Paul Kafasis has some good questions around how the iPhone App Store will work. I found the last one interesting though:

What about other pricing concerns?
Currently, we have a coupon system in our store, we can offer upgrade pricing for users who’ve purchased old versions, we can offer volume discounts for large purchases, and much, much more. All of these things, and more, help our bottom line. We’ll want to do them with iPhone Apps, but will we be able to? and the final comment:

Someone came up with a cool idea to add a universal edit button to make editing wikis easier. It adds a button like for RSS feeds that redirects the browser to the edit page. It’s clever but it aims way too low. If you can get browsers to add an editing button you have an opportunity to either point to an online form or a standalone application that could also edit the page. In other words, Atom Publishing Protocol auto-detection.

Got a couple of good comments on my last post about NewsGator Syncing that I thought were worth following up on. Firstly, Greg Reinacker points to the article I had in mind about how NewsGator polls the feeds, and Andy pointed me to this forum posting about it which shows how to see why feeds aren’t updating.

When I go and look at my feeds I find a whole bunch reported as having errors from the source of the feed – obviously why they’re not updating. There’s just one problem, even Andy’s comments are marked as broken:

Jef Atwood has discovered the implicit variable type declaration in C#:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(name));

Who came up with this stuff?

Is there really any doubt what type of the variable br is? Does it help anyone, ever, to have another BufferedReader on the front of that line? This has bothered me for years, but it was an itch I just couldn’t scratch. Until now.

Actually, there is a question about the type of br – it could be a BufferedReader or it could be any superclass of BufferedReader and sometimes that distinction is important.  The most common example of this is in the collections API:

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds.

When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works. This leads to much faster sync times but also means that you can’t actually refresh your feeds to find what’s new. All the refresh button does now is check NewsGator and there’s no way to check directly with the site itself.

Kevin Gamble has an excellent post Enterprise 2.0– working in the open:

A week doesn’t go by where I don’t hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, “Then a wiki isn’t for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs.” It’s amazingly common for people to want to work in a private little sandbox until they have everything perfect and then reveal it to the world. The trouble is, this almost entirely eliminates the opportunities for collaboration because people can’t see the content until it’s completed. What’s the value in reviewing and adding to a document that the author already thinks is done?

I got just got home from a very entertaining evening with some folk from the Web Content 2008 conference watching, or rather largely ignoring, an overall boring game of basketball between two teams I didn’t know from a bar of soap (for the record, the Celtics won and were premiers or something). Anyway, I found in my email an entire conversation within Ephox around this article on CMS Wire about the talk I gave today. It’s actually a very good summary of what I said and I hadn’t realized there was anyone from CMS Wire even at the conference (Rachelle, please do say hello tomorrow if you get this, I don’t know what you look like).

I’ve seen in a few places people getting excited about the upcoming support for Google Gears in WordPress as a way to locally cache common files so they don’t have to be downloaded repeatedly. For instance, this article from Geniosity Musings:

But, some of the new features (and features I’ve just started using now that I use the Visual Editor) just aren’t as cool thanks to the not-so-great internet speeds in South Africa.

Kevin Gamble echoes an increasingly common theme at the moment, complaining that some US ISPs are trialling metered internet plans instead of unlimited data:

This is serious stuff. This is an both an economic and freedom issue. Changing the way the Internet works means people will be less likely to share and to try innovative things. If you don’t think this will impact the quality of your Internet experience you are dead wrong. It will make a massive difference in changing people’s online behavior. Here’s the thing though – metered internet plans are not a new idea. They’re not even unusual, they’re just a way of life for a huge number of people, like say pretty much anyone in Australia. You don’t have a civil right to unmetered internet access any more than you do to unmetered electricity.

I’m commuting to work these days since Ephox has a sweet office in Windsor and while I’m there by myself at the moment its still nice to get out of the house. Anyway the point is I now have 30 to 40 minutes each day walking to the train station, waiting for trains or sitting on the train. In the mornings this is the perfect opportunity to review email and feeds but in the afternoon there aren’t many of those so the trip is somewhat boring. Of course this is the perfect use case for audio books an podcasts so I’m going to have to try a few out. Previously I haven’t bothered with podcasts because the information density is too low. Its so much more efficient to read text instead of listening to someone talk. Its rare that emotion and speaking tone really adds anything to technical discussions. If you have spare time sitting on a train though that’s not really a consideration so you may as well cover off that extra content that isn’t provided as text.

More a bookmark for myself than anything – the W3C has published a preliminary guide to differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4. Quite useful for anyone planning to update their products for HTML 5.

I have a very simple benchmark for judging how much emphasis a site puts on people instead of technology – I look at how it identifies those people. Sites that don’t have anything to do with people treat everyone the same and don’t have a name for their users at all. The next step up is sites that let you log in some how and then refer to you by your username or email address. At least you exist, but in a very abstract, computer oriented way. Getting in to the area of treating you like a real person is where the site refers to you by your real name (or the pseudonym you put in the real name box). That’s a really big step towards having people form connections. Where it really makes a giant leap forward though is when you have photos to identify people.