Taiwan news decided to have a little -- fun? -- with Apple and iPhone 4 by casting Steve Jobs as Darth Vader, laughing as Foxconn workers jump off buildings, and light-sabering off the fingers of customers who complain about reception problems.

It's sensationalistic, callus about the suicides, and convenient in casting blame entirely on Apple for the problems of Taiwanese and Chinese owned businesses, and some might find the imagery disturbing. Consider yourself warned before you hit the play button. But, hey, Star Wars.

[Thanks Michael for the tip and the subtitles!]

iPhone OS 4 beta 2, released yesterday, has introduced a new, circling, side-switching animation for multitasking fast app switching. The new animation occurs when you switch between two apps either via the new, double-click-Home to trigger to launch the multitasking UI, or when one app calls another app (i.e. when you're in Contacts and you tap to send a contact an SMS, as noted by @ranger_bill, when clicking on a link in Mail to open Safari, etc.).

Launching or leaving an app retains the same, zoom-based effect as always (though the wallpaper in iPhone OS 4 zooms slightly as well, like on the iPad -- gotta love those little details Apple puts in).

Check out our complete iPhone OS 4 preview and feature walkthrough for more and hit up the video after the break!

YouTube link

Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what's most interesting is that it's the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.

Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.

WebKit is Apple's open source evolution of the old Linux Konquerer KHTML browser, and it forms the foundation of Safari on both the desktop and the iPhone (and Google Android, Palm Pre, Nokia tablets, etc.). Their Surfin' Safari blog has just announced CSS animation support, but the better news (via MacRumors), is that iPhone (and iPod touch) Safari already supports both CSS animation and 3D.

Want to check it out? Just hit up this awesome animated falling leaf demo on your iPhone!

Overly provocative headline not withstanding, and while this doesn't address the ubiquity of Flash video, it should go a long way towards enabling more scalable and open interactivity on the web. (Flash sites don't always scale well to small screens, after all).

Okay, I'm a web geek, I admit it, but is anyone else excited? Or do we just fear that it will all-too-quickly be perverted into iPhone optimized punch-the-monkey banner ads?