Tomorrow, on October 14, Apple will hold a press event where the “spotlight turns to notebooks.” As usual there have been lots of speculation and rumors about what new products Apple will be announcing, but we won’t list all the rumors here since they can be found elsewhere.

However, we thought this would be a good time to remind all Apple fans of our Apple Store status widgets that checks if the Apple Store is up or not. If Apple does what they usually do, they will take down the Apple Store for a while before opening it again updated with the new products.

There are two widgets, one you can include on your website and one you can run on your OS X desktop.

Display if Apple Store is up or down on your website

Using our uptime monitoring system we are constantly checking the status of Apple Store to see if it’s open or not. If you want to display this information to your website visitors why not add our small widget?

Read more on how to use it here: Show the Apple Store status on your website

Display if Apple Store is up or down on your desktop (OS X widget)

Instead of constantly reloading Apple Store in your browser to see when it’s back up with new products you can just get this information served to your desktop. All you have to do is install our Apple Store status widget.

Download and read more about it here: Apple Store status widget for Mac OS X

We’re looking forward to seeing what new inventions Apple is planning to introduce. Oh, and do we need to mention that the widget will be on our desktops so we know when Apple Store updates? (Well, those of us who have Macs ).

UPDATE Oct 14:

We told you so!

This is what the US Apple Store looks like right now:

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

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There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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