If going to the shopping malls is not your favorite task during this holiday season, maybe Google made things a bit easier with Google Catalogs. A newly designed application for the iPad, Google offers their online catalog of hundreds of retailers molded together into one app. According to Google, the app will give consumers an easier way of experiencing online shopping from their comfortable couches, and it will feature more than 125 different retailers

Google has released an update to their Google Search app for all iOS devices. The iPhone gets the usual bug fixes and a full-screen mode, while the iPad gets a whole new makeover with an overhauled iPad UI. Google also worked in shortcuts icons for: Voice Search and Google Goggles, while a new side-by-side pane view allows the user to simultaneously search results and web pages.

Do you remember the Oregon Trail? Of course you do. It’s been a long time, but you can finally play the sequel to that wonderful game. Now that you’ve made it alive, you can start building your village and getting back to your lives. Also this week, Google rerereleased Gmail for iOS. Is the third time really a charm? And, of course, I found a whole bunch of limited time freebies.

Google released their free Gmail app two weeks ago, but it was quickly pulled due to bugs within the software. However, Google today brought it back to the app store for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Now, Google is offering up version 1.0.2 that, according to the company, brings some new enhancements. People who previously installed the buggy version 1.0.1 are instructed to uninstall before upgrading to the new application. The new version of the Gmail app requires a device running iOS 4.0 or above.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview with Charlie Rose that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs helped him focus on building his company and with choosing the right management team. Zuckerberg talked about his time with Steve Jobs: “I had a lot of questions for him…how to build a team around you that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are…”

At one time, it was an amazing feat for Macs and PCs to play with each other for multiplayer games. Now, Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles will bring together players with mobile devices—both Android and iOS—with those on Macs and PCs for the first 3D MMO in gaming history. In Star Legends, human privateers travel to the UCS Blackstar, a massive colony ship, to answer the call of fame and fortune.

Music Beta by Google allows users to store 20,000 songs on the cloud, which can be made available anywhere online, it operates similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player, acting as a digital locker for MP3s rather than a fully integrated music sales and streaming service. It is still in a fairly limited invitation-only beta. The service is still initially free, but was available only to Android users. Now, Google has launched a new iOS web app that allows Apple iOS devices access to its Music Beta service.

Google’s blog publishing service known as Blogger has become a widely-known blogging platform, especially after the company acquired it in 2003, four years after its launch in 1999. Today, Google released its Blogger for iPhone app—boasting the ability to publish blog posts or save them as drafts directly on an iDevice—as a free download on the App Store.

More evidence that desktop Linux is spinning its wheels—alas, stuck at less than one percent OS market share for the past several months according to Hitslink metrics—is to be found in Microsoft’s latest Annual Report to the United States Securities And Exchange Commission, in which Linux is no longer cited as a competitor to the Windows operating system.

The first version of Swiffy, which can convert Flash SWF files to HTML5, is now available on Google Labs. You upload the SWF file and Swiffy does all of the work. All you have to do is take the resulting HTML code and include it on your website using an iframe tag. Swiffy works by converting the SWF file into a JSON file which your browser then loads with JavaScript and renders using HTML, SVG, and CSS.