Today Apple announced details about the upcoming release of iPhone OS 4.0. We’ve heard a lot of rumors about just what it will include. Now it's coming and here are all the things you need to know about iPhone OS 4.0 (organized via techcocktail)

Multitasking - Finally! the new iPhone OS 4.0 will the ability for 7 multitasking services (APIs) on the iPhone. Some of these include:

• Background audio
• VoIP
• Background location
• Push notifications
• Local notifications
• Task completion

Folders - Users will be able to add folders to your home screen. Just drag two apps together and an folder is created with intelligent naming. Users will also be able to change their wallpaper background with ease.

Enhanced Email - The new mail offering will create a unified inbox pulling together all your account into one account. You can also now have multiple exchange accounts. Messages will be organized by thread which sounds very similar to Gmail.

iBooks - Just like the iPad the new iPhone OS will offer iBook with a bookstore where if you buy once you can read the book anywhere. Sync pages and bookmarks between devices. Users also get a free copy of Winnie the Pooh.

Enterprise features - The new OS will offer improved data protection, including data protection within third party apps as well as mobile device management which means that up until now companies would have to plug into iTunes to distribute apps but with the new OS they will be able to do it wireleslly from their own servers.

Game Center - Allows games players to challenge each other interactively and offers a leaderboard to track game play.

iAd - Apple announces the launch of a mobile advertising platform! The platform could serve 1 Billion ad impressions a day. Apple wants to offer amazing advertising experiences leveraging HTML 5. Apple will host and sell the ads and give 60% of the revenue to developers. This could be huge for Apple Developers of free applications. Ads will have access to many of the same Apple APIs as apps (i.e. like location and some level of accelerometer access, etc).

These “tentpoles” as Jobs called them, are going to be released to developers today and to iPhone users later this summer. and they will run completely on iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd generation models, won’t run completely on 3G and iPod Touch 2nd gen models. More than 100 user features are being added and developers will have access to more than 1500 new APIs. As for the iPad, iPhone 4.0 OS is coming to the iPad this Fall.

It is with great sadness and heavy hearts that we tell you of the passing today of Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan. Jimmy was not only one of the world's best drummers, but more importantly he was our best friend and brother. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Jimmy's family and we hope that you will respect their privacy during this difficult time.

Jimmy you are forever in our hearts.
We love you.

M Shadows, Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance and Johnny Christ

Big sadness, Avenged Sevenfold is my fave band. If you know my email address you'll see. It's very very sad when I heard TheRev died. In my book, Jimmy you are were the greatest drummer. a7x will never be the same without you... we'll miss you, Rest In Peace.

Today, Google launched real-time search integrated into search results pages. It updates as stuff is happening around the web, live tweets, news articles and blog posts, it works on mobile,too (at least iPhone and Android for now). That’s not all, they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time.

The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English. You can try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.

Google says the features aren’t available to everyone yet. But, all users can see it now via a "Hot Topics", the most popular 10 keywords are available at Google Trends and they trigger a real-time search OneBox.

Well, it won’t yet show up by default when you search. However, this trick will help you trigger it easily: If you add &esrch=RTSearch to your the URL after you've done a google search, you get the feature.

Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=copenhagen&hl=en&sa=G&esrch=RTSearch&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=rltm:1

Pretty cool, huh?

This summer, those of us living in China have the spectacular chance to see a total eclipse of the sun, a truly rare opportunity because the moon completely covers the sun, leaving a colorful ring around it called a Corona (meaning crown). Thousands of people from the rest of Asia and all over the world will be coming to China to witness the phenomenon. If you have never seen a total solar eclipse, then this is your chance to see this China solar eclipse 2009 from several major cities. This 22nd July will be the only solar eclipse of this kind this year and remarkably, instead of the usual 200 Km spectrum of visible areas, there will be 254Km, providing a magnificent area from which to view the eclipse from Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou,Wuhan, Nanjing, Chongqing, Chengdu, Suining and Yichang. You have plenty of options to choose from if you want to go and see it yourself. The eclipse will also be visible for a full 6 minutes and 39 seconds, which is the longest visibility period of the 21st century.

This coming 22nd July, (If the weather's good) I'll put some real pics and vids of the eclipse into my blog, and live tweet from my twitter account : @lyanghsueh, welcome to follow!

Warnings: Never view the sun with the naked eye!

Google has announced the development of an operating system (totally separate from Android) called Chrome OS, designed to be a fast, lightweight, kinda web-based system for mobile computing that we should see showing up netbooks in the second half of 2010.

Details from Google:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple -- Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android.

Google plans to release the open source code for Chrome OS later this year ahead of the launch next year. Don’t be surprised if this code drops around the same time as Windows 7. Google vs. Microsoft, it's on. Let us wait&see. ;)

Read more details from Google