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As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.

I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming).

Like Ustream, Qik did release a version of its app that allowed users to upload videos — but not live videos, until now.

Following Ustream and Qik, you can probably expect other companies like 12seconds to get into the iPhone live streaming game as well. Once all these apps are available, the question is how much will people use them? Services like Qik in particular seemed hot among some of the tech elite last year, but this year have seemed to have large cooled off. Perhaps that’s because people have been ditching their Nokia phones (it seemed like everyone was using the N95 with Qik for a while) in favor of devices like the iPhone. Now that these apps are allowed on the iPhone, will we see a resurgence of links to live streams on Twitter again?

Below find some examples of Qik videos I shot with my iPhone 3GS using the ad-hoc version of the app.

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While Mac users grow impatient for Google’s Chrome browser to come to the platform, there’s a small bit of good news today: A new beta version of the excellent Camino browser.

Camino is a browser built by Mozilla specifically for the Mac. Unlike the much more popular Firefox, Camino is extremely lean and fast. It’s so fast that it’s been my browser of choice for the past several years. And the new version, Camino 2.0 beta 4, released today, offers some nice improvements. Among them:

• Phishing and Malware Protection: Camino 2.0 Beta 4 includes phishing and malware protection based on Google Safe Browsing.
• Full Content Zoom: The scale increment used by full content zoom has been reduced to provide smoother zooming. There is also a new Zoom Text Only item in the View menu to toggle the zoom keyboard shortcuts between full content zoom and larger or smaller text.
• Software Update: When quitting for an automatic update, Camino will now save and restore pages that were open before quitting regardless of whether the “Load the pages that were open before quitting” preference is enabled.
• Updated Appearance: The tab bar, Bookmark Bar, and folder icons now better match the appearance of Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

The key feature for many users will be the last one. Mozilla has finally updated Camino to blend in a little bit better with OS X. While the changes in the look and feel definitely aren’t huge, they are subtle and nice.

But here’s the real interesting thing about Camino, its project lead, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy leading the development of the Mac version of Chrome for Google. It seems likely that most of his time is now spent on Chrome (and his Twitter updates indicate as much), but he has always maintained that work would continue on Camino for Mozilla.

Of course, it has been almost a year since Camino 2 first went into beta testing (last December) and it’s still not done yet. Meanwhile, in that time, there have been three official releases of Chrome (though, again, none for the Mac). Still, it’s nice to get even little updates to Camino. It remains a great browser.

On the Chrome end, Google has publicly stated that it will be available before the end of the year. Judging from the Chromium builds, it seems very close. No word on when Camino 2 will be finalized, but that too, seems pretty stable.

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Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android.

Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.

Users who have played with the iPhone version should feel at home with this app. But it has a few features that the iPhone version doesn’t, such as integrated maps and a one-click check-in process. Other areas like the friends check-in list and the page to display your badges are largely the same as the iPhone version, but the app has the distinctive Android look and feel.

One advantage the Android platform has over the iPhone is that applications can run in the background. But Foursquare for Android chooses not to take advantage of that, and instead opts for speed and better battery life. “No “location aware” always-on background services or application bloat to drain your battery over the course of the night,” is how they phrase it. Since Foursquare is all about manually checking-in places, that makes sense.

With the app now complete, the next revisions will focus on performance and UI, LaPenna says. But there are also some new features that both they and Foursquare have planned. “We of course plan on adding features to the app but we’re not sure what order we’re going to tackle them in,” LaPenna says.

Having another mobile application for Foursquare should certainly help with its adoption. And Android is especially key since a lot of geeky early adopters have Android phones. There is also work being done on a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app. The latter I’ve seen in action, as my friend Anand Iyer has been working on it. It has a few great features also not found on the iPhone app including the ability to ping you if three of your friends check-in somewhere that you are not. And placing your friends on an actual map to show where they are (think Latitude).

One really nice thing about the new Android app is that it’s open-source. LaPenna and Brummel have already had plenty of others help in building it. You can find out more about it on the Google Code page for the project. They’ve also written up some documentation for first-time Foursquare Android users.

The Android Foursquare app is available in the Android Market right now for free, or you can grab the app from the Google Code page and install it yourself.

Update: DailyFinance published some other interesting information today in a profile of Foursquare. The most interesting part is that Foursquare is preparing to announce a round of seed funding. We’ve heard that as well from a couple sources. From what we hear, the company is actually looking for less money than some investors are offering.

Look for a low seven figure seed round to be announced in the coming weeks. And one name that is continually thrown around as being involved is Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson. And where he is putting money, you can often find Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet close by as well. Nothing confirmed yet, that’s just what we’re hearing.

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When Facebook launched the 2.0 version of its iPhone app in September of last year, it was a huge upgrade from its original app that launched with the App Store last July. And now it’s on the verge of launching the 3.0 version of the app, and having tested it today, we can safely say that it once again takes Facebook on the device to the next level. In fact, it may be the most useful app on the iPhone now, period.

This new version simply improves upon the old one in just about every way imaginable. Not only does it have a wide range of new options and features, many of which we went over previously, but it’s actually faster. And the design is rather brilliant. Built by Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, the app manages to maintain the good practices found in many iPhone apps, while at the same time creating its own unique look and feel.

Features

Nowhere is this new look more evident than on the new Facebook home screen. It’s sort of like the iPhone main screen, but with a different, distinctive design. The large buttons are easy to hit, and best of all, you can add people’s profiles and pages as icons as well, to provide shortcuts to your favorites.

The main screen that you were probably used to from the old app now resides in the upper left corner of the main screen, as the “News Feed.” It largely looks the same but the ability to “like” items has been added to the ability to comment on them. You can also now easily take and post videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. Hitting the “News Feed” button in the upper right hand corner, allows you to sort this feed by the various filters you’ve set up.

The “Profile” area is the next button on the main screen. The overall look and feel have been updated, and now also include the “like” and “comment” elements on the Wall. You can also now see your profile pictures.

The “Friends” area has been updated to include both Friends and Pages. But a killer feature may be the ability to hit the phone icon and have the option to call or text your contacts. People who consider Facebook to be their contact list, will love this.

The “Inbox” is the next main area, and it now features not only new messages, but updates from your groups, and sent messages. But the best thing about this feature is how fast messages load. It’s leaps and bounds better than trying to load messages on the regular Facebook, and I think from now on I’ll simply use the app to respond to any emails I get through it.

The “Chat” and “Requests” areas remain largely the same, though both have been cleaned up.

The big new feature of this app has to be “Events”. The lack of a way to even see events in the previous version of the app was a major complaint against it — it had people using the web interface to log-in specifically to find events. Now, not only can you see them in the app, you can see details like the address of the event and host of it. And you can RSVP, and you can see who else is attending. With so many Facebook users now using its events feature for social gatherings, it simply made no sense not to have this in there. The Events area also features a “Birthdays” tab to specifically see which of your friends’ birthday is coming up.

The “Photos” area now allows you to create new photo albums, and it is significantly easier and more obvious as to how to tag someone in a picture. And at last, Facebook photos allow you to take advantage of the iPhone’s multi-touch to pinch zoom in and out of pictures.

The last main page element is “Notes,” which is new. You can see, edit and create new notes from here, just in case your Status Updates don’t give you enough room for all you want to say.

Below the main elements is the “Notifications” area that seems to update in near real-time when someone comments or “likes” one of your items or an item you’ve commented on.

What’s Missing

As good as this new Facebook iPhone app is, there are still some missing features. The two biggest ones are Push Notifications and a robust search. Hewitt had mentioned previously that Push Notifications would not be in 3.0, but hinted that they could come in 3.1. He stated on Twitter that with 3.0 done, the work is already starting on 3.1.

When we asked him about any new features for that build, Hewitt said he wasn’t ready to comment on specifics yet. But it’s probably a good bet that Push Notifications will be one of them. And earlier today, he also noted that there will be a landscape mode in 3.1. And he’s also noted that videos recorded on the iPhone 3GS don’t yet play in the app because Facebook doesn’t encode them in an iPhone-compatible way. That should change soon too.

The bigger omission, as I see it, is the lack of a robust search tool. Facebook recently rolled out the upgraded search functionality on its site, but on the iPhone searching is limited to profiles and pages. Basically, it’s useless, as you can get much of this information from the Friends area. If Facebook is serious about search, it needs to make basically everything that gets updated on the site (allowed for by individual’s privacy settings, of course) searchable on its mobile app in real-time. That would be a killer feature.

Overall

Overall, the Facebook 3.0 iPhone app is a huge step forward as a social tool. In fact, in terms of the data it lets you access, it’s hard to argue that any app is more robust. It’s now basically a way to keep track of and remark about what your friends are up to, an always up-to-date contact list, a picture and video sharer, an inbox, an IM client, and a event coordinator, all tied to over 250 million social users.

With the additions of Push Notifications and a better search tool, it will be nearly perfect. And all of these new features wrapped into an app that is even zippier, makes this a great (and free) upgrade.

Update: Hewitt has just let us know about another really nice feature. If you tap the Facebook logo, you’ll automatically go back to the main home screen. Tap it again and you’ll return to where you just were. Subtle, but nice feature.

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We’ve been gushing for weeks now about the latest Chromium builds for Mac. Every day, they seem to get better. The problem is that every day, several updates are released and you have to manually go to the site and scroll down a long list to find the newest version to download. So we’ve made an application that allows you to easily ensure that you have the latest version at all times.

Our Mac Chromium Updater was built with the help of Greg Rosen, who created a script to check your version of Chromium versus the latest build. Then one of our developers, Hunter, created an Automator process so you don’t have to deal with installing something like Wget on your machine. The end result is a simple app that you run and let it update Chromium for you. You can find it here.

For those who aren’t aware, Chromium is the open source project behind Google’s web browser, Chrome. While there are pre-release versions of regular Chrome available for Mac as well, the Chromium builds get updated much more frequently, and as such, are the closest to a working version of Chrome on the Mac. For example, latest versions of Chromium include Flash support and bookmark support. Overall, the project is coming along very nicely.

A couple quick notes about our app: First, when you run the app, depending on the speed of your connection, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to download the newest build of Chromium. So even if you don’t think the app is doing anything, let it run, and eventually you will see the latest build of Chromium open on your screen. Second, this has only been tested of OS X 10.5 Leopard, but Chromium will only run on Leopard, so there you go.

Enjoy. We’ve included a read me file in the zip with a few more obvious disclaimers and a note of who to email with problems.

Again, find it here. Bookmark this post, we’ll add a note here if we update the updater.

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