Did Google just pulled the plug on cloud computing, or the Wave only?

Google recently dropped Wave, its revolutionary collaboration platform I wrote about last year. The general reaction is a surprise, firstly because the Wave was very innovative, though not well packaged, secondly because no longer than a few months ago Google was actively promoting Wave to business partners on the Google IO 2010. And now, they are just stopping the service, just like that. Ok, it’s not the first product they closed, but this time the ecosystem is bigger, and the consequences are higher. And an important question arise – how dependable cloud computing really is?

The curious case of a Mirror app

This is a short story about a general wondering as to how is Apple calculating and displaying app quality ratings. Or, why is an app that has 169 1-star reviews, out of 171 total, having a 4-star rating, using the UK App Store iPhone app (possibly, it’s the same in US Store too).

My Personal Top 10 Free Games for the iPhone

In general, free games for the iPhone and iPod Touch pretty much suck. They are either very stupid, very ugly, very boring or have very bad controls. After using an iPod Touch for almost half a year now, I have pinpointed just a small number of titles worth the place on the dashboard. I really wished for more, but maybe my expectations are too high. One way or another, here is the list of 10 free iPhone games that are not utter rubbish, and should give you more gameplay than the usual start-playonce-remove scheme of most of the free games in the App Store. Enjoy!

Is Safari 5 a game changer?

Yesterday marked the beginning of the Apple WWDC 2010, the release of iPhone 4, the iOS 4 and a general wow effect, mainly over the iPhone’s new Retina display and video talks called FaceTime. Apple didn’t want to steal iPhone’s thunder, so it quietly released Safari 5, but in fact, it’s the biggest leap for this browser since years. But let’s first look on what is new.

Exploiting Gmail webmail for phishing

I recently noticed that a certain Gmail webmail “feature” enables you to convince the receiver that the email was sent by someone else than you. This exploit is really easy to fix by Google, but apparently it would also change the way they display senders completely – would, sort of, be like a step back to the era of email addresses as identification. Here’s how it works.

Opera Mini is hot in the App Store but is it really a hot app?

Opera Mini hit the App Store a few days ago and became an instant hit in every country. I downloaded it as soon as it was available and tested until today. In short, it’s not a surprise Apple applied it – there actually are plenty of other web browsers in the App Store. And it’s also not a surprise Opera Mini isn’t better than Safari. Why exactly? Continue reading.

Twitter @Anywhere platform quick introduction

Twitter announced its @Anywhere platform on the Chirp conference and I decided to give it a quick try on my blog. It turns out the platform is extremely easy to start with, has 3 primary and very useful features, and it takes only 15 minutes to implement them on the site. In this post I’ll guide you through the improvements I’ve made using @Anywhere.

TextOne - an SMS replacement for iPhone and iPod touch

I recently started playing with an iPod touch. It a pretty useful device. I chose it over iPhone because I travel a lot and would go broke from data roaming charges. I don’t miss the phone calls, since there is Skype. But I do miss SMS, or rather something similar but cost-free. At just the right time my company, ProcessOne, released a cool and simple app just for that called TextOne.

Update of automatic tweet plugin for Expression Engine

A while back I wrote about my plugin to automatically tweet about new blog posts in Expression Engine. Well, recently those of you who follow @f055 on Twitter might have observed that the announcement of my last blog post about Google Buzz was tweeted every couple of hours. That’s because there was a bug in my plugin.

What’s wrong with Buzz?

It all started with Twitter. And a bit of a Facebook. Got spiced up by LinkedIn and Yahoo Meme. We had Blellow on the way, Friendfeed, even the recent hype – Foursquare – can count in. Instant micro-exhibitionism, so you can generate all the buzz you need. But wait. Now you have the actual Buzz, for all your social pleasures. Enjoy?