works great on any iPhone or iPod touch screen.

IncrediBooth (99 cents) lets you relive those moments at the amusement park or carnival, when you and your friends would cram yourselves into a little photo booth to create a strip of funny shots to save your fun memories. This app will work on the iPhone 4 only, so users of older iPhones should NOT download this app. The app uses the iPhone 4's front-facing camera to take three pictures in a row, letting you get creative with how you pose between shots. The end result is a strip of retro-looking photos, much like what you would pull from those aforementioned photo booths once you were finished.

The interface of IncrediBooth doesn't offer much in the way of features, but it doesn't really need any. Simply press the button to snap three photos in succession using one of three different retro-looking effects. When you're finished you can share your strip (or just one photo from the strip) with your Facebook friends, save it to your camera roll, or send it in an e-mail. Overall, if you're looking for a fun app that demonstrates a creative use for your iPhone 4's front-facing camera, IncrediBooth is easy to pick up and use and delivers great results that most will appreciate.

Aqueduct ($2.99) takes a page from those popular classic pipeline-type puzzle games, bringing the same challenging gameplay to your touch-screen iPhone or iPod Touch. Like many online versions of the game, the mission in Aqueduct is to use available tiles to create a pipeline between a spigot and drain before you turn on the water supply. Aqueduct adds to the old pipeline formula by including conveyor belt tiles, teleports, door switches, and more, to create a fun and challenging time-waster that's easy to pick up and play wherever you are.

When I started playing Aqueduct, I wasn't immediately impressed because the first several levels are pretty easy to get past. But once you get deep into the second tier of puzzle levels it can get plenty challenging, and with more than 140 unique puzzles you'll be forced to come up with creative ways to get the water from point A to point B. Eerie music and sounds and good-looking (if simple) graphics round out the Aqueduct experience. I often talk about action-oriented games like shooters and racing games in this space, but if you want something that's a bit slower paced and requires a tad more thought than just hitting the fire button, you should definitely try Aqueduct.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Have you had problems with connectivity using the iPhone 4? What do you think of IncrediBooth? Have you hit a level in Aqueduct that you just can't get past? Let me know in the comments!

If you're like us, Trillian's multinetwork chat app has been one of those programs whose quite useful set of IM features could never overcome its outmoded, cacophonous interface. All that is about to change, and we couldn't be more relieved.

On Thursday, Trillian-maker Cerulean Studios announced work on Trillian 5 for Windows, a beta of which is expected to arrive in the next few weeks after the current round of internal testing.

The redesigned interface is a key improvement, and a teaser screenshot already reveals it to be cleaner, more modern, and easier on the eyes.

In addition, Trillian 5 will be optimized for Windows 7, and it will sync your chat history across Trillian on Windows and mobile platforms. On the social-networking side, news feeds for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get some work done, and a Foursquare plug-in means you'll be able to check in from Trillian on Windows 7 machines.

Behind the scenes, Cerulean Studios promises that Trillian 5 will be lighter, faster, and more compact than previous builds, which have been known to lag.

These announcements aren't a bad way for the company to celebrate Trillain's 10th birthday, which it's also marking with a $15 discount sale of the premium Trillian Pro features. You can sign up to be part of the forthcoming beta here.

Firefox has become the default browser for nearly 400,000 IBM employees, a big coup for the open-source project during a time of increasing browser competition.

"All IBM employees will be asked to use it as their default browser," Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux at IBM's Software Group, said in a blog post Thursday. "Firefox is enterprise-ready, and we're ready to adopt it for our enterprise."

Mozilla has said in recent weeks it believes nearly 400 million people use its software.

In particular, IBM will load Firefox on new computers, train employees in its use, encourage vendors working with IBM to adopt it, and rely on the browser for its increasing use of cloud computing in its own IT infrastructure, he said.

"Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we're going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls," Sutor said.

Sutor lavished praise on the browser's role in recent history:

"While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be," he said. "I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond. Their software has gotten better and we have all benefited."

Like Firefox, both Opera and Google's Chrome browser also span Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but Sutor said IBM is interested in Firefox's independence. "Firefox is open source, and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity," he said.

The support from IBM might help nudge Firefox's recently wavering share of browser usage in a more optimistic direction.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Internet Explorer has reversed a years-long slide in browser usage, at least for the month of June, reclaiming share at the expense of Firefox.

IE increased usage from 59.8 percent to 60.3 percent, according to new statistics from Net Applications, an analytics company that monitors browser usage across a large network Web sites. It was buoyed by increasing usage of IE8 that offset the decline in IE7--and by what Web developers no doubt hope will be only a temporary pause in the decline of the despised IE6.

The change in fortunes was significant enough that Microsoft couldn't resist crowing about IE's progress in a blog post Thursday. "We certainly don't judge our business on just two months of data, but the direction here is encouraging," said Ryan Gavin, senior director of business and marketing for Internet Explorer.

Although IE has long been scorned by Web developers for its out-of-date features and its lack of compliance with Web standards, Microsoft is working hard to change the browser's image. The IE9 Platform Preview bare-bones browser prototypes, of which three have been released so far, are steadily accumulating modern features in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and JavaScript. And Windows, despite the browser ballot that in Europe presents Windows users with a choice of browsers besides IE as a result of an antitrust settlement, remains a powerful means of distributing the software.

Some of IE8's gains probably can be ascribed to the growing use of Windows 7, which ships with that browser and is showing some signs of finally being a successor to Windows XP that people actually are embracing. Net Applications showed that the browsing usage of Windows 7 climbed from 12.7 percent to 13.7 percent from May to June; Windows Vista dropped from 15.2 percent to 14.7 percent; and Windows XP dropped from 62.6 percent to 62.4 percent.

Meanwhile, IE's biggest rival, Firefox, dropped in usage from 24.3 percent to 23.8 percent. And third-place Chrome climbed from 7.0 percent to 7.2 percent from May to June.

In fourth place, Apple's Safari rose from 4.8 percent to 4.9 percent, and Opera slipped from 2.4 percent to 2.3 percent.

The browser battles are shifting in direction dramatically as mobile phones and devices such as the iPad extend Web usage well beyond PCs. And things are very different on mobile devices.

Opera has years of experience on mobile devices, and indeed its Opera Mini version comes close to the regular computer version of Opera in terms of browser usage. Apple's Safari works on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, and Apple at least partially bans other browsers.

Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox for Android and high-end Nokia phones and just submitted a tool to the Apple App Store it hopes will keep the desktop version of Firefox in sync with Apple iOS-based browsers. Google lets other browsers on devices with the Android operating system, but it comes with a browser as well.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Updated at 2:12 p.m. on July 1: Opera spokesman Thomas Ford said in an e-mail to me that he's "almost certain" that Opera's new AVG anti-malware detection system replaces the previous one that Opera used, which had been provided by Haute Secure.

The first beta of Opera 10.60 was released only two weeks ago, and on Thursday it graduates to a wide release and sheds its beta tag. Opera 10.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux incorporates security enhancements provided by popular freeware antivirus vendor AVG, improves performance, adds further HTML5 compatibility, and makes a minor but noticeable tweak to the browser interface.

The new security feature indicates that while Chrome and Firefox are looking to further isolate plug-ins and add-ons, Opera hopes to address the immediate threat from malware-infected Web sites. Opera now comes with AVG's real-time Web threat data feed built in. What this means is that when you encounter a page that's been detected by the AVG network to be malicious, you'll see the warning instead. The network is fed by data supplied anonymously by 51 million AVG users from around the world.

According to AVG's press release, the feature uses multiple techniques to protect users. It uses exploit signatures to detect sites serving drive-by downloads, the AVG Online Shield and contextual analysis to detect social engineering scam-driven viruses, and reputation lists for safeguarding against malicious domains and URLs.

Opera is also claiming the same dramatic performance improvements in version 10.60 as it did in the beta, saying that the browser is 50 percent faster than the previous version using the Peacekeeper test. CNET tests performed on the beta showed it closer to 33 percent faster on that test, which is still a massive improvement, but only 5.6 percent faster on the SunSpider JavaScript test.

Version 10.60 supports several nascent HTML5 features, including the next-generation video and audio codec WebM, geolocation compatibility, Web Workers, and App Cache. This update places Opera at or very close to parity with beta and development versions of Chrome and Firefox. Opera has also created an HTML5-geolocation-powered map showing real-time downloads and active users of Opera.

In other changes, Bing finally makes it onto Opera's default search options list, and Opera has tweaked the "O" logo menu that debuted in Opera 10.5 by adding the word "menu" to clarify what it's for. The Windows changelog, Mac changelog, and Linux changelog are available at the Opera Web site.

Mozilla had to restart an effort to overhaul Firefox's extension technology, but the Jetpack reboot is steadily coming together.

Mozilla has released five beta versions of the Jetpack Software Developer Kit, a package that puts a friendly face on Firefox's inner workings so that extensions can do things such as open new tabs, add menu items, and modify Web pages. And the latest schedule was announced this week: its goal is to release Jetpack 1.0 by the end of 2010.

"We've been working on the SDK for almost a year now (and the Jetpack project as a whole for over a year), and we've done a bunch of great work that we should get into the hands of developers who could benefit from it," said Mozilla Jetpack team member Myk Melez in a mailing list message.

Jetpack takes a page from the Google Chrome playbook by letting programmers write extensions that use Web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. That's the same direction Apple went with its new Safari 5 extensions, too.

In contrast, Firefox extensions today use the powerful but complicated XUL technology. Mozilla hopes Jetpack will bring more programmers by making it easier, increase extension compatibility from one Firefox release to the next, and help eliminate the need to restart Firefox when an extension is installed or updated.

As Jetpack matures, the Web-based extension development tool called Flightdeck is growing more important for those who prefer its approach to the Jetpack SDK software running on their computers.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that FlightDeck will be a key component in the success of the project, just as important as the SDK, and we should treat it as such, devoting the same kind of time and energy to planning and driving its development, designing its interface and capabilities, and developing its functionality," Melez said in another mailing list message.

Jetpack isn't timed specifically to be released with Firefox 4, which brings better performance, a new user interface, and the new HTML5 parser. However, Jetpack is designed to take advantage of some new Firefox 4 features, Mozilla said.

For a tentative look at what's next for Jetpack, see the plans for Jetpack 0.6, 0.7, and 0.8.

One complication of Jetpack is that it integrates with Electrolysis, a Mozilla project to separate elements of Firefox into separate memory regions to help with performance and security. Jetpack extensions are designed to run in these separate partitions, but Electrolysis is a pretty deep and technical change to the browser's development.

The first Electrolysis element, out-of-process plug-ins, arrived last week with Firefox 3.6.4, but Mozilla quickly released the 3.6.6 update because older machines would show the Flash Player plug-in to have crashed when in fact a slower computer was just bogged down in processing.

Originally posted at Deep Tech