The Chevy Volt is one vehicle we can really get behind. It’s hard not to be a little excited over it — we have, after all, been watching its development for quite a long time now. The electric car gets an impressive 230 miles per gallon in the city (and, all shaky rating practices aside , that’s nothing to scoff at). Autoblog Green ’s just taken one of Chevy’s 80 IVER pre-production prototypes for a little spin, and they seem to have come away pretty impressed with the car. They report that the brakes are better than most hybrid vehicles, and said that when the engine does kick in after the battery’s depleted, they didn’t even notice it until they stopped and heard it running quietly. It was a short spin, so they weren’t able to gauge, for instance, whether the car can actually pull the full 40 miles per battery charge that Chevrolet claims it gets, but check out their full, detailed observations at the Source link. 2011 Chevrolet Volt gets taken for a test drive originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |  Autoblog Green  |  Email this  |  Comments

For the last six months, you may have noticed that some of your favorite apps on Facebook Platform carried a special badge deeming them to be “Facebook Verified”. These apps “passed Facebook’s review for trustworthy user experiences”, and were given both greater exposure in the App Directory and less restrictive limits on the number of messages they could send to users. And tomorrow, just over six months after the program launched, Facebook is killing off Verified Apps for good. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Facebook announced plans to end the program in late October, and has been Emailing developers about it for weeks. But now that Verified Apps are going away, it’s a good time to look back at the long, convoluted road Facebook took to a program that was ultimately very shortlived. The Verified Apps program has been anything but a smooth ride for developers. It was first announced at the Facebook developer conference in July 2008, with the intention of helping users identify the most trustworthy apps on the platform. In return for meeting Facebook’s guidelines, apps would be rewarded with bonuses like advertising credits and relaxed rules on how many notifications and messages they could send to users. More concrete details about the program were revealed the following November, when Facebook opened up the program to applications. Developers were charged a $375 fee to apply, which we likened to a protection racket . But after developers paid their money, Facebook went silent about the program for half a year. That understandably led to growing developer unrest . Finally, nearly a year after it was first announced, Verified Apps made its debut in May 2009. But Verified Apps was only supposed to be a stepping stone to the site’s true cream of the crop. The most elite class of applications was to be called “Great Apps”, and launched with iLike and Causes as inaugural members. But that was another false start. Two months after the launch of Verified Apps, Facebook revealed that it was canceling its plans for its Great Apps program and demoting current members to regular Verified Apps. Or, as Facebook put it, they were getting rolled into the same thing, so Verified Apps were getting the benefits that would have been reserved for Great Apps. Despite these logistical hurdles, developers certainly benefited from the program. For example, CampusBuddy , a verified app we covered in September, has grown from 60,000 to over 150,000 monthly active users. CEO Michael Moradian says that the company will especially miss the “extra boosts” that applications received as part of the program because they helped virality. But while CampusBuddy would have liked to see the program continue, Moradian acknowledges that times may be changing. You can see his blog about the news here . So why is Facebook getting rid of Verified Apps? Facebook gives the following explanation: We are standardizing the idea of verification to apply to all of the applications on Facebook Platform. We are evolving the program to improve the overall user experience and ensure that applications on Facebook Platform meet verification standards. We intend to make sure that the experience that our users have on Platform is of the same quality as they experience elsewhere on Facebook, which is something that we are constantly asked for by developers. In other words, Facebook wants every app to be trustworthy. To do that, they’re planning “to expand [the] team responsible for policy enforcement on Platform so that they can support the upholding of the principles we’ve introduced as part of our roadmap.” It’s not really clear why they wouldn’t have done this from the start. The timing is certainly interesting. Some of the companies we called out in our ScamVille posts for using scammy offers, like Zynga, have some of their apps Verified. Granted, Facebook announced the decision to end Verified Apps a few days before we first broke the Scamville story, but they’ve been aware of the infringing games, offers, and ads for a long time. In effect, they’ve been stamping their seal of approval on games using tactics that are the target of a class-action lawsuit . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

In Soviet Bulgaria, we don’t have Cyber Mondays, but from what we’ve been told this is a pretty bargainous time of the year. HP starts us off with a pair of coupons on its dv8 Core i7 notebook , one of which drops the 18.4-inch laptop to just $899. There are also deep 50 percent discounts on its printers, but only the Photosmart Premium All-in-One remains after the two cheaper models sold out. Click the Logic Buy link below to get in on the action. Amazon has the older Modern Warfare at $29.95 and Uncharted 2 at $40 flat for the PS3, Garmin’s nuvi 260W at a cent under $115 (or half price), and plenty of discounts on DVDs, gadgetry and even clothing. Best Buy keeps pace by offering the same price on the Garmin nav unit, as well as 10 percent discounts on Apple’s iPod range. Walmart is kicking off a whole Cyber Week with a Sony Bravia 32-inch HDTV priced at $398 and a $249 Nintendo Wii Value Bundle, which includes Wii Sports , sporting peripherals, and a choice of free game. If you’re more interested in computer components, Newegg’s $30 mail-in rebate on the 120GB OCZ Agility SSD will net you the drive for $289, our favorite of a plethora of deals at the online store. And finally, Dell is offering the Droid Eris for free when taking out a new Verizon Wireless account, which is at least $30 cheaper than you can get it anywhere else. Time to get clicking! Cyber Monday deals roundup: Core i7, HDTVs, SSDs, free Droid Eris originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink   Gizmodo , I4U  |  Logic Buy , Best Buy , Walmart , Newegg , Dell , Amazon  |  Email this  |  Comments

As we’ve noted , Chrome for Mac is getting very, very close to its official beta launch. The team is down to a mere 8 bugs to fix before it’s ready (and it looks like the list has been trimmed to 7 as of a few hours ago). This is great news for Mac users who want to try out the Chrome experience that PC users have had for well over a year now. But still, the product will be in beta, and it will be incomplete. It’s been known for a while that Google would have to trim some features from the initial Chrome for Mac beta launch to get it out before self-imposed “end of the year” deadline. But what’s on the chopping block? A scan through the Chromium logs on Google Code seems to reveal what will and won’t be a go for Chrome for Mac beta. So what’s out? The biggest feature that is currently not slated to be done in time for “milestone 4″ (aka Chrome version 4, which Chrome for Mac beta will be, at least initially) is the Bookmark Manager . Current Chromium (and dev Chrome) testers will know that this option has been grayed out forever on the latest builds of the browser, and as of September , it was moved from a M4 (milestone 4) to a M5 target. It would appear that Google will launch Chrome for Mac beta without it working. Another feature moved to M5 is App Mode . This is the Chome mode that allows you to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Fans of Fluid , a free program for OS X that works with Safari, will appreciate this being built into the browser eventually, but it doesn’t appear that will be ready for the beta launch either. Likewise, the Task Manager has been moved from M4 to M5, but recent chatter about it makes it seem like it’s possible that it could be done in time. Gears , which allows for offline web app functionality, is completely off the table as a Chrome for Mac feature right now, according to project lead Mike Pinkerton (he actually noted this back in July). Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac. Sync for Mac (bookmark syncing) is another feature that currently works on the PC version of Chrome, but is slated to be a M5 project for the Chrome for Mac team. Still, this thread shows that significant progress has been made on it, and it looks like you can even enable it to try it out, but it won’t be on by default yet. Multi-touch gestures that are built into OS X and used by MacBook trackpads and the new Magic Mouse are another M5 project. The two listed gestures, “Three-finger-swipe up” and “Pinch in/out to zoom in/out” are still being debated as to what they should actually do. While one of the highly touted features of Snow Leopard is that it’s 64-bit , Chrome for Mac beta will not be initially supporting it. In fact, this may not even be a M5 project, it all depends on how well Google’s V8 JavaScript engine is able to perform in a 64-bit environment, apparently. Full extension support will also not be a part of Chrome for Mac beta, Pinkerton tweeted out tonight. While many extensions are working in the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, some are apparently not. Pinkerton promises that the team will get to this “soon,” but needed to “draw a line somewhere.” Another feature currently disabled in the Mac builds of Chromium is Full Screen mode . It would seem this too has been pushed to M5. So those appear to be the big features that will be missing with the launch of the Chrome for Mac beta. There’s a larger list of other M5 projects here . Again, Chrome for Mac beta will be a M4 (version 4) release, so all of these appear to be off the table for now. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Here’s a tip for all you iPhone app developers out there. If you want to make sure your app doesn’t join the long list of rejected iPhone apps out there, make sure it doesn’t advertise a competing product, especially if that product runs the Android operating system. Swavv Apps (creators of Beer Pong) learned that lesson recently when they tried to get their iDroid app past the App Store censors. The iDroid didn’t do much. It didn’t replicate any Droid features or take over any functionality of the iPhone (that would have made it a worthwhile app). All it did was display the glowing red Droid eye. If you tapped on the eye, it then showed some marketing bullet points about the competing phone such as the fact that it can run simultaneous apps and has a slide-out keyboard (something the iPhone lacks). The second page also shows a picture of the Droid with its keyboard out. Apple rejected the app because it was nothing more than an ad for a competitor. I kinda have to side with Apple on this one, although I think it would have been smarter for them to let the app through. Sure, the iDroid was an ad for the Droid phone. But what’s the real message it would have sent? What it says is that the iPhone is a powerful marketing vehicle for anything mobile, perhaps even more powerful than Times Square billboards or Google’s homepage . If you can get someone to download an app to their iPhone and show it to their friends that’s more likely to make a lasting impression than a glaring billboard. Now, why anyone would want to download the iDroid app other than to get the increasingly-familiar, if somewhat spooky, Droid eye on their iPhone as a lark is beyond me. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors