The loaner program would allow employees to take a device from a pool of iPads. During the week, employees can do what they like with the device and don’t have to take it back to the store until their time is up, according to the report.

There’s no word on whether the pilot program is a first step before rolling this out across Apple’s retail chain, but that’s a logical assumption, if the pilot program is successful. A lending program for the iPad would help ensure all employees have hands-on familiarity with the iPad and with iOS 5 when it launches, which should be sometime next month.

Apple hasn’t done any lending to retail employees before, but it did actually give away the original iPhone in 2007 to store workers. And retail employees would definitely benefit from more actual experience with the iPad and Apple’s software. It’s a little unfair considering my job, but I often test the knowledge of Apple’s sales staff when I’m visiting a store, and am amazed at how often they either don’t know or are mistaken about a specific device’s capabilities.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015

One of the best reasons to get a new MacBook Pro, aside from the dazzling new screen on the 13-inch, and in spite of the SATA capping that’s apparently in place, is the extended battery life courtesy of the new built-in lithium polymer batteries. And by all accounts, even if you won’t necessarily reach Apple’s estimates, you will get more usage out of your notebook without having to connect to a power source. Or you’ll get more usage as long as you’re not running in Windows under Boot Camp, that is.

AnandTech’s Anand Shimpi has been running a MacBook Pro 15-inch through its paces over at his site, and while he was very impressed with the machine’s new battery overall, he noticed a considerable disparity between apparent power consumption under OS X, and under Vista. Nor was the difference marginal. Running OS X while only web browsing, Shimpi was able to coax a little over eight hours out of the notebook under OS X, and only six using Vista. That’s a two hour, or 25 percent difference.

Windows 7, which is supposed to make up for a lot of the mistakes Microsoft made with Vista, fared no better. The RC 1 version of the upcoming OS lasted only 5.48 hours using the same test conditions. Some of that can be ascribed to there not being final, optimized drivers for Windows 7 yet, but I doubt that accounts for the more than two-hour deficit it has compared with OS X running on the same hardware.

Windows supporters will no doubt chime in with claims that the Apple hardware is to blame, but Shimpi found some reason to believe that may not be the case. He spoke to a number of PC OEM manufacturers to see if they’d found a difference in battery life between OS X and Vista, and though none would officially go on record, some at least admitted to seeing a similar difference to the one Shimpi had found.

Since Apple doesn’t officially support any third-party hardware, it’ll be hard or even impossible to prove that OS X is, in fact, a more battery-efficient operating system, completely independent of any hardware considerations. Still, that’s one less reason to ever commit sacrilege by dual-booting your Apple notebook, which is bad news for Windows sales, no matter what the cause.

All you hackintosh experts out there, feel free to chime in with your own battery life tales, since your experience running OS X on non-standard hardware might be the closest thing we can get to a fair standard for comparison.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Windows 7 Forecast: Mostly Sunny, With a Chance of Showers
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

The app, which expires in seven days, appears to only be available through the U.S. iTunes store, which doesn’t seem to have stopped Apple from sending out emails to all developers, regardless of their country of residence. The email specifies that devs should choose U.S. English as the app’s default language at first run, which suggests that they are fully aware that people already have or are able to create U.S. store accounts without actually being residents.

A forum thread on MacRumors details some developers’ progress so far with the test app, which is varied. Some, like Ben Dodson, have successfully received push notifications from the app (check out a lengthy post on his blog for details and screenshots). Others have yet to receive any notifications at all, myself included. A cursory survey of those who’ve also been unable to receive any push updates from AP finds that most, if not all, are located outside of the U.S., but I don’t have nearly enough information to cite that as the definite cause.

Chime in and let us know your experience if you’re also helping Apple test the app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories

For anyone who’s ever designed a web site on a Mac, you’ll know that one of the biggest headaches is testing your design on Windows browsers. Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer have a nasty habit of displaying the same web site in very different ways, and constantly swapping between XP, Vista and OS X can be a time-consuming issue.

Alkaline is a new application, launched yesterday, that goes some way toward alleviating this problem. It’s powered by Litmus, an online tool that can show you how your web site appears in a vast array of different browsers and operating systems. Alkaline is their first move to the desktop environment, and certainly stands to save web designers using OS X a huge amount of time.

Setting up Alkaline

Alkaline is a free download, and only takes a few seconds to get up and running. However, to actually use the app, you’ll need to create an account with Litmus. You can initiate this process right from within Alkaline itself, and when completed you’ll be presented with a useful graphic which explains how to enter your information into the application:

Litmus Login Information

Once logged in, you’re able to start running a few tests.

Creating and Managing Tests

Initiating a new test is very simple — just enter the URL of the site you’d like to check, and select the browsers in which you’re interested. Testing in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 is completely free of charge, though you’ll need to subscribe to access all 23 browser versions available.

After initiating a test, you’ll need to wait a while before the screenshot images are generated and returned. This took around one minute in my testing — a more than acceptable delay for a free account. You’ll then be presented with a resizable screenshot of the site in question, and the option of viewing the result with or without browser chrome is available. A test information window is also displayed:

Litmus Test Information

This outlines a variety of information about your test, including the site URL and title, creation time and browser/platform information.

Tests are concurrently integrated with the online version of Litmus, so you can log in and access your results from anywhere. This is done by accessing your personal URL (e.g. http://yourname.litmusapp.com) and logging in.

Version Support

When ironing out problems and bugs with display in a particular browser, you’ll likely be running several tests, one after the other, until the issue is solved. Alkaline supports the storage of different test versions so that you’re able to flick back through previous screenshots and check where improvements have been made:

Version Storage

This is really useful for seeing which code/design changes effected which browsers in different ways over time — as you fix one problem, another often occurs. These different version images are also available through the Litmus web app.

Plugin Support

If you’re someone who uses an integrated environment such as Coda for design and development, you’ll be pleased to know that Alkaline is offered as a Coda plugin. A different version is also available for TextMate. Alkaline is also pushing developers to create a plugin for their own application, and has provided instructions on how simple the process is.

I expect this will be a great way to generate interest from other developers, and it would be incredibly useful to have support built-in to other apps such as Espresso and BBEdit.

Pricing & Conclusion

After running a few different web sites through Alkaline, I’m really impressed. It goes a long way towards negating the need for virtual machines, Windows licenses, or any messing around with keeping different copies of Windows up to date. I’ll definitely be keeping the app installed, and I do think it’ll come in very handy for future projects. While I expect I’ll still need to boot up a virtual machine from time to time, gaining a general overview of how a site looks in Alkaline will be invaluable.

The obvious limitation is that you don’t actually get to use your site, and there is only so much you can gain from viewing a range of screenshots. To really generate an idea for how your site works in a different browsers, you do need to actually use the application itself. Animation, user interaction and rollover effects can often behave in a way you wouldn’t expect — issues that wouldn’t be picked up via a static image.

The free version of Alkaline allows testing in Firefox 2.0 and IE7. To upgrade to access all 23 browsers you have two options. A ‘day pass’ is available for $24, giving you access to all web browser (and also email account testing) for a 24-hour period. Alternatively, you can pay a monthly subscription of $49 per month for unlimited testing. The service doesn’t come cheap, but can offer real value and save a decent amount of time if you’re an OS X web developer.

For more information, check out the detailed screencast or head over to the Alkaline web site.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Maybe it’s because the iMac is so tricky to find that the story got picked up so quickly over the weekend, and by so many different outlets, but readers were quick to point out that the “news” of a possible $899 iMac was in fact not news at all, since the model has been available at that price point since 2006. In fact, rather than being the deal of the century, the iMac priced at $899 is actually probably one of the least appealing value propositions available from Apple, unless you want an old white plastic model to keep sealed in a box in the hopes that it will become a priceless collector’s item in 20 years time.

This story was picked up by everybody, including Gizmodo, MacRumors and Engadget (although Giz and Engadget have taken it off of their main site; Giz link leads to their Australian site), among many others, as such serving as yet another example of how susceptible Apple news reporting is to manipulation, even if the original “leak” was not intentional. At least MacRumors didn’t immediately try to backpedal to avoid embarrassment. Mistakes in print are not so easy to undo. Tech publications: Admit it when you screw up, instead of trying to go back in time and erase any evidence of a less-than-perfect track record.

This example also shows pretty clearly what we can do to reduce our susceptibility to manipulation. The answer? Take five seconds to fact-check before you hit the publish button. Ours is admittedly a fast-paced news cycle, but artificially and unnecessarily so. In fact, nothing we report has dire consequences, if you really think about it, so hanging on to a story in the interest of accuracy will better serve readers than publishing mistaken information at a break-neck pace.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

MacDeveloper, a recently founded Mac testing community, wants to bring developers together with motivated, responsible beta testers. They do so through their website which allows individual testers to register and become part of a pool, which is made available to developers. Sign up is free for individual testers, but developers have to pay a $16.75 to set up what MacDeveloper calls a “Project Channel,” basically a home page and server space to house your development project.

The site is built around a rewards model for beta testers, and has a points system in place whereby you can earn free software or discounts based on your testing contribution. Testers also obviously get early looks at upcoming software, which is always a big incentive for Mac users involved in the development community.

Testers can also earn “Star Ratings” by becoming a “Quality Tester” through positive developer feedback, which grants even more benefits. If they wish, developers can limit their search to Quality Testers, in order to help ensure that those working on their product are interested and engaged.

As of this writing, MacDeveloper currently has a beta pool of 442 testers, though only 10 project channels are currently active. 88 developers have signed up. If you have a project you’d like tested, it might be a good idea to get in now, since there seems to be an imbalance on the side of available testers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks