Jacqui Cheng:
>As a result, the 11 individuals behind the three poker sites now face “at least” $3 billion—you read that correctly, billion—in money laundering penalties, in addition to the shut-down of 76 bank accounts in 14 countries.
That is a lot of money, a lot of money. Also be sure to read the second to last paragraph for quotes from FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Janice Fedarcyk — who must have had CSI write the statements for her.
Dr. Drang:
>A cracking program trying to hack my GMail account has no idea how long the password is, nor does it know the character set I’m using. Does it start with a dictionary attack? If so, does it try multiple words before moving on to random strings? Does it try lowercase passwords before moving on to the full character set? If so, at what length does it stop trying lowercase passwords?
That’s a pretty good set of questions — hard to say what password will be most secure unless we know the method a potential attacker is going to use against us and the sophistication that the cracking software has.
Thomas Baekdal:
>It is 10 times more secure to use “this is fun” as your password, than “J4fS<2".
Eric D. Snider:
> It’s the old “I like you, I’ll kill you last” routine.
The whole thing is pretty great.
IGDA Board of Directors:
>Many journalists have noted the unusual nature of Amazon’s current store terms, but little has been said about the potential implications of those terms. In brief: Amazon reserves the right to control the price of your games, as well as the right to pay you “the greater of 70% of the purchase price or 20% of the List Price.” While many other retailers, both physical and digital, also exert control over the price of products in their markets, we are not aware of any other retailer having a formal policy of paying a supplier just 20% of the supplier’s minimum list price without the supplier’s permission.
They don’t provide any source links to the Amazon information, but if this is true I can’t imagine why you would want to be in the Amazon store. Especially given this:
>And if you ever conduct even a temporary price promotion in another market, you must permanently lower your list price in Amazon’s market.
Yikes.
Colin on e1ven.com:
>The problem is, Google is entirely useless whenever there finally *IS* a flaw.
After all the stuff I have been posting about why free is not good, and about Google support — this is yet another example of why using Google apps costs a lot more than the $50/user charges.
Instacast just got a lot better with the 1.2 version update. If you have been holding off you should check it out now. You can now import and export OPML files (feed files for the podcast subscriptions) and you can do this via Dropbox. You can also send show notes to Instapaper — clever.
MG Siegler:
>I also love the idea of adding some chaos into the mix. If Twitter doesn’t own the most popular mobile client, what does that mean? Would they have to buy Tweetbot? Do they make moves to shut it down or limit it?
That’s and interesting question, but I am already willing to say that Tweetbot won’t over take Twitter (official app) as the most popular iOS client. The problem isn’t that Tweetbot isn’t good enough, the problem is that it isn’t $1.99 *better* than the free Twitter offering — it’s $0.99 better, but for most ((Whereby, “most” is not referring to us nerds, that only make up a small fraction of the base.)) they wouldn’t even cough that amount up.
[Updated: 4.14.11 at 1:35 PM]
I should also clarify to say that I think it is worth the price, but I don’t think that at any price they could surpass the market share that Twitter has with its official app.
Mark Millian reporting for CNN on plans that UberMedia (the people behind TweetDeck) may make a Twitter competitor, got this choice quote:
>”The audience for TweetDeck is very different” from the people who use Twitter’s official apps, Tony Haile[…]
No kidding, TweetDeck is a hot mess. Besides being ugly as sin it is nothing more than information overload presented in the most user hostile method possible.
Having said that, can you imagine just how “amazing” a Twitter competitor from UberMedia would be? It’d make MySpace look well designed.
Shawn wrote a really nice review of Tapbots’ new Twitter client: Tweetbot. It just hit the U.S. app store last night and is overwhelmingly nerd popular. I have a mixed set of feelings about the app and haven’t used it enough to say for sure whether it is right for me or not. There is a lot of UI chrome going on and no real “must have” feature — I put it in my dock in place of the Twitter app and we will see if and how long it stays there.
I updated the Solarized theme for OmniFocus to fix the color of the completed items. I also moved it to a permanent home. Please update your bookmarks to the page linked to as I won’t be mentioning future updates.
Joshua Topolsky:
>There are five gestures which allow you to navigate the OS. A swipe up from the bottom bezel while in an application will take you to card view (and your homescreen), while the same gesture in the card view will bring up your app drawer and also close it. A swipe downward from the top of the bezel while in an app will reveal more chrome, allowing you to explore options or make other selections (in the browser, for instance, it brings up your tabs and option icon). If you perform the downward swipe on the homescreen […]
I don’t normally quote this much of any one article, but I wanted to highlight just how complicated this gesture stuff is on the PlayBook. I just don’t see how grandparents would be fine with this. I know tons of grandparents who are in love and using iPads — do you think they could handle all those crazy gestures? I think we need a home button here.
Topolsky:
>And that’s what it really boils down to here; what is the compelling feature that will make buyers choose the PlayBook over something else?
There isn’t one.
MG Siegler:
>Is the PlayBook comparable to the iPad? No. Between the (lack of) app support and the wonky web browsing, there’s just no way around that fact. But RIM was smart to make the PlayBook a completely different form factor and give it BlackBerry Bridge to appeal to corporate users. So in that regard, there could be significant interest in this device.
The review isn’t as bad as the above passage makes it seem — Siegler notes that there were a couple of updates pushed while he was reviewing the unit and that the software has a lot of nice touches. The problem seems to be that the iPad 2 and the apps behind it are much further along than where the PlayBook is as it jumps in to the ring.
I have always typed on a white background with dark gray text — it has a lot of contrast, but I just liked it. Justin linked to this and I check it out — what a fantastic color scheme (both light and dark) — I am using it now for everything and love it so far. If you are looking for a nice color scheme to use for your text editors or terminal — give this a go.
(Here’s the [TextMate theme](https://github.com/markstory/solarized).)
Christopher Mims on developing for Android devices:
>Developing for such a wide array of device screen sizes and aspect rations means that not only is it impossible to create pixel-perfect designs for Android interfaces, there isn’t even any guarantee that a given interface can be scaled to fit a particular screen.
A nice read and a follow-up to this [piece](http://android-gripes.tumblr.com/post/4547554787/why-do-apps-look-worse-on-android-than-iphone-a).
The big story here isn’t that there is a new version of Final Cut Pro — it’s that the new version costs $299, not $999.
When I was down at SXSWi I almost missed this presentation from Jim Coudal, Michael Lopp, and John Gruber — they spoke early in the morning at a venue far away from my hotel — I am glad I didn’t miss it though. Turns out that this was the best presentation that I attended, they have great insight into how they write. If you have time to listen I recommend that you do (alas it is a Flash only audio player).
[Updated: 4.13.11 at 7:02 AM]
Gruber kindly posted a direct link to the MP3 so you aren’t stuck in Flash. Grab that here.
>Acorn can create layered screenshots of every window you have open on your computer. It’s magic.
That’s a pretty amazing feature. With every update to Acorn I have less and less of a reason to have Photoshop installed — which is impressive for an app that is selling for $29.99 right now.
Patrick Goss:
>Lenovo is working on a 23-inch tablet, with William Cai telling TechRadar that the company believes a home tablet could be arriving this year.
Wow. I’ll let [Craig Grannell](http://reverttosaved.com/2011/04/12/is-the-ipad-too-small-for-you-if-so-check-out-lenovos-23-incher/) comment on this one:
>Someone at Lenovo presumably, then, was thinking about gaps in the tablet ecosystem and yelped “what if Godzilla wanted a tablet?”, because that’s the only explanation that makes any sense.