Rhododendron Software announces the release of version 1.1 of FolioCalc, an investment portfolio manager and performance tracker for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. FolioCalc automatically receives current share price data from the internet at configurable time intervals for all associated stocks, with all financial quantities dependent on share price automatically updating periodically. read more

San Francisco, CA - Apple Enthusiast debuts today with a mission to aggregate all the online user news and information for fans of Apple products. All of it. Apple Enthusiast is the companion website to Apple Investor News which aggregates all the financial and business news for investors in Apple Inc. [Nasdaq: AAPL]. read more

San Jose, California - ivyskin llc, a pioneer in silicon skin consumer electronics and mobile phone case design, and one of the world's leading brands in the luxury case designer, unveils the first ever completely hard touch screen iphone and iPod case. read more

While the pre-release build of iPhone OS 2.0, officially available only to select developers and beta testers, is sluggish and buggy overall, one area of operation has seen a dramatic performance boost. The new version of Safari included with iPhone OS 2.0 is up to 35 percent faster at executing JavaScript than previous editions of the iPhone OS. Prior testing of iPhone OS 1.x’s JavaScript performance using Celtic Kane’s benchmarks revealed performance 30 times slower than that of a 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro, with iPhone-generated test times in excess of 9000 ms on average. Under iPhone OS 2.0, however, Celtic Kane’s benchmarks run the gamut in just over 6000 ms. The iPhone OS 2.0 beta uses an updated version of WebKit — build 525.15 — to render pages in Safari.

BGR is claiming iPhone firmware 2.0 will provide a YouTube plugin for MobileSafari.app. They aren’t citing their source, but they’re pretty confident in their assertion:

“You heard it here first, people! The latest version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware that was just seeded to developers has a YouTube plugin for MobileSafari.app”

BGR tends to be a solid source, but we cannot confirm this to be true without some more evidence. Nonetheless, if true, YouTube video playback from within Safari will be possible on the iPhone, without launching a separate application for the content. That sure would make surfing the web and viewing content a helluva lot easier; here’s hoping BGR is bang on with this one. Boy Genius also goes onto suggest that this may be indicative of some form of native Flash support, but we just can’t raise your hopes like that. It wouldn’t be right.