The Webkit team, those intrepid guys who have this forever on-going work-in-progress to improve and speed up Safari, Apple’s web browser, has unveiled a version of Webkit that incorporates a new Javascript rendering engine called Squirrelfish, which purports to jack up Safari performance to 1.6x better. Not quite ready yet for prime time, it’s still being tweaked and fixed before they roll it out.

Squirrelfish, if you really must know, is a register-based, direct threaded, high-level bytecode engine with a sliding register window calling convention made for open-source browsers. Huh?

Bring it on. All we need to know is, will it blend?

Update on that report on the Samsung L870 slider phone using Apple’s Safari web browser: turns out it ain’t true after all. Or something like that.

Engadget reports that Samsung’s takin’ it all back:

Actually, L870 is equipped with S60 OSS browser, also known as S60 safari browser because both are using same webcore platform. Sorry again for the unclear specification, and bothering you with this.”

Hmph. Ooooooookay.

Something smells mighty fishy here. Either Apple lowered the boom on Samsung for spoiling the surprise and renegged on the browser deal, or Samsung’s PR guys can’t even get their act (or names) together.

As Thomas Ricker of Engadget wryly points out, “the S60 browser has never been known, even informally, as the ‘S60 Safari browser’. “

One of the most anticipated things later this year (aside from the obvious new iPhone iteration announcement), is the flood of new apps borne of the release of the SDK, to be made available through the iTunes Store. A lot of these new apps likely were first discussed in iPhoneDevCamp.

Last year, the iPhoneDevCamp was a hotbed of new and innovative ideas, and this year the madness continues with iPhoneDevCamp 2. The gathering is meant to encourage development and stimulate creativitity and ideas for app creation and development for the iPhone and iPod Touch using the SDK and web standards in a non-profit, collegiate atmosphere. Think camp for geeks.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 this year will be held August 1-3 in San Francisco at the Adobe Systems Headquarters, for those of you curious, or want to somehow participate. For regular updates, follow iphonedevcamp on Twitter.

In a no-brainer upgrade, Apple has just (belatedly) upped the iPhone’s storage capacity to 16gb, and the iPod Touch to 32gb.

At first, I got giddy with excitement, as a fanboy is wont to do with something new from Apple. But almost immediately that euphoria deflated as I realized how ho-hum the upgrade is. We’ve been waiting for this for at least six months now. No new and impressive features. No 3G, no better battery, no Air-type slimdown. Outside of the 1.1.3 Firmware, it’s exactly the same banana as the current models, only with more space. And they both cost US$499.

I’m stumped why they don’t go whole hog on the phone and bump it all the way up to 32gb. There’s no reason other than they don’t want to kill the iPod Touch, but I think a high-capacity iPhone without the phone will always have a market. I’d buy a 32gb iPhone if they had one.

I’ve learned to live with 8gb on an iPhone. I’ve been idly ruing my decision to move up (down?) from a 16gb iPod Touch to an iPhone with half the storage; as a phone, the iPhone is actually mediocre and subpar in some areas (like I’ve said in a recent podcast I recorded; you won’t believe the ribbing I got). Now that they’ve doubled capacities, I’m just …underwhelmed. I’d rather get the 32gb iPod Touch than a 16gb iPhone, to be honest about it.

I’m sure fanboys who’ve got not much to live for after realizing the new ultrathin Mac is a lot of hot Air for the most part, will fixate on upgrading their phones to the double-capacity ones. Have fun, guys. I think I’ll wait for something a bit more substantial.

Hi, gang. You might have noticed we’ve been having off-again, on-again problems server side at our blog network of late.

Things have been fixed, but we’ve lost a considerable number of days because of the downtime, and for that, the Doodler apologizes.

Because of the changes at the back-end, some of your bookmarks might not work anymore. I’ve had friends like Ryan who thinks the blog is still offline because his old bookmark takes him to the Twilight Zone, even if we’ve been up for some time now.

If you can, spread the word around that the working link is “http://blogs.inquirer.net/macadoodle”. That should bring everyone up to speed.

Thanks!

Yun lang po.