Snackr for iPhone lets you listen to the news.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida)

There are countless ways to scan the news on an iPhone, and even a handful of ways to listen to it. But newly updated Snackr effectively does both, reading aloud the latest headlines and news summaries from a variety of sources--including some personal ones.

In other words, it's like a news "snack"--get it? The app provides five minutes' worth of current headlines, but also lets you shift to other channels for more targeted news: top stories, business, entertainment, and technology.

You can also create your own channels derived from nine broad categories, including sports, science, gaming, and music.

What you can't do, alas, is hand-pick any news sources (like, say, CNET, ahem), nor can you add RSS feeds. But there is some nifty personalization available in the form of customized daily greetings, which include local-weather updates, sports scores, and even notification of friends' birthdays--all courtesy of Snackr's just-added Facebook integration.

The app's interface is fairly straightforward, relying on side-scrolling lists in upper, middle, and lower sections. Up top: channels. Near the bottom: the current batch of ... [Read more]

Apple has released a small patch to fix a problem a number of iMac users have been experiencing with network connectivity on their systems after waking from sleep. Apparently, after the latest OS X 10.7.3 update, people with iMac systems from late 2009 or newer found that the system wouldn't connect to their preferred wireless network, requiring the user to manually select the network from the Wi-Fi menu.

While not a serious bug, it was a problem that caused a bit of frustration with users. MacFixIt readers wrote in asking about this issue, and while some have had success implementing my script-based workaround that automatically detects the system's Wi-Fi status and triggers it to connect, others have preferred to have the system behave as it ought to.

Apple recently released a small update that addresses this issue by replacing a faulty driver that shipped with OS X. The update is a 26MB download (even though the updated files are only a few MB in size) that should be available in Software Update for affected systems, so be sure to check there first (Software Update is available in the Apple menu). Alternatively, you can download the update from the iMac W-Fi Update v1.0 Web page. The update will require OS X 10.7.3 to install.

Keep in mind that this update is only for the iMac systems, and... [Read more]

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

BARCELONA--Facebook would like to build more mobile Web apps and fewer mobile native apps. Really, it would -- but browsers just aren't up to it, the company has concluded.

Web apps naturally span the multitudes of mobile devices that Facebook loves to run on, but they support Web standards so inconsistently that it's a developer's nightmare, said Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, speaking here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. So Facebook is trying to do something about it: "We're taking on mobile web standards," Taylor said.

A sample result for Facebook's Ringmark test

(Credit: Facebook)

It's a two-pronged effort. First, Facebook is working with a wide range of companies and the World Wide Web Consortium to standardize a set of Web standards suited for mobile apps. Second, it's coming up with a corresponding mobile Web standards test suite called Ringmark.

Facebook has a lot to gain from the project. Most obviously, it could reach more mobile devices with less development effort. But it also would benefit when third-party developers could have an easier tim... [Read more]

A demonstration of B2G (Boot to Gecko) at Mobile World Congress shows that Mozilla's browser-based mobile OS can send and receive text messages. It also can send and receive calls, play games, and be used to read e-books.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was evidently a challenge. These are early days for B2G (which stands for Boot to Gecko), but in the meantime iOS and Android show no signs of slowing down, and Windows Phone is gaining adherents.

Top-end performance isn't everything, though. ... [Read more]

Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, announces the carrier's plan to embrace Mozilla's B2G browser-based mobile OS at Mobile World Congress.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

BARCELONA--Half of Telefonica's customers are in Latin America, where smartphones are scarcer than in wealthier parts of the world. But the mobile network operator hopes Mozilla's new browser-based operating system, B2G, will change that.

"What we're selling the most in these countries is feature phones, which is ridiculous, said Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. "We think we can bring smartphones to the masses in developing countries with this approach."

How affordable, exactly? The B2G phone will be "ten times cheaper than an iPhone," Domingo said.

At a press conference today to announce the Telefonica pact with Mozilla, Domingo demonstrated the reference phone with a 480x320 pixel screen performing a number of mobile phone tasks with its browser-based interface. He put a call through to another phone, sent and received text messages, won a score of 317 at the HTML5 test Web site, ... [Read more]

Mozilla CTO and JavaScript founder Brendan Eich

(Credit: Stephen Shankland)

BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla took a big first step in making something real out of B2G, its browser-based mobile operating system, by signing on mobile network operator Telefonica as a partner.

In addition, the Firefox maker discussed another step, a close relationship with mobile processor maker Qualcomm to create the hardware for the first phones, expected to launch later in 2012.

Those are two very important steps. But they're only one of dozens that it must take to create an operating system competitive with Apple's iOS and Google's Android, much less one that fulfills Mozilla's grander ambition. The nonprofit organization wants to break down the barriers that make it hard for people to switch among iOS, Android, Amazon, and other technology realms.

A big part of the B2G sales pitch is price. With component cost of only about $50, Mozilla can tap into "the opportunity to convert a large part of the world from [lower-end] feature phones to smartphones," Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology officer and the initial inventor of the JavaScript programming language that's universal on the Web, said in an interview.

"A lot of people can afford the kind of phone we're building," Eich said. "These are not fat, high-end smartphones," but he believes the Web apps will run fast on lower-end hardware so man... [Read more]

What's new in Opera Mini Next 7 and Opera Mobile 12

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BARCELONA, Spain--The maker of the second-most popular mobile browser in the world has given its feature-phone fans something to tweet about, as Opera Mini Next debuted and brought several smartphone features to "dumb" phones.

The big new feature that's kicking off the inaugural build of Opera Mini Next, the developer's preview of the browser, is "smart" page called Home. Home will live next to Opera's Speed Dial, its customizable collection of regularly visited Web sites that occupies top billing across all Opera browsers, and it serves a similar function. It will let you bookmark regularly visited, regularly updated sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail, so that you can quickly check for updates without having to load the site in full.

In an interview last week, Phillip Gronvold, Opera's product manager for mobile, said that because of the Turbo feature's data compression the automatic updates only cost 1 KB of data per update. The feature ... [Read more]

Your opening screen, which shows all the projects you've saved. To transfer them to the desktop, you can upload them to Adobe Creative Cloud and open them in Photoshop CS5.1 or later. It preserves the layers, but not much else.

(Credit: Screen capture by Lori Grunin/CNET)

While Photoshop Touch offers a nice set of special effects and adjustments, $10 is probably overkill if that's all you're looking for.

(Credit: Lori Grunin/CNET)

Just a few months after its first suite of Creative apps debuted on Android, Adobe makes good on shipping its flagship Photoshop Touch for iPad. The app, which is as close to identical to the Android version as is possible given the platform differences, is available on iTunes for the same $9.99; it requires an iPad 2 running iOS 5. Adobe says the iPadification of the rest of the Touch apps is under way.

Once you get the hang of it, the interface is pretty straightforward. However, it also tends to block large chunks of the image.

(Credit: Lori Grunin/CNET)[Read more]