• 6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses – I’m appalled that they’re trying to stop the public finding out how they’re spending our money! How about some accountability?
• Yummy 2.0 Quick Overview – New version of my iPhone delicious.com client. Lots of new features, including a web preview, integration with various Twitter clients, view by tag, improved search, streamlined bookmark editing… the list goes on!
• If you’ve nothing to hide… – Double standards from MPs. Who’d have thought?

• Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
• Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
• Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
• Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
• What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
• Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
• Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
• Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
• If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…

My iPhone application, Yummy, has been on sale in iTunes for a couple of months now and, as a number of other developers have noted, after the initial launch sales figures take a significant nose dive very quickly. I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase visibility without taking too much time away from actually making enhancements to the software.

As luck would have it, I got a “free trial” of Google AdWords and thought I would give that a try. Results have been… well, not exactly what I was expecting.

This originally started as a question on Apple’s support boards:

With the current AppStore model (which seems to be a money machine for developers) I do not understand why anyone would give away their applications. At least charge $0.99 and get something back for your hard work.

So, why do you give away your apps?

With the caveat that I have not actually submitted anything yet…

My motivation in writing an application was entirely for the pleasure of doing it. If I never do anything with it once it’s “finished” my goals have been achieved. So my only objective in pushing it to the AppStore is for other people to get some benefit from using it too. There is little incremental cost in doing so and zero cost means that it gets the widest possible distribution.

• Afghan Student Sentenced to Death After Downloading Report – Good to see that the invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in more freedom for the locals…
• Forget passports – teachers and kids are the new ID card targets – Despite the loss of personal data and despite the fact that they will not (and cannot) do what the Government says they will, the ID Card scheme is still not completely dead.
• The True Cost of SMS Messages – “How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.”

Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications¹. But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.

If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days² but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.

On the principle that all publicity is good, here’s a link to my girlfriend’s job-hunting and career blog. She’s into CSR, PR, events management, marketing and, well, go have a look and find out more. Go on, you know you want to give her a job!