Links

Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people.

Mozilla will cease to develop the Thunderbird email suite any further, except for security updates. While most people are probably using web based email, Thunderbird is one of very few email clients to support TLS client certificates when connecting to email servers.

There’s a lot of bad information on the Web (I’m looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web

For email, it’s actually less effort to maintain it at zero than to maintain it at three hundred.

David Allen talks about the effort required to maintaining an inbox at zero in contrast to another number.

our analysis of the iOS and Android versions of the same application showed that it’s not an SMS worm but a Trojan that uploads a user’s phonebook to remote server. The ‘replication’ part is done by the server – SMS spam messages with the URL to the application are being sent from the remote server to all the contacts in the user’s address book.

The first malicious application has reached the AppStore. While it is “only” a spam application, it does makes on think about the approval process and how it got through. It is a pretty good track record for Apple though, with only one (publicly known) trojan since its inception.

This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year.

An interesting article on what platform and which software Instagram uses for their 14+ million users.

Chrome for iOS has just been released for iPhone and iPad, with support for their extensive syncing, including history, tabs and passwords.

According to the Hacker News thread, it uses the standard UIWebView, and not Chrome’s own V8 engine. In addition, sandboxed applications doesn’t get the fast Nitro JavaScript engine, which means it should be much slower than the built-in Safari browser.

One of the Facebook engineers said the new application has been built primarily using Objective-C, the programming language used to build applications for iOS. Many of the components of the current version of the Facebook app are built using HTML5, the Web-based markup language.

Facebook is finally giving their mobile platform some love. Being one of the largest social media platform, their mobile app has been terrible, which lead to many people disengaging from the site out of pure frustration.

With the recent update of the Google+ iPhone app, which is beautiful and very fast, Facebook had to do something, and the new version is supposed to be released this summer.

While users can opt out of having their @facebook.com address listed, the troubling part of the change is how Facebook went about implementing it. The social network didn’t as much as announce the change was coming or alert users once it happened.

Interesting things start to happen once you realize that many people have Facebook contact sync, meaning that the email addresses for all Facebook contacts in their phone’s contact list will be replaced with the one from @facebook.com.

Extreme presentation!

Apple just released a new app for podcasts called… Podcasts. It allows subscribing, downloading and streaming of podcasts available in the iTunes Store. To sync podcasts between devices however, you will need to subscribe to them using iTunes on your computer, which is very sad.

I will continue to use Downcast for now, which features syncing of podcasts, settings and subscriptions using iCloud directly, which means there are no dependencies on iTunes.

Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as individuals can always set our own guidelines and curb the effect of the Fast Web, but as I hope I’ve illustrated, there are a number of considerations the creators of web-connected products can make to help us along.

An interesting article by Jack Cheng, discussing and comparing the web to slow and fast food, and the driving factors behind them.

Consumers who fully charge their iPad tablet every other day can expect to pay $1.36 for the electricity needed annually to power the device

An interesting analysis on how the move to smartphones and tablets contra laptops and stationary computers shift the power requirements and future energy planning.

Having both bands available at once in the 2012 AirPort Express (a feature added in 2009 to the Extreme and Time Capsule models) allows your network to perform at the highest possible speeds no matter how distant a device is from the base station while it remains in range of a signal. That’s a significant improvement, and makes the Express a much better value, especially compared with equipment from competing manufacturers, such as Linksys.

Looking forward to trying it out!

In this test, you will find out how you score in the relation between perspective and control, together with an explanation. You can read more about the different result quadrants in the accompanying PDF.

Suppose you dropped your phone — a real fall, like from the second story — and it broke. You’re picking up the pieces, cursing and trying to think of the last time you backed up your contacts, when you notice something. Deep within the phone’s hardware, hidden from everyday use, you find a message — etched right onto the chassis.

An Apple conspiracy theory for the weekend.

On Monday, Microsoft held a secret press event in Los Angeles where it announced a new family of tablets under the Surface moniker. Along with Surface, the event revealed a branding shift for Microsoft, one that values the unity of hardware and software, and the idolization of aesthetics. Something about it felt familiar…

Interesting similarities in the presentations of the Apple iPad and the Microsoft Surface.

The Elusive Inventory of Your Projects is an article written by David Allen, regarding projects and how to define them.

People complain about “too much to do,” and yet most couldn’t give you, in the moment, a complete and accurately defined inventory of what they’ve committed “to do” if their life depended on it.

Leisure time is time spent engaged in an activity for my own personal enjoyment or growth. Idle time, on the other hand, is time spent on whatever activity happens to be at hand. In short, I try to find room in my life for genuine leisure time and avoid idle time.