Free content by DJ Shadow is always a plus, except this offer includes “free, optional RealPlayer software”. If it’s 1999 again, I should warn some people that the world gets kinda shitty in a couple of years.
Parallels apparently serves ads to their customers, who already paid $80 for the software. The only way to turn them off is through an arcane Terminal command (defaults write com.parallels.Parallels\ Desktop ProductPromo.ForcePromoOff -bool YES according to Reddit). Any reference to that preference setting gets deleted by Parallels Support if it’s posted in the related forum thread. Via John Gruber.
A client of mine would like updates from their Facebook page to display on their website. There are a few ways of doing this, including the officially-sanctioned Facebook activity widget. Unfortunately, this widget is pretty resource-hungry, and fairly ugly.
The lightest way I’ve found to do this is with the page RSS feeds. I’ve had Kayla Knight’s Facebook RSS parser bookmarked for a while, but at some point, Facebook quietly disabled getting RSS feeds via the method you’d expect. The page ID that Kayla uses is the one that you’ll find in photo uploads by that page. It’s the 360554127319590 in 544979_360554127319590_637526006_n.jpg. But, as I said, this was depreciated.
Happily, “stacey” on Stack Overflow has a solution. Simply place that ID into the URL http://graph.facebook.com/that-id-goes-here and use the second ID shown in the feed. For my example, visiting http://graph.facebook.com/360554127319590 shows the following:
{
"id": "360554127319590",
"from": {
"name": "Fallacious Logic",
"category": "Website",
"id": "360553933986276"
},
If I substitute the 360553933986276 ID above into Kayla Knight’s parser, and include that PHP file in the usual method, it works wonderfully. Quick, lightweight embedding of Facebook page updates into a website.
I won’t be upgrading — at the last minute, Apple removed my mid-2007 MacBook Pro from their compatibility list due to the 32 bit nature of its graphics drivers. The developer previews have all worked fine, interestingly.
Apple PR:
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $35.0 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $28.6 billion and net profit of $7.3 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 42.8 percent compared to 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
The Company sold 26.0 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 28 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 17.0 million iPads during the quarter, an 84 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.0 million Macs during the quarter, a two percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.8 million iPods, a 10 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
26 million iPhones and a record 17 million iPads are good by anyone’s standards. But, as Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes, analysts were expecting more.
Yesterday, the developers of Dead Trigger, and Android and iOS game, announced that the Android version was going to be dropped to a price tag of nothing:
In a statement on Facebook, developer Madfinger Games says that even at $0.99, the piracy rate on Android devices was “unbelievably high.”
Matt Gemmell reflects on high piracy rates:
Piracy isn’t a symptom of social disease. Well, it might be, but your bank manager won’t care about that inconsequential detail. Piracy is a symptom of failure to find an effective business model. “Effective” here means the whole gamut of product quality, availability, platform, marketing, price, delivery, support and so on. It’s not black magic.
Very good points in this article. I’m sure there are ways of making lots of money on an Android app, but for many developers, setting up a means to do that (say, by cross-referencing a unique user ID with a known purchase receipt) is more difficult and time-consuming than their app warrants. It’s simply harder for the average developer to make money with a paid app on Android than on iOS.