My Online Thoughts & Pontifications

But this announcement that they are able to decrypt the files on behalf of the government contradicts their prior public statements. They claim that Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files.

This announcement means that Dropbox never had any mechanism to prevent employees from accessing your files, and it means that Dropbox never had the crypto smarts to ensure the privacy of your files and never had the smarts to only decrypt the files for you. It turns out, they keep their keys on their servers, and anyone with clearance at Dropbox or anyone that manages to hack into their servers would be able to get access to your files.

Worrying article by Miguel de Icaza today where he points to the changes in Dropbox’s security clauses in their terms of service and admittance that they can provide the US government with your files at their request. This is contradictory to their previous claims that their staff are unable to access to your files and the first negative news I have seen in a long time about the cloud computing and synchronisation darling of the tech world.

Dropbox is still a great service and I would continue to recommend it to others, especially when compared to the terrible iDisk on the Mac. However I would also recommend that people take the same approach that I do and encrypt any sensitive data in sparse bundles within Dropbox, to ensure prying eyes are unable to access your data. If sparse bundles confuse you then take a look at Knox from the excellent Agile Web Solutions, which will take the pain away for you at an extremely reasonable price.

Ben Brooks on Tweetbot:

While I have yet to decide if I like Tweetbot any more, or less, than I like the official Twitter app — I did note two annoying things:

1. The app doesn’t have the “one” single feature that is unique to it.
2. The app feels like a nice wrapper of eye candy applied over the existing apps out there (mainly the official Twitter app).

I agree. Tweetbot is a very good app, but I’m sticking with the official Twitter app for now because it’s also a very good app, it seems faster and more responsive to me, I know it’s not going anywhere, and I already know how to use it efficiently.

Full-featured Twitter clients need to have so many features that switching has a learning curve and an indirect cost. It’s not difficult, but it takes time to develop the habits to navigate each app efficiently.

A new Twitter client that essentially offers the Twitter app’s features, but in different places, isn’t enough of a difference for me to switch. If anything, it supports Twitter’s “don’t make full-featured apps” position. Maybe they were right.

This isn’t to say that Tweetbot shouldn’t exist as an option for people who really do like it a lot better than all of the other full-featured Twitter clients. It really is very good. But it lacks significant reasons why anyone should switch to it if they already like their Twitter client of choice.

I couldn't agree more with the points made by both Ben Brooks and Marco Arment in their blogs today.

While I will happily acknowledge that Tweetbot is a great Twitter client with a fabulous looking user interface, there isn't any one feature that stands it apart from my existing Twitter client of choice, TweetList.

While I will keep it on my iPhone and use it occasionally for the novelty value, Tweetlist still retains its privileged location in my iPhone's dock and I cannot see that changing anytime soon.

Truly stunning short film, shot by Terje Sorgjerd on Spain’s highest mountain El Teide. Thanks to Don McAllister for highlighting it on Twitter

What's green and looking a bit shaky? No, not Kermit on a booze binge.

We mean Spotify's free service. From 1 May free users can only listen to 10 hours of music, and individual tracks can only be heard five times apiece.

So where do you go if you can't or won't pay for Spotify Unlimited or Premium?

Good article by Techradar.com looking at the alternative options to Spotify, following their announcement yesterday that they would be restricting the free service to only 10 hours of music.

Personally I'm not a big user of the service but I no many who are, so if you want to listen to more than 10 hours a month you either need to upgrade to the Spotify premium service or look elsewhere.

Mflow definitely looks like an interesting alternative

There has been a lot of excitement about this app since Tapbots first teased us about it a year ago but now finally Tweetbots has arrived in the wild!

Yes its another Twitter client for the iPhone, as if I didn't need another one, but all the feedback that we have been hearing from beta users like John Gruber is extremely positive.

Brief highlights of the functionality available includes:

◆ Multiple Timelines. Quickly switch between your lists as your main timeline.
◆ Smart Gestures. Use Twitter more efficiently with time-saving and configurable gestures.
◆ Customizable Navigation. The last 2 tabs are customizable and unused tabs are easily accessible.
◆ Support for multiple services like Read it Later, Instapaper, Cloudapp URL Shortening.
◆ Save drafts, add locations and POI's, attach photos and videos, manage your lists, and much more.

Nothing awe inspiring in the feature list but their blog post really emphasises the work they have put into both the gesture system and the integration of lists into the main timeline. Does it have enough to get me to switch from my current Twitter app of choice, TweetList? I'll report back once I have had a chance to try it out in earnest.

Have a look at the demonstration video on the Tapbots website and then get over to the App Store and give it a spin for yourself.

The kick-off agenda builder is a fancy name for a very simple little web app (its insulting to even call it that). Its essentially a list of all the subjects that one might possibly cover in a kick-off meeting for most web projects. Each element comes with a description that will help educate the client while reminding the project team of things that must be covered. The descriptions also occasionally include links that go into more depth on a particular subject.

Headscape have just released a great little web app for all project managers, allowing you to quickly and easily build an agenda for a project kick off meeting.

Its fully customisable, allowing you to pick and choose the items that are relevant to your specific project. The best feature in my mind though is that it includes an overview of what each section will cover. This is not only great for educating customers ahead of meetings, specifically those that are new to the web but also as an internal aid memoir for team members who be new to running meetings such as these.

You can access The Kick-off Agenda Builder directly from the Headscape website or download it and install it on a server of your choosing. The sourcecode has also been released under creative commons license so you can further enhance it if required.

Read the full article about it on Boagworld

It looks like a marriage made in heaven when VW presented their new concept car at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year. The Bulli is supposed to be a modern take on everybody’s favourite the VW Camper Van or Bus and sports an integrated iPad in the dash for touch control of all the key features of the car.

A new version of the Camper was first touted by VW nearly 10 years ago and whether this one makes into production, only time will tell. However with a concept that people can touch and feel it is definitely one step closer.

Hat tip to TUAW for the heads up on this story.

A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially after the search engine rolled out its "Panda" update, intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.

Well if your site is one that scraps a lot of content then I'm afraid its bad news for you, with your site plummeting in the rankings or disappearing altogether.

There are notable exceptions to this with a number of technology news websites, like UK based Tech Radar for example being affected and seeing their rankings drop. Interestingly Microsoft owned Ciao has also seen their site drop in the rankings as a result, with some speculating that this may have more to do with the fact they logged a complaint with the EC about Google using their monopoly unfairly. Highly unlikely but fun all the same!

The good news is that if you have been following standard SEO advice, of generating good readable content which your users enjoy, then you should see your rankings increase. This is because the new algorithm takes into consideration the amount of time a user spends on your site.

All in all a good upgrade I think, with sites with good original content getting a boost and the sites clogged full of scrapped content disappearing from the top of the search results.

Acorn, one of my favourite image editors on the Mac has just hit version 3 and is available to buy from both the Mac App Store and Flying Meats own website.

Always a great alternative to Photoshop for the majority of users, version 3 introduces layer styles (something I really missed), multi-stop live gradients, rotating text and shapes, new filters plus many more features. All the existing functionality is still there, including its ability to take screen grabs and break out all of the individual windows and components into separate layers.

For anybody toying with the idea of purchasing Photoshop for the Mac, then I would strongly recommend you pop along to the Mac App Store and try Acorn first. You may be pleasantly surprised and at £17.99 you will make a massive saving as well!