The rumor comes from AppleInsider, which cites “people familiar with Apple’s roadmap”. The publication reports:

This will include new, ultra-thin unibody enclosures that jettison yesteryear technologies like optical disk drives and traditional hard drives in favor of models with lightweight chassis that employ flash-memory based solid-state drives, instant-on capabilities, extended battery life, and rely on digital distribution for software and media.

“They’re all going to look like MacBook Airs,” one person familiar with the new MacBook Pro designs told AppleInsider. Meanwhile, existing MacBook Pro designs are expected to be phased out over the course of the year.

The late Steve Jobs was known for his focus on design, sometimes at the cost of functionality (see Antennagate). It sounds like design is still a vital part of Apple’s mentality under CEO Tim Cook so far.

The iPhone and iPad might be the sexier Apple products these days, but Macs continue to sell quite well too. Apple’s Q1 earnings report indicate that Mac sales were up 26%, having sold 5.2 million Macs in the quarter. In addition to that, over 100 million apps were downloaded from the Mac App Store in less than a year.

Interestingly, however, iOS has eclipsed Mac OS X in web market share, according to a recent study from Chitika.

There was a fair amount of enthusiasm for it, but we don’t really hear that much about it these days. In October, Google announced it was shutting down some social features. Those changes went down on January 15, by the way.

Now, some users are seeing a new version of iGoogle (pictured below, hat tip to Google Operating System):

The changes have reportedly been being tested for quite some time, but apparently more people are seeing them now .

Do you use iGoogle? What do you think of the changes?

This tells me that there are still people who are just now getting this Google experience, which places navigation among Google services at the left-hand side of the screen.

On search results pages, this navigation menu (formerly accessible via a black bar at the top of the screen) appears when you mouse over the Google logo.

There is also a share box, to share updates, links, etc. from pretty much any page (across multiple Google products like Gmail, Google Reader, etc. For some reason, the design is still not integrated with YouTube.

There has historically been little Google branding throughout the YouTube experience, and surprisingly (given Google’s major push to integrate Google+ across products and tie everything together, including YouTube, via a singular Google account) this continues today. That said, YouTube is not without its Google+ integrations.

Are you seeing the new Google design? How long have you had it? Are you still waiting? Do you think it’s an improvement? Let us know in the comments.

The home page doesn’t look much different. It still looks like the image you see above.

The search results pages are a bit different. The header has gone from green to red, for example. There is a set of search suggestions on the right-hand side.

You can actually change the color to anything you want from the settings. That goes for not only the header, but: highlight, URLs, background, text, links, visited links and border.

In case you’re wondering why you should use DuckDuckGo instead of Google (or Bing), founder Gabriel Weinberg makes his case in this interview he did with WebProNews from last year:

In October, DuckDuckGo announced its first round of funding, led by Union Square Ventues. At the time, Brad Burnham wrote on the Union Square Ventures blog, ” We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.” He seemed to suggest that the investors see something in DuckDuckGo that reminds them of a young Google.

Hopefully the redesign is up to snuff for users, because the company has been taking feedback for it as it’s been going. The company said in a community post:

“The new visual design is live on the main site! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions leading up to it.”

Do you use DuckDuckGo? What are your thoughts about the new design?

(Hat tip: Matt McGee)

“We’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of the app, now placing the actions you want to make with your blog all in one place: The Dashboard,” says WordPress mobile engineer Dan Roundhill. “You have one-tap access to create new posts and pages, upload media, view your stats, read blogs and more! There’s also now a beautiful comment count ribbon to show you how many comments you have in your moderation queue.”

“The Action Bar up top allows you to quickly get to other areas of the app as fast as possible,” he adds. “You can tap the blog name to switch blogs, refresh your content, and call up the dashboard from wherever you are in the app at the time.”

The post editor has a new formatting toolbar that displays above the keyboard while you type. The post editor goes ful screen, which should be nice. You can also now insert images anywhere among the post text. Tapping an image will bring up options to set title, caption, placement and size.

“We paid special attention to tablets for this release, adding special layouts just for Android Tablets,” says Roundhill. “From Galaxy Tab to Xoom, we’ve got you covered.”

Here’s a video showing off the new app:

It can be downloaded from the Android Market.

One of the main differences between what TwitVid is doing and what YouTube is doing is that YouTube is all YouTube videos, and TwitVid is videos from all kinds of providers.

TwitVid claims over 12 million uniques a month, including celebrities, and as a spokesperson put it, “has social at their core (not search like YouTube).” This is significant, when you consider that YouTube’s recent changes make the service more like a traditional social network, with the subscription and news feed format. It’s basically like a video version of Twitter. Follow the channels you like, and see them in your timeline.

TwitVid has probably been thought of by most people as a way to post videos to share on Twitter. That’s certainly what the name implies, bu the company says it’s looking to expand beyond its original model. It wants to be looked upon as a social video network built on an open network.

CEO Mo Adham tells WebProNews it’s “a natural progression” of their service, and one that reflects a growing online trend where people are consuming more information that is pushed to them, taking away a little bit of the search habit. You can see this a bit in Nielsen’s survey about popular Android apps. Facebook trumps Google search across all ages surveyed.

And speaking of Facebook, that is a big part of what sets TwitVid apart from YouTube. What YouTube is doing is more about Google+, Adham says. “So far, I don’t think they pose any threat, because we’re directly integrated with Twitter and Facebook.”

If you want to log in to TwitVid, you can use your Twitter or Facebook ID. With YouTube, you’re logging in with your Google account.

“The other thing is the community,” saysAdham, referring to all of the “nonsense” IDs in use on YouTube, and the comments that these breed. He implied that with Facebook and Twitter IDs, there is a greater sense of community and real people not hiding behind fake names.

Another thing TwitVid does better than YouTube, is that it plays videos right from the feed. You don’t have to click away from your stream and go to a separate video page.

The new TwitVid will rollout on the web first. The new functionality will come to the mobile apps later.

Adham tells us TwitVid is also looking into its TV strategy. “The TV is going to be super important for us,” he said. Whether that means Xbox, Google TV, Roku, Samsung, etc. he says they’ll be exploring opportunities.

Here’s a separate interview we did with Adham about the news:

Now, Google has officially launched it. Go to YouTube.com. The page feels much more personalized, and really places a great deal more emphasis on YouTube as a social entity – something I’ve been long surprised that Google hasn’t done more of.

It also comes with those new channels that have been in the news a number of times, as part of YouTube’s renewed focus on high quality video content.

“Given the homepage’s new focus on helping you find and organize your favorite Channels, we would be remiss if we didn’t update the look and feel of the Channels themselves,” the company says. “Today we’re launching an improved Channel design focused on what matters most: helping users find great videos. As different uploaders have different goals, we’ve created new Channel templates to meet your needs whether you produce one video a week or have thousands of videos for a fan to browse. Some partners have even uploaded videos talking about the features, or giving tips on how they’re taking advantage of the new design. To learn how to opt-in to and test this new Channel design, check out our help center.”

“To bring the new homepage and Channels designs together we’ve also applied a fresh coat of digital paint across the whole site,” Google adds. “In July, we unveiled an experimental design called Cosmic Panda. We’ve used your feedback to improve our overall design, and today, we’re presenting a cleaner and simpler YouTube, with a consistent gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a more streamlined watch page.”

Here’s a video highlighting the changes:

I wasn’t one of the ones that implemented the new interface early, but just browsing at it quickly, I can tell this is going to make the home page much more relevant on a personal basis, and is going to inspire people to subscribe to a lot more YouTube channels and gain exposure to more personally relevant video content.

Not to be overly dramatic, but this looks like what YouTube should have been a long time ago.

Well, now that Google Reader design is here (for better or for worse), and it looks like that Gmail redesign isn’t too far behind. It hasn’t rolled out completely yet, but it’s been officially announced on the Google Blog.

Here’s that video, to refresh your memory:

“Conversation view has been completely redesigned to help you read through your email threads,” says user experience designer Jason Cornwell. “You’ll now see profiles pictures for your contacts, so it’s easier to keep track of who said what. We also stripped out as much as possible so you can focus on communicating with your friends and colleagues.”

“We know that you use Gmail from a variety of screen sizes and devices, so now the spacing between elements on the screen will automatically change based on the kind of display you’re using,” he says. “If you prefer a denser view all the time, you can change your density manually in the Settings menu.”

The left panel keeps labels and chat contacts in veiw all the time, and has more customziation features. There are also some new search features:

Finally, there are new HD themes.

The new Gmail will be implemented for everyone soon, but Google is rolling out a “switch to the new look link” in the bottom-right corner over the next few days.

Now, it will be interesting to see if this redesign attracts the same kind of backlash the Google Reader design is. I am a little surprised there aren’t more Google+-related features included in this refresh.

“As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit,” says Google software engineer Alan Green. “Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.”

“We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles,” Green says. “We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.”

That data includes: subscriptions, shared items, friends, likes and starred items.

We can also expect some changes to Gmail pretty soon from the looks of it. Google has uploaded a video with a closer look at the Gmail redesign announced back in the summer. More on that here.

Do you want to see Google make changes to Google Reader? Let us know in the comments.

In the video, Google’s Jason Cornwell, who wrote a blog post about the redesign in June talks about it some more.

“To start, we’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of Gmail to make it as clean, simple, and intuitive as possible,” he says. “In addition, the new Gmail automatically adapts to fit nicely into any size window. If you prefer a specific display density, you can easily set that as well.”

“Some people use a lot of labels. Others chat a lot,” he continues. “You can now adjust the size of the label and chat areas to meet your needs. Even if you do nothing, Gmail adapts to you. The new look allows themes to really shine. We’ve updated many of them with new high resolution imagery.”

“Conversations in Gmail have been redesigned to improve usability and to feel more like a real conversation,” Cornwell says. “We’ve also added profile pictures, so that you can see who said what. Searching is at the heart of Gmail. The new search box makes it easy to customize your search to find exactly what you’re looking for. You can also create a filter right from the search box.”

The design feels a lot more Google+y – particularly with the profile pics and whatnot. It will be interesting to see how people like it once it has rolled out.