I'd like to start recommending webservices  and software that I use frequently. Any product recommended has been evaluated for at least several weeks. In today's recommended we feature Instapaper. (Recommendation articles are personal opinions with no benefit for the author)

What does Instapaper do? Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

http://www.instapaper.com/

#technology #web

Should simple software be free:

During the chat, the entire MacBreak Weekly crew discussed the danger to the music industry that comes from younger listeners having a built-in expectation that music should be free.

On this episode I believe [Leo Laporte] has inadvertently helped to perpetuate the same kind of thinking about software that the panel had just finished expressing concern about with regard to music: the idea that the hard-earned fruits of somebody’s creative labor should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

#technology

Mike Davies works as a web developer for Yahoo Europe and has some insightful comments on the Internet Explorer rendering switch (see source).

When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. [...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it's dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.

Source [isolani.co.uk]

I can only agree. It seems to me the switch will result in better fitting websites, but not by using more standards. But I noticed this at the whole Eolas patent debacle: the IE team doesn't take enough responsibility regarding standards. Even though the code was fine they wanted developers to implement a javascript workaround for their own workaround solution in all their pages with embedded content. They didn't want to (or couldn't) pay Eolas so people now have to click to start embedded media. Even though it's a browser issue.

And the same happens in this case: if the browser vendor took its responsibility and improved its implementation, the whole issue  wouldn't exist for webdevelopers' if their sites written to standards (and valid) don't display properly. So the whole "the users have to be protected from broken pages" card is a smoke screen in my opinion.

Just be frank then: corporate partners costcutting is more important to Microsoft than the freedom of the web.

#technology

All you need now is a mirror to see your own shirt:

This Wi-Fi Detector Shirt will detect Wi-Fi hot spots around you and will show you a signal each time it detects a working Wi-Fi spot.The Wi-Fi shirt will even show you the signal strength of the Wi-Fi hot spot around you and will animate the signal dynamically.

Source: Sizelopedia via Cybernetnews

#technology

Oliver Rist brings us the latest rant on Leopard not being as rock-solid as Tiger. His informative article *cough* starts like this:

I'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista.

Lesson 1: Any article that starts with a sentence like that is not journalism. I thought better of pcmag.com! Well not anymore. Between that and the sidebar enty "Why social networking stinks" pcmag just lost a lot of credit in my book. No thanks Oliver Ristard.

Thanks to the Donationcoder thread (yeah I am the user justice, I'm not ripping off other people's posts)

#technology

It's impossible to know if software is worth the asking price, even if it's free, if you haven't used it. Value of software only becomes apparent over time. It takes time to evaluate and learn the software, to manage your information with it, and to fit it in your workflow. Only after that you know how valuable the software is to you. So how much should you pay the next time you hit that buy button?

Well that depends how much the developers are asking for it of course. And they're guessing as much as you do. They can prize their product out of the market, by being too expensive. Or they might prize it so low that you think it isn't up to the task.  They might not tell you the price at all and have you call their 'representatives'. They might give it away for free!

And God help you if an A-list blogger finds out that your premium printer is identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off. Joel Spolsky

ANY price SOFTWARE bring its own problems

So recently there seems to be a trend to allow customers to set their own price for the latest audio-cd or software package. If you want to pay £1 for it, that's fine. If you think it deserves £100, that's ok too. That's a very brave move on the part of the creators and I have respect for that. It must be hard to hand over the responsibility of valuing your software to people who do have no idea about the value.

As for letting people name the price they pay for the album, he said "It's fun to make people stop for a few seconds and think about what music is worth, that's just an interesting question to ask people."

But I have no idea how much more valuable the latest operating system is before I use it. Especially not if one variety is available for free and another costs me my monthly salary. How much money would you be prepared to pay for an iPhone for example? Other people paid $200 less, are you still happy?

Don't worry be happy

So it's almost impossible to value software, and nobody really knows how much it's worth. This only leaves us with two other options that I have not explored: donationware and software-as-a-service (SAAS). Use the software for an amount of time and decide how much money it's worth to you. And then just make the most of it.

#technology