In all honesty. Innovative as always, these Linux guys. Well, not that Microsofts “I’m a PC” campaign has been terribly innovative.

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and
announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys
for $10 each.
The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announce d that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.’ The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.
They never saw the man or his assistant again, only
lots and lots of monkeys!
Now you have a better understanding of how the
WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!!

Merry Christmas.
(via gnn.tv)

I hardly play games anymore, but this sure as hell looks like a big hit. That battle report feels like a good football game.

There was a great summary of their past development efforts in a Slashdot comment, some months ago:

Seriously, given Palms history regarding Operating System development, if I was Palm, I would have jumped on the Google Android bandwagon right when it came out.

Via Ft.com

A detailed (actually even a brief) look at the field of Twitter clients for different systems leads to an interesting observation: There’re not only more but especially far better Twitter clients available for iPhone than for any other device. Take Tweetsville or Tweetie as the dominant examples. They’re a joy to use, offer great functionality and one can just feel the attention to detail and thought gone into their development.
A look at Mac OS X or Windows, on the other hand, reveals just mediocre clients which lack a lot of functions I’d take for granted, given the size of the userbase and importance of Twitter.

There is no simple monocausal reason to explain this. It might in parts be the (monetary) appeal of the App Store. Another aspect might be a strong usage of the standard Twitter website as a substitute for unnecessary advanced clients.
I do think though, that the primary reason is a direct hint at the latent needs, people solve via Twitter. Even more, I do think that the current state of Twitter clients offers a glimpse at the future of Twitter (or Microblogging, for that matter):
Twitter is the archetypical mobile application.
Currently, a lot of people still twitter while they’re browsing the web. Publishing liks to interesting pages. I do think though, that there’ll be more and more mobile tweeting. Think about it – as soon as Twitter moves beyond being just a tool to publish links; as soon as you start talking about your life, politics, business or local news; that is: as soon as you start using Twitter as it was intended to be, you’ll most likely need it when you’re not at home. The Mumbai terror attacks offer an insight into such a usage scenario (and I will use this example in more posts to come, as it serves as a very good example to understand the nature of Twitter).

This, of course, doesn’t mean, that there’s no need for a sophisticated desktop client. I’m pretty sure, that The Killer Client is already in the works (presumably for Leopard). The interesting conclusion to draw from the above observation is that, in the future, Twitter might very well become ubiquitous.

So. After several months of not having enough time to write any code, I finally managed to fix the remaining bugs and publish my first application on the iTunes App Store. If it wouldn’t be for work and university, the app would probably have been online months ago. But one has to set priorities, and thus it took me a tad longer than expected.

A dedicated website for the application is here, and the direct link to the iTunes Store Page can be found here.

Happiness is build around the concepts of Dolf Zillmann’s Mood Management Theory and further research in the area of mood modification through media. The basic and empirical verified (in many many studies) idea is that the exposure to funny, sad, frightening or suspenseful media can modify our mood in specific ways (that is, funny or sad, f.e.).
Build around this idea, Happiness aim is to enhance one’s mood in a very positive way through the exposure to nice imagery and the sound of laughing people. There’re different options which allow to optimize the usage behaviour.
While this is certainly not a complex application, it taught me nontheless a lot about the whole iTunes Application Store experience.
The App is really cheap (almost a bargain!), and I’d love if those of you, who own an iPhone or iPod touch, could try it and give some feedback, so I can enhance the app.