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Daily Crunch: Mega Launch Edition

eStar From Navistar Is Another Electric Delivery Van Obama?s Plan For 1 Million EVs By 2015 Might Be Impossible Apple Patents More Stuff It Will Never Implement U.S. Military Looking To Bring M4 Carbine, M16 Rile Into The Modern Era 8-Bit Mega Man Straps Serve No Purpose; Buy Them Anyway

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AppBoy Releases A Check-in SDK For iOS Apps

With the number of iOS apps now well over 300,000, app discovery is becoming an increasing frustration for users. It's also become a major challenge for developers as the increasing number of apps is making it more and more difficult for them to attain exposure for their apps. Now, straight from the "What Took So Long for Something Like This to be Released" department, mobile developer community site AppBoy has released an iOS app check-in SDK.

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Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences

You know those fridge magnet kits composed of a whole bunch of words? The ones you put all over your fridge door and then try to arrange into all sorts of juvenile and/or amusing sentences. Well, Farragomate is the social, webby version of that very same pastime.

You get to play with a bunch of random strangers in real-time, and make up sentences out of a pre-set collection of words, including some fairly naughty ones, and all players' nicknames. As you can imagine, some of the results are not child-friendly.

There are ten rounds to a game. Once a round is done, players get to vote for their favorite sentence from that round. You can't vote for your own creation, of course. There's in-game chat, too.

I think the vocabulary could be made a bit more eclectic, but even as it is, it's a nice way to spend a few minutes and meet random strangers on the Internet (always a thrilling experience).

Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update)

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven't experienced the issue personally, we're hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We'll soon see if this is a momentary setback... or a lengthy wakeup call.

Update: No fix yet, but Google's revised its estimate as to how many users might have been affected by the issue -- "less than 0.08%" -- which means we're probably looking at closer to 150,000 individuals, rather than 500,000. We're assuming that the revised estimate means that the initial count wasn't precise, and not that customers are ditching Gmail in droves.

Update 2: Google's provided promising but terribly vague guidance on when the situation will be resolved: "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change."

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC Trophy spotted in the wild, sporting Verizon logo

If you had any remaining doubts whether the HTC Trophy would be playing for Team Red, you can leave them at the door -- a tipster just sent us a high-res version of the above image, and says it's running the latest version of Windows Phone 7, complete with copy/paste support. Our anonymous source says it seems exactly the same physically as the European version we reviewed in October, save for a last telling tweak -- instead of the orangish-yellow innards, it's got red highlights around back.

[Thanks, Anonymouse]

HTC Trophy spotted in the wild, sporting Verizon logo originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mgnet.me shortens and deobfuscates BitTorrent magnet URIs

Magnet URIs, which are a way of downloading torrents without actually downloading a .torrent file, are a fantastic idea, but a bit... long-winded. They're regularly over 200 characters long, making them too long to share with Twitter. Email clients can break them by inserting line breaks, and most annoyingly, very few IM clients make magnet links 'clickable.'

Mgnet.me, as you can tell from its ruthlessly eviscerated noun, shortens magnet URIs into something a lot more manageable. The Pioneer One episode 1 magnet URI goes from 148 characters, down to just 20: http://mgnet.me/ZQx. The best bit, though, is that you can assign an 'alias,' which nicely cuts through the magnet URI obfusctation -- for example: http://mgnet.me/.pioneer.

Of course, the main problem is that you have to head over to Mgnet.me to shorten URIs -- but don't worry, there's a Mgnet.me API! As you can see on Sailr, a magnet-only torrent search engine, shortened URLs are now easily available. Now we just need integration with a big-name BitTorrent client, like uTorrent, and magnet shortening will really take off.

Mgnet.me shortens and deobfuscates BitTorrent magnet URIs originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 09:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Deal of the Day ? New 2011 Apple MacBook Pro Laptops

Today?s LogicBUY deal offers savings on the new 2011 MacBook Pro laptops from Apple. You can save up to $150 on these brand new 2011 laptops. There are two configurations for the 13? and the 15? models and a single loaded configuration for the 17? Pro to choose from. Check out the above link for [...]

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You Rock strums its way into Rock Band 3 Pro mode

Those seeking the upper echelons of virtual guitar wizardry have a third option now -- the You Rock Guitar, which is now compatible with Rock Band 3's Pro mode. So long as you've also got Mad Catz' MIDI-Pro adapter handy, the multi-touch fret board sounds like a solid middle ground between the uber-realistic Squier Stratocaster strings and the tiny toy-like fret keys of the Mustang Pro, and at roughly $200 street it's priced right between the others as well. PR after the break, and find our early impressions of the You Rock here.

Continue reading You Rock strums its way into Rock Band 3 Pro mode

You Rock strums its way into Rock Band 3 Pro mode originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 06:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail app for Android adds custom label colors, improved text select

Google has delivered another pair of tweaks to the Gmail app for Android. This time around, users with Android 2.3.X Gingerbread will notice improved text selection when tapping and holding to copy. Custom label colors are also synced as of this update, making it easier to see how your messages have been auto-sorted. The update note also trumpets our favorite vaguery: bug fixes.

Hit the Market app on your Android device and head to My Apps to update, or download the new Gmail app.

Gmail app for Android adds custom label colors, improved text select originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mac OS X Lion has TRIM support for SSDs, HiDPI resolutions for improved pixel density?

As you'd expect, developers have wasted no time in tearing apart the Mac OS X Lion preview, and in so doing they've allegedly discovered some intriguing things -- namely, support for the SSD-wiping TRIM command, and a series of high-DPI display modes which would allow for icons and UI elements with twice the graphical detail -- which could mean a PC-sized Retina Display. The former doesn't sound like the most exciting upgrade, but it's truly a boon for Mac users with solid state storage, as TRIM can greatly improve write speeds in compatible drives. As far as the improved pixel density rumors are concerned, it's not clear whether Apple's actually looking at doubling display resolutions in new computers (9to5Mac imagines a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a 2880 x 1800 screen) or whether Apple's simply moving to maintain icons that are precisely the same physical size across all its displays -- which would make fantastic sense for a touchscreen UI, by the way.

Mac OS X Lion has TRIM support for SSDs, HiDPI resolutions for improved pixel density? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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