MacRumors

Facebook has released Facebook Messenger, an iPhone app focused on chat and messaging. The dedicated app allows users to send messages directly to friends whether they are on phones or using the Facebook website.

Messenger is a separate app, so it only takes one click to get to your messages or send a new one. Messages are delivered through notifications and texts, so your friends are more likely to get them right away.

You can use Messenger to reach all of your friends -- whether they're on Facebook or in your phone contacts. All you have to do is type the person's name.

The app is integrated with the Facebook messaging and chat service and all conversations are archived as part of ongoing conversations on Facebook. The app allows users to share their location and attach photos to conversations. Users aren't restricted to chatting with one friend either, group conversations are easily created as well.

Facebook Messenger is a direct challenge to other messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger and Apple's forthcoming iMessage. Like those products, Facebook Messenger uses data, not text messages to communicate, which means the service isn't restricted by per-message charges or separate mobile phone charges.

Facebook Messenger is a universal app available for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, free from the App Store.

Apple, Inc. was, several times today, the most valuable public company in the world as measured by market capitalization. Apple's market cap briefly passed ExxonMobil today, just after 1PM, reaching $341.55 billion in valuation. ExxonMobil was valued at $341.42 billion. Both stocks fluctuated throughout the day, but ExxonMobil closed the day at a higher valuation.

Apple didn't pass ExxonMobil by rocketing up in price, however. It merely hasn't fallen as far during the current market downturn. Both AAPL and XOM are significantly off their highs as the overall markets have dropped over the past couple weeks.

Today, Apple is having a strong day, up more than 4%, while Exxon is near flat.

At the time, Apple's stock was trading at $368.40, off 8% from its all-time high of $404 - but ExxonMobil had fallen farther, down 20% to $70.21 from just over $88.

Update: While Apple dropped back a bit after its initial move past ExxonMobil and quickly relinquished the lead, ExxonMobil has pulled back more than Apple has over the past few hours, and Apple now holds a market cap lead of $4-5 billion.

Update x2: At 4PM Eastern, the end of the trading day, ExxonMobil closed at $71.64 with a market cap of $348.32 billion. Apple closed at $374.01, valued at $346.74 billion, some $1.6 billion behind XOM.

FOSS Patents reports on news out of Germany that Apple has been granted a preliminary injunction barring Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 anywhere in the European Union with the exception of the Netherlands.

Apple alleged that the Galaxy Tab imitates the iPad and infringes on various intellectual property rights owned by Apple. Apple asked the Landgericht (district court) of Düsseldorf, Germany, to order an injunction under which Samsung is threatened with fines of up to EUR 250,000 (US$ 350,000) for each violation or imprisonment of Samsung's management in the event of continued infringement. Those are standard sanctions under German tort law for contempt of a preliminary injunction.

Last week, Samsung agreed to delay the launch of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia in response to Apple's request for a preliminary injunction in that country. Samsung argues that Apple's case in Australia addresses the U.S. version of its tablet device and that it plans to release a version specific for the Australian market, but the company has agreed to provide Apple with samples of the Australian version and has pushed back the device's debut there as the dispute continues to play out.

Apple today quietly rolled out several enhancements to its reuse and recycling programs designed to help consumers dispose of their outdated computers and mobile devices in an environmentally friendly manner. The changes include the addition of old iPhone and iPad devices as accepted items for gift card trade-ins and free recycling for all computers and displays, regardless of manufacturer.

- iPhone and iPad now accepted for Apple Gift Card trade-ins. Apple has for some time partnered with PowerON to offer users the ability to trade in an old desktop or notebook computer (Mac or PC) and receive an Apple Gift Card good for the "fair market value" of the computer. The gift card can then be used in any Apple retail store or the online store. Apple has now expanded the trade-in program to allow users to send in their used iPhone and iPad devices for gift cards.

Turn that iPhone, iPad, or computer — Mac or PC — you’re not using anymore into something brand new. Send it to us and we’ll determine if it qualifies for reuse. If it does, that means your device has monetary value that we’ll apply to an Apple Gift Card, which you can use for purchases at any Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. If your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC doesn’t qualify for reuse, we’ll recycle it responsibly at no cost to you.

- Free recycling of all computers and displays. Apple also has an existing partnership with WeRecycle to help recycle computers that no longer possess trade-in value. Apple had previously offered free recycling of all old Macs as well as PC systems for customers purchasing Macs, old non-Apple-branded computers and displays recycled without the purchase of a Mac were processed through WeRecycle for a $30 fee to cover shipping. But Apple has now expanded its relationship with WeRecycle to support free recycling of all brands of computers and displays, regardless of whether the user is purchasing a new Mac.

If all you want is to dispose of your unwanted equipment — regardless of brand — we can help you do that. Apple contracts with WeRecycle! to responsibly recycle computers and displays from any manufacturer. Just call 877-712-2405 to receive a free prepaid shipping label. Then pack up your equipment using your own box and send it off.

Apple also continues to offer its iPod and mobile phone recycling program. That program offers users 10% off of the purchase of a new iPod when they trade in an old iPod at an Apple retail store. Users can also recycle their old iPods or mobile phones (from any manufacturer) free of charge by mail.

Apple's recycling and trade-in services are of course not the only options for users seeking to get rid of outdated equipment, as there are many other vendors offering cash for trade-ins and a number of states and municipalities offer recycling programs for electronics. But Apple is clearly taking an interest in providing such services on a broader basis to help simplify the process for its customers.

A couple of weeks ago, we noted that Apple was apparently set to open over 30 new retail stores over the following two months, pushing the company's total to over 360 by the end of September. While Apple has opened a couple of stores since that time, including a new Glendale, California store just 500 feet from an existing location, things now appear to be getting into full swing with Apple apparently set to open at least five new stores this Saturday.

The total includes two U.S. stores and three international locations covering Australia, Canada, and Italy, and represents the largest batch of store openings since Apple opened seven stores on September 25th of last year.

- Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall (Anchorage, Alaska): The new store will be Apple's first location in Alaska.

- Fashion Place (Murray, Utah): Apple's second store in Utah, the new store covers the southern suburban stretch of Salt Lake City suburbs to complement the company's existing store at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City.

- Southland (Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia): The new store is Apple's third location in the Melbourne area and its twelfth overall for Australia.

- Conestoga: (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada): Apple's 20th retail store in Canada, the new location is also notable for its placement in the hometown of smartphone competitor Research in Motion.

- I Gigli: (Florence, Italy): The new store is Apple's sixth location in Italy and first in the Florence area, filling a gap between the company's store in Rome and a series of stores in northern Italy across the Turin, Milan, and Bergamo.

The new openings come as Apple continues to push forward with construction on a number of other stores, as well as renovations and expansions of some of its existing stores. The company is also notably undertaking an upgrade of the plaza and glass cube at its flagship Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Earlier today, we reported that Apple has released details on the cube's revamp, which will see the original design of 90 panes of glass replaced with a new version using only 15 panes of seamless glass.

Back in June, Apple began work on a $6.6 million upgrade of the plaza and glass cube at its iconic flagship retail store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Barriers surrounding the plaza and the glass cube itself quickly went up, with customers continuing to access the store through a covered passageway leading to the main entrance. At the time the work began, planning documents revealed that Apple would be removing the glass cube and working on drainage, pavers, and bollards on the plaza, but it was unclear just what changes Apple would be making to the cube itself.

Apple has now revealed its plans for the cube with a new informational sign posted on the barrier surrounding the plaza, showing that the company is completely replacing the cube's glass panels with new, larger panels that will also be "seamless" for a cleaner appearance.

We're simplifying the Fifth Avenue cube. By using larger, seamless pieces of glass, we're using just 15 panes instead of 90.

According to the diagram of the new cube, Apple will be using three glass panes per side of the cube (plus the top), with each side pane stretching the entire height of the cube.

Apple last year filed for a trademark on the original design of the Fifth Avenue store's cube, seeking to protect what was recently ranked as one of the most-photographed sites in Manhattan based on a study of geotagged photos posted to Flickr and Picasa.

Thanks, Vincent!

The new Airport Extreme and Time Capsule released by Apple in June didn't have an advertised upgrade, outside of a capacity bump on the Time Capsule. However, Brian Klug at AnandTech has written an extraordinarily detailed review of the new devices and found they are notably improved from the prior generation.

Klug notes that the new devices are virtually indistinguishable from their older counterparts, but in detailed testing, they found increased throughput and range.

At the end of the day, the new Airport Extreme dramatically improves throughput in the best case and in a few regions where signal was previously unusable. In the worst case (location 4), performance improves from being essentially unusable to totally fine, and in the case of the 2010MBP goes from not being able to connect at all to pushing 23 Mbps.

[...]

The main improvements with AFS (real-world file transfer) happen out at the extremes where previously signal was unusable on 2.4GHz, and likewise on 5GHz. That really tells the story of the (sometimes dramatic) difference that the higher power WLAN solution in the 5th generation makes over the 4th generation.

The highest speeds are attained with the 2011 generation MacBook Pro which includes an upgraded "three spatial stream compliant WLAN stack", which basically is next-generation wireless software and hardware.

The new Airport Extreme includes a slightly different chipset as well, moving from one sourced from Marvell to one from Broadcom:

The result of the move from Marvell to Broadcom is twofold. First, performance and range is definitely better thanks to more transmit power and the improved sensitivity afforded by newer generation chipsets. Second, the combination of lots of Broadcom in Apple’s hardware lineup (from the iPhone, iPad, and MacBooks, to iMac and Mac Mini) with Broadcom in the access point likely allows for the use of frame bursting or some other packet aggregation technique that speeds things up in some scenarios. It’s another example of how having that complete hardware control can in fact result in some benefit—in this case, faster WiFi.

Klug finishes the review by noting the Airport Extreme is reasonably priced compared to the competition and he prefers it due to it "actually work[ing] without locking up, becoming unstable periodically, dropping the session from overheating when being pushed to 100% for hours, or requiring a daily reboot."

Metropolitan Police have multiple police vans parked in Oxford Circus, including three parked directly in front of the Apple Store flagship on Regent Street. The picture above was posted to Twitter by @Joe, a venture capitalist with m8 Capital in London.

Update: Reports on Twitter that the Bullring shopping center in Birmingham has been breached. There is an Apple Store in the Bullring complex, but there are no confirmed reports that the store has been broken into. The Bullring closed early on Monday evening due to the situation in Birmingham.

Update: The Bullring shopping center closed early again on Tuesday, shutting stores at 5PM. There are no indications of vandalism to the Apple Store in the complex, though there were significant disturbances in the area around Bullring last night.

Update: The Apple Store Liverpool ONE was emptied of all product Tuesday evening ahead of possible unrest in Liverpool.

Londoners are facing rioting and looting for the third night in a row. The BBC has extensive coverage of the events.

Any UK readers with pictures, video, or other information, please get in touch via Twitter, email, or the comments on this post.

Way back in January 2010, development firm Illusion Labs demoed a Mac version of its popular iPhone game Touchgrind, showing off how the sophisticated multi-touch trackpad included on Apple's notebook computers could be used in a novel way for controlling the skateboarding gameplay.

As noted by our sister site Touch Arcade, Illusion Labs has finally followed through and released Touchgrind for OS X [Mac App Store].

Currently available for free from the Mac App Store, Touchgrind can obviously also take advantage of Apple's Magic Trackpad that was released last year, several months after the Touchgrind demo was first created.

It may have taken a while, but Touchgrind has indeed launched in the Mac App Store, and it’s currently completely free. The game controls well with the multi-touch trackpad, though it definitely feels different than the iOS touch screen and does take some getting used to. The view is nice and zoomed out, similar to the iPad version Touchgrind HD [$7.99], which makes it a whole lot easier to tell where you are going while cruising around the skatepark.

Illusion Labs has been aggressive in demoing ideas for moving its iOS games to other devices and platforms, having also shown off Touchgrind and another title, Sway, on a large multi-touch table several years ago.

Apple today released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a utility that lets users create a Lion recovery partition on an external drive or USB key. Lion Recovery lets users "repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc."

To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive, launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant can be downloaded from Apple's support website.

Apple's knowledge base article about the utility notes that the partition it creates has all the same capabilities as the Lion Recovery that is installed during a Lion installation. However, this partition could be used in the event a user can't start their computer from the Recovery partition or if the hard drive is replaced.

[Users can] reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.

The document has two final notes:

- If the computer shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with the system that created it.

- If the system was upgraded from Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive can be used with other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

We had previously reported that in order to do a clean install of Lion, Snow Leopard would need to be installed first. With this recovery partition creator, there is now an official path to perform a clean install without Snow Leopard. Also, this would seem to make the unofficial Lion boot disk creator unnecessary.

Skype today announced the release of Skype 5.3 for Mac OS X , a significant update bringing full support for OS X Lion, as well as new support for HD video calling.

Skype 5.3 for Mac OS X is built to work with Apple's newest desktop operating system, Lion, in addition to being compatible with past versions of OS X going all the way back to Leopard.

With Skype 5.3 for Mac OS X, you'll also be able to send and receive HD quality video when talking to your friends and family. You'll need to use the Mac's built-in webcam or choose from a variety of webcams from our Skype Shop, such as the Logitech C910, to make video calls in crystal clear HD quality. To receive clear HD video calls on your Mac, we recommend an upload/download speed of 1.5Mbps.

Just last month, Skype 5.2 for Mac added group screen sharing for customers with premium subscriptions, as well as a revamped call control bar with support for video calls. Skype has also been hard at work on its offerings for Apple's mobile platform, finally releasing Skype for iPad one week ago.

Patently Apple reports that Apple has been hit with a new patent lawsuit targeting "fast booting" used in OS X, a method of utilizing boot configuration information from earlier booting processes to speed the system startup process.

The lawsuit specifically states that Apple's OS X violates "at least Claim 1" of the OSS patent. The claim in question reads as follows:

"A method for fast booting a computer system, comprising the steps of: A. performing a power on self test (POST) of basic input output system (BIOS) when the system is powered on or reset is requested; B. checking whether a boot configuration information including a system booting state which was created while executing a previous normal booting process exists or not; C. storing the boot configuration information from execution of the POST operation before loading a graphic interface (GUI) program, based on the checking result; and D. loading the graphic user interface (GUI) program."

What is most interesting about the patent and associated lawsuit is that the patent application was initially filed back in 1999 and assigned to LG Electronics. LG is of course a competitor to Apple in the smartphone market, but also serves as a supplier to Apple, primarily through its LG Display arm.

It is unclear, however, whether LG still has any stake in the patent in question, as the assignment on the patent has changed hands multiple times dating back to 2004. LG initially passed the patent off to a company known as Microconnect LLC, but the patent was subsequently passed along to firms by the names of Protimus Technologies LLC and ANPA Inc while also being reissued once along the way. The patent lawsuit has been brought by a Florida-based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC, which appears to be a previously-unknown entity that may have been created specifically for the purposes of the lawsuit.

Apple is of course no stranger to patent and other types of lawsuits, not only engaging in high-profile disputes with major competitors but also both taking on and being targeted by smaller firms. And while this latest lawsuit may simply be a case of a small patent holding firm seeking to capitalize on its holdings, the patent's historical ties to LG naturally lead to questions about whether yet another of Apple's major competitors is playing a role in the ever-increasing legal entanglements for Apple.