After obtaining my iPod Touch, I was immediately met with a dilemma. I wanted apps, but I didn’t know which ones to get. Oh, that’s easy, just go to the Apps Store and browse around. Browse 50,000 apps? Right. Good idea.

Not wanting to take two years to select the handful of apps I would probably use, I went a different route. I e-mailed my tech-savvy friend, also an iPod Touch user, asking for his recommendations. An iTunes screen shot and a few minutes later, I had his recommendations.

There is an easier way. AppsFire, launched just today, offers iPod Touch and iPhone users an easy way to share and recommend apps. According to the introductory video, “AppsFire is a new iPhone service that will allow you to share your favorite iPhone apps with your friends.” The way it works is simple.

First, you must download AppsFire onto your computer. Right now, the program is only available for Mac users. After installing the program, AppsFire will immediately take inventory of all the apps that you have installed on your device.

From there, you go to your own personal AppsFire page—the page where you can both see your applications (on a virtual iPhone), chose the applications that you want to tell your friends about (or select all of your apps), and notify them.

To notify friends, there are four share buttons. The buttons are “social networks,” “e-mail,” “widget,” and “links.” The process is simple. E-mailing is a mere matter of titling your selection, inserting your friend’s e-mail address, and sending the e-mail—right from the AppsFire page. Social network shares are just as easy. Virtually all it takes is one click—and instantly a link to your favorite iPhone apps is available for all your friends and followers to check out on Twitter, Facebook, or Delicious. If a simple link to e-mail or share is what you prefer, that is also possible within mere clicks.

When you send the AppsFire notification to your friends, they will see the same image of an iPhone, loaded with all of your recommended apps. Remember, that you can control which apps your friends see. Thus, any proprietary apps that you own and would like to keep confidential, need not be included in your initial selection. Friends browsing your apps can click on any of the apps to bring up the download page in iTunes, and download it right to their own device. (No, they don’t get them for free, just because you “shared” them.)

The process and idea behind AppsFire is much like social networking customized for your iPhone. This will prove to be a simple, fast, and convenient way to get the apps you need, as long as your friends jump on board, too.

Apple has announced that Safari 4 has been downloaded 11 million times since its release on Monday. More than half of those downloads were from Windows users.

CUPERTINO, California—June 12, 2009—Apple® today announced that more than 11 million copies of Safari® 4 have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads of Safari for Windows. Safari 4 is the world’s fastest, most innovative browser and is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.*

“Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow.”

Starting with the development of the open source WebKit browser engine, Apple has been leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and support for advanced CSS Effects, enabling an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari 4 includes Top Sites, for an incredible visual preview of frequently visited and favorite pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; and Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks. Other innovative features include Smart Address Fields for automatically completing web addresses from an easy to read list of suggestions; Search Fields, to fine tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches; and Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text.

In Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent.** Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page. Safari running on Snow Leopard also delivers HTTP streaming, making it easy to deliver high-quality audio and video in industry standard formats from any web server without the need for browser plug-ins.

If you purchased a 13″ Unibody MacBook in the past few days, then you are the proud owner of a brand spanking, updated screen. If you own one of the older models, you’re probably cursing and asking yourself why you didn’t wait.  Seth Weintraub, over at ComputerWorld was the first to report on this new model. After taking a look at pictures,  and reading various responses to the news, I’m not too sure there’s that big of a difference.

According to Weintraub’s research, the new Unibody Macbooks have the exact same screen that the MacBook Air has. The screen provides better quality colors, black blacks, and better washout reduction. If you’re interested to see if you have one of the new screens, Weintraub has a walkthrough to check your screen’s model number.

According to AppleInsider, Apple is planning to slash prices on some Macintosh computers, either as a reaction against the current recession or to repudiate Microsoft’s most recent round of Windows commercials.

AppleInsider’s sources state that this move comes in response to netbooks’ rising popularity, and is intended as a stopgap solution until the company can release its media tablet device a device that’s taking longer to develop than anticipated.

The company is planning to reduce prices on both its iMac and MacBook lines. The MacBook is currently the most popular Macintosh computer Apple sells, with the iMac is the most popular desktop model. Both computers are already strong sellers; lower prices will only encourage consumers to keep buying.

Apple indicated that it could reduce the price of the desktop iMac when it announcing special educational pricing earlier this month. According to AppleInsider, the $899 educational iMacs are so considerably cheaper than their consumer counterparts that the company could split the difference and still turn a profit.

Cheaper prices could hit as early as this spring, when Apple is expected to revamp its entire notebook line. Either way, this is an encouraging sign that Apple’s continued success will lead to cheaper consumer products and a further on down the line a the release of the upcoming tablet device.