Just in time for the midterm elections, app developer Handmark has launched two new political news apps, one aimed at liberals and the other at conservatives. PolitiCaster Left and Politicaster Right popped up in the Android Marketplace today and can be downloaded for free as both are ad-supported.

Each app compiles national and local political news from hundreds of sources in a single, tabbed interface, offering content customized for the opposing viewpoints. As the names suggest, PolitiCaster Left pulls a feed from liberal sites and blogs, such as Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Think Progress. Similarly, PolitiCaster Right features commentary from influential conservative sources such as The National Review, Red State, and Michelle Malkin.

In addition, the apps integrate the top tweets from the respective parties as well as offer the option to directly share articles via e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter. There's also a "Talk Back" feature that lets users send a personal message or forward any article to elected officials and popular political media personalities.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

For browser watchers, October was a continuation of previous trends: Internet Explorer lost share to Chrome, Firefox and Opera idled, and Safari edged upward.

The statistics, based on Net Applications' monitoring of millions of Web sites in its analytics network, show that this summer's resurgence of IE has faded, at least for the present. At the same time, Chrome, now two years old, made its July dip look like a blip rather than a foreboding omen.

IE remains the top dog, with usage that dropped from 59.7 percent in September to 59.3 percent in October. Firefox edged down from 23 percent to 22.9 percent over the same period; Chrome grew from 8 percent to 8.5 percent; Safari stayed level at 5.3 percent; and Opera dropped from 2.4 percent to 2.3 percent.

IE8's usage changed little from September to October, but Web developers will doubtless be gleeful that the much-loathed IE6 gave up a half a percentage point of share, sliding to 15 percent of worldwide usage. Microsoft is feverishly working on IE9, currently available in beta and platform preview editions, and its usage reached 0.3 percent in September.

Chrome is the fastest-changing browser since by default updates are downloaded and installed automatically when the browser or computer is restarted. Net Applications released an illustrative graph showing just how fleeting the life of a Chrome version is: six weeks in the case of Chrome 6.

Google is working on releasing new Chrome versions more frequently, which means the number of changes in new versions diminishes. It also means the significance of the version number, which Google doesn't emphasize and calls a mere "milestone," is even lower.

Originally posted at Deep Tech