Webby News

I’ve fielded a lot of questions today about the iPhone 4. No, not about the antenna — that was last week — today, all people want to know is why the hell is white version being delayed again? Like everyone else outside of Apple, I have no idea. Is it a problem with the glass supplier? That they’re prioritizing the black ones for now? That they’re working on an antenna modification? Any of those things could be the reason behind the delay (though if it’s the last one, Apple is going face a whole range of new questions). But I can’t say for sure what the reason actually is. What I can say that this is potentially a real problem for Apple — and I don’t mean from a manufacturing perspective.

In their two-sentence statement on the matter this morning, all Apple said is that the white iPhone 4 “will not be available until later this year.” This is a quick reversal from just one week ago when Apple confirmed that the device was on track to ship by the “end of July” — which itself was already quite a bit of a delay from the original iPhone 4 launch in June. “Later this year” is a bit ominous. It could mean anything from August all the way until December. The fact that Apple isn’t saying “August” or “another month” seems to suggest that it will be at least the Fall when we see the ivory device.

Earlier this year, you probably heard that Apple blocked Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone App converter from the App Store on the eve of the tool’s launch. That may have crushed Adobe’s dream of allowing developers to write their Flash apps once and deploy them wherever they’d like, but its AIR platform still works with Mac, PC, and Linux, with support for Android devices coming later this year.  That means developers will soon be able to write applications that will work on both the desktop and smartphones.

Of course, the prospect of running cross-platform applications is a lot more impressive when you can see one in action. Which is why Adobe Technical Evangelist Christophe Coenraets has put together a demo showing off what AIR can do when it’s used to deploy the same application across both Android and desktop computers.

Earlier this week, ABC News launched a new iPad application that adds a twist to the way most apps present the news: a third dimension. Fire up the app and you’re immediately faced with a nifty-looking globe that’s covered in headlines and photographs depicting the day’s top stories; tap one and you’ll be linked to the relevant video clip or news article. It’s quite snazzy, at least from a looks perspective (more on that later), and it’s quickly risen to become the #1 free application on the App Store.

To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application.

Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.

Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“

After a bit of a slow start, the Android app ecosystem is now growing at a rapid clip, as it nears 100,000 apps. One of the people Google can thank for that is Sun Hu Kim, their lead for Android developer marketing. But come Monday, he won’t be pitching Android anymore, he’ll be pitching Twitter.

Twitter has hired the longtime Google employee (he’s been there just about 4 years) to be a part of Twitter’s fast-growing platform team, the company has confirmed. Kim tweeted about the news a few minutes ago, as well.

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories - that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files - while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code snippets contained in a single file, like this one, for example.

GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup.

It’s that time of week again: the latest episode of TechCrunch TV’s OMG/JK has just landed. As always, the show features fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself discussing (and arguing about) the week’s top tech stories.
This week’s topics include the demise of the Nexus One, AT&T’s troubled relationship with Apple, and plenty of other key information that will help you impress your friends. Also, one thing to note: you can now subscribe to the show as a podcast! Subscribe now, so you’ll never miss an episode. At some point in the near future we’ll be distributing a subscriber-only video featuring MG serenading his iPhone 4. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?