So let’s see, MediaDefender admitted to using revision3’s bit torrent tracker illegitimately (by exploiting it to deliver something that it was not meant to do) and then they admitted to SYN flooding it over 3 days, yet all they can come up with is “sorry”. 8000 connection attempts per second is hard to attribute to an errant application.

Please, revision3, sue the crap out of these guys. Considering MediaDefender’s track-record and previous behaviour, the only way the world can be rid of them is for a judge to order their ISP to pull the plug completely.

As more and more applications go cross-platform, users are sometimes presented with software that they can tell was simply “dressed-up” on/for their platform of choice, not actually thought out with it in mind all the way. Does your application follow the platform or does it follow itself?
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RSS readers and desktop blogging tools are the two kinds of applications I try out quite frequently, so I’m always happy when I see new products on the market from either category. It is not necessarily an issue of not being satisfied with what I am currently using¹ insomuch as curiosity and wanting to see how people tackle old ideas and try to rethink them and bring better solutions.
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1. NetNewsWire and MarsEdit [↩]

As I have found out today, Twitterrific’s default behaviour is to use base64 encoding for logging into Twitter. Now, you may or may not care about that, but it is very insecure and it makes it relatively trivial for someone to grab your username and password. Here is an easy way to make it safer.
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I very much hope not. It would be a pain to have a dozen or more applications carefully crafted for the iPhone, only to be used as a gateway to some site or another. It may make sense to have a Flickr client, a bank app or a blogging tool¹, but I do not really think more is better in this case.

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1. Oh yes, how happy I would be! [↩]

I love Julius Eckert’s creations. Especially his Quicksilver plugins — I would not use QS without BezelHUD (above)¹. Recently, Silverflow went in public beta. I gave it a quick spin before taking the screenshot and hitting return.
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1. Exaggeration [↩]

My recent affair with usability brought me to analyze a somewhat subtle aspect of software, especially the user interface design aspect.
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I have recently discovered a passion for design — especially the kind that can be done in software — and so I have been paying a bit more attention to various concepts and ideas pertaining to the field. Today I was called into a meeting to discuss the changes required to make a particular user dialog more… user-friendly. A great time to put theory to practice¹.
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1. I am a software developer by function and workplace designation [↩]

Recently, I have come across blog posts where authors and commenters alike were considering that the whole open-source fad is going to cost a lot of programmers a lot of money and quite possibly make it very hard to earn a living by writing code.
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