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After years of keeping quiet, developer Irrational Games--the crew behind the original BioShock--held a mysterious event at New York City's Plaza Hotel last night to announce the company's latest endeavor, only known up until now as Project Icarus.

Ken Levine, creative director at Irrational Games, took the stage and rolled a trailer (see right) showcasing Columbia, a gorgeous city in the sky flanked by American flags, skyscrapers held up by gigantic hot-air balloons, and gruesome bionic creatures that immediately made us think of BioShock's Big Daddies.

It wasn't long before we began seeing more reminders of Rapture: billboard propaganda, superhuman powers, and utter chaos. With the trailer complete and the lights up, Levine announced that Irrational's next game would be BioShock Infinite.

BioShock Infinite takes the franchise out from the ocean floor and launches it above the clouds. The original BioShock's Rapture dealt with a mysterious utopian city that crumbles under its own obsession with power; BioShock Infinite will play on the ultrapatriotic--albeit ultimately ignorant--American ideals of the early 1900s. Columbia differs from Rapture because the public is aware of its existence. We hop into the game just as Columbia has disappeared into the heavens and out of the public eye, just as this city--once a great feat of American ingenuity and strength--is experiencing its downfall.

Levine compared Columbia to a theoretical "moon landing of 1900--an expression of American genius designed to demonstrate to the world by example the founding democratic principles of the United States...however, what started out as the Apollo Project became the Death Star. The city, which turns out to be armed to the teeth, goes off-mission, becomes embroiled in a violent international incident...and promptly disappears behind the clouds."

Is BioShock Infinite in the same universe as the original? When exactly does it take place? Who do you play as? When will the game come out? We got to sit down with Tim Gerritsen, director of product development at Irrational Games, who filled us in on some more details.… Read more

Mozilla's first public beta for Firefox 4 debuts support for future-Web tech, lays the groundwork for better security features, and launches a brand-new look that should be eerily familiar to users of Opera and Chrome.

Want to try it out for yourself? Download Firefox 4 beta 1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Flickr is unveiling a dramatic face lift on Wednesday that takes the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site into the wide-screen era. Both photo pages and the site's home page have been stretched out to accommodate users with wider screens, as well as to put more of an emphasis on what users have uploaded.

Photos now get 640 pixels of width, instead of the previous 500, which makes for a 30 percent increase in size. While seemingly a small boost when compared to the originals of photos (which can stretch to close to 10 times that size), that extra space ends up … Read more

Quieter yet more effective, the latest ZoneAlarm Firewall Free should be considered an excellent tool for replacing the otherwise adequate default Windows firewall.

It's a stronger option that includes quieter outbound protection, behavioral detection from the ZoneAlarm Internet security suite, automatic Wi-Fi security setting activation, antiphishing protection, an overhauled ZoneAlarm toolbar that will protect you even when hidden, six months free identity theft protection, and 2GB of free online storage.

It took a year, but the long-awaited stable version of Chrome for Mac and Linux is here. Google has upgraded the stable branch of the browser to version 5, which includes several HTML5-based features and broad support for syncing, and which also maintains the blazing page-render speeds that the browser is known for. Take a tour in this First Look video, and download Chrome 5 stable for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Unlike its predecessor, which didn't really offer much in the way of new features but overhauled its look, Photoshop CS5 (Windows | Mac) leaves the interface practically untouched to focus on major feature improvements.

The big changes include automatic lens correction, better high dynamic range processing, content-aware filling, "intelligent selection", and enhanced tools for 3D image creation in Photoshop Extended (Windows | Mac). More than three dozen minor tweaks were also made, small improvements--such as building a "straighten" function into the Ruler tool and pumping up Raw image noise management--that nevertheless dramatically cut down time-consuming procedures.

Take … Read more

Apple has numerous "at your fingertips" options in OS X, including icon previews, coverflow and column-view previews, as well as QuickLook and Dashboard. Of these, QuickLook is one of the most useful in allowing you get a brief bit of information about an item that does not have a preview option, or a more detailed look at the contents if the item does have a preview. If for some reason the QuickLook feature stops working there are several things you can try to get it up and running again.… Read more

The speedy Carakan JavaScript engine has finally been added to the stable version of Opera on the Mac. Combined with Opera's extensive toolbox, an interface refresh, Growl support, and Opera Link syncing--hello, Opera Mini on the iPhone--Opera should be a top contender for best Mac browser.

Take a tour of the new Opera in this First Look video, and tell me in the comments below which browser is your favorite for the Mac.

When you invoke QuickLook on a folder in OS X, you are shown the folder icon along with some information about the folder. While this is convenient, QuickLook has a hidden "X-ray" feature that lets you preview items in the folder, similar to the option in Windows where pictures are displayed in the enclosing folder's icon.… Read more