Gina Trapani ports Todo.txt from Android to iOS, 40% More Sales On First Day

Co-host of the TWiT network's This Week in Google podcast and highly regarded Android proponent, Gina Tapani, has ported her Todo.txt Android app to iOS:

I announced the app went on sale yesterday morning on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, then Lifehacker ran a post on it. It got no other press coverage. I announced the Android app release in exactly the same way on January 24th of last year (minus Google+, which didn't exist then). If my Googling skills serve me right, Lifehacker did not run a post the day the Android app went on sale, though they did the week before when I was beta-testing it. The first day of iOS app sales was solid: just around 365 apps sold, compared to the 215 I sold on the first day of Todo.txt Touch's availability in the Android Market. That means the iOS app sold 40% more units under somewhat similar conditions as the Android app on release day. Her whole post is worth the read as she discusses how the project came together (it's open source) and some of her thoughts on working on an iOS app in comparison to an Android app.

Huffduffer

Today I learned about a great new (to me) service that allows you to create your own personalized Podcast feed of audio you fine on the web. Perhaps I'm late to the game on this, but I had never heard of it before. The service, called Huffduffer, sports a tastefully designed site which I appreciate. The user interface is intuitive and simple. I first saw mention of Huffduffer over on the website of one of my new favorite podcasts, Roderick on the Line. Merlin Mann, one of the co-hosts of the podcast, has enabled a "Huffduff It" link at the bottom of each post. Curious as to just what Huffduffing was, I soon found out what Huffduffer did. I love it. I pass a lot of my time during the week while working, coding, doing chores around the house, cooking, etc… by listening to podcasts, mostly from Dan Benjamin's great 5by5 network but sometimes NPR. Occasionally I find one-off episodes of some random podcast I want to listen to, or a random interview of someone I manage to find in audio form. Gone is the old, tired, and tedious was of having to drag random audio files into iTunes in order to get them on my iPhone or iPad to listen to, only to then get out of my house and realize I forgot to configure that particular audio file to sync (I selectively sync only certain podcasts/music to different devices). Huffduffer allows you to create your own new personalized podcast RSS feed, and easily add random bits of audio you find around the web to that feed. iTunes treats it just line any other podcast, and downloads the audio. Once setup, that feed is always set to sync to your respective devices, so it works beautifully. From the best I cans tell, the service is free. This worries me, because I don't want the service to be sold to some behemoth corporation which will ruin it, or to have ads on it. My only request would be for Huffduffer to charge money to its users customers so that we can insure it continues to operate successfully. You may be interested in subscribing to my own Huffduffer feed.

The New Twitter (R.I.P Tweetie)

Twitter launched its new design today. Yes, they only just launched a redesign back in September. This is not the New Twitter, but the New New Twitter. Many people do not like the new redesign, which has been rolled out across their entire client ecosystem: their website, their iPhone & Android apps, Tweetdeck, the web version of Tweetdeck, their mobile website… everything. John Gruber, writing on Daring Fireball, wrote an excellent point-by-point critique of the new changes. Now, that being said, like John I too have quit using the iPhone Twitter client and primarily use Tweetbot on my iPhone. Also, due to Tweetbot not having an iPad app, I use Twitterrific on my iPad. Still though, John's article is worth reading and accurately sums up the problems with the new design. From Gruber's article:

What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be. It all makes sense if you think of the label under the “#” tab as reading “Dickbar” instead of “Discover”. Twitter 4.0 for iPhone lacks the surprise, delight, and attention to detail of a deserving successor to Tweetie, offering instead a least common denominator experience that no one deserves. Read the rest.

Why Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics & How It’s Not An Apple Conspiracy

Danny Sullivan, writing on Search Engine Land:

“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an abortion clinic. Really disappointed in MoveOn.org and other Democratic organizations bad mouthing Apple. I have a feeling 50% of the people doing it know it's a straw man and they're just using it as an opportunity to push their political agenda, and 50% of those people really are clueless idiots. Either way, they just lost a supporter.

Stamped

John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes:: "New social network/recommendation engine, which like Instagram, is debuting with but a single interface: a native iPhone app. The premise is simple and ambitious: you “stamp” things that you enjoy and recommend. There aren’t different types of stamps. There’s no rating from 0-5 or anything like that. Just stamped. What kind of things can you stamp? All sorts of things: restaurants, places, books, movies, music." "Stylish, distinctive, nice-branded UI, too"

Stamped describes itself as:

Stamped is a new way to recommend only what you like best—restaurants, books, movies, music and more. No noise, no strangers, just the things you and your friends love. Read their entire introductory blog post.

Searching The Web For Planes In The Sky

Jason Kottke, writing on Kottke.org:

If you search Wolfram Alpha for "planes overhead", it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look. This is very impressive. My next question is, since Siri searches Wolfram Alpha, will this same search produce the same results using Siri on an iPhone 4S?

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match

Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.

Adobe: Your Questions About Flex

Adobe Q&A posted over the weekend (late Friday night, I think):

Is Adobe still committed to Flex? Yes. We know Flex provides a unique set of benefits for enterprise application developers. We also know that the technology landscape for application development is rapidly changing and our customers want more direct control over the underlying technologies they use. Given this, we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi. Daring Fireball's John Gruber sums this up aptly: Translation: “No.”