There goes productivity everywhere.
It’s “near-100% HTML5″ because it relies on Flash for audio for some reason.
(h/t Daring Fireball)
Archive for the 'tech' Category
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From ThreatPost:
That free service comes at a price, Veracode found. Researchers who took apart the application and studied its code found libraries for five different ad networks embedded in the Pandora application. Those libraries collected and trasmitted a variety of different data from the Android phone and its owner. The data included both the owner’s GPS location and tidbits the owners gender, birthday and postal code information. There was evidence that the app attempted to provide continuous location monitoring – which would tell advertisers not just where the user accessed the application from, but also allow them to track that user’s movement over time.
I tend to overreact when it comes to privacy concerns, but I think this represents a legitimate concern for everyone in the era of free mobile apps. While the developer might not give up personal data maliciously or even knowingly, advertisers who offer up software packages to developers for ad placement might be slightly more nefarious. App developers should be cautious as to what info their apps are divulging, and consumers should realize that “free” doesn’t always mean “free”. You might be giving up a lot more personal info than you think.
Gizmodo on William Hope’s use of double exposure to create fake ghost images:
The results were spooky. Even knowing that they are fake, I look at them and feel the chills today. Imagine how it was back then. Even very smart people, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, bought into it. When Hope was exposed as a scam artist by the Society for Psychical Research, the writer defended him.
Cool, but indeed, very spooky.
Via MacRumors:
Apple today announced that it is making several changes to its App Store developer policies and procedures, with one of the most significant changes being an easing of its earlier move to ban third-party compilers such as Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler it had built into Flash Professional CS5. Under the new policies, such third-party tools will be permitted as long as the apps generated by them do not download any code.
This is a good move that potentially opens app store development to a much larger community and should help get regulators off of Apple’s back. I’m excited to see some of the potential tools that could arise, but I am still skeptical as to how Apple will handle this loss in control of the app development process.
Today Skype released an update to their iPhone app that enables multitasking. Along with it, they announce via their “Big Blog” that they won’t be charging for Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G as had been announced at their previous update.
At Skype, we believe that better call quality and better availability which is achieved with an app capable of multitasking and/or making calls over 3G lead to increased call frequency and longer calls. We also believe that the mobile world is in a period of significant change, for example, with some operators starting to move to tiered pricing models.
In light of that, we no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G. We’re delighted to make it easier for you to talk for even longer and do even more together using Skype.
