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The recent hype and hullaballoo surrounding the Amazon Appstore has made me think. Do I ever really want to post any of my apps there? Short answer: No, never. Here's why.

First of all, I am immediately turned off by the sign up process. It says that initial sign up is free, but then after a year it will automatically charge you $100? I see a few problems with that. One, is there a way to cancel my account? I don't believe there is. I believe that, once you sign up for it, you're going to loose $100 to them per year no matter what you do. And secondly, $100? A person can get on the Android marketplace for $25, and that's a once per lifetime purchase. Simply for the money reasons, I won't be signing up.

Second, what's the real draw behind the Amazon AppStore? It says Amazon on it? That's not enough for me. The Android Market comes preinstalled on every android device that gets made. The Amazon market gets preinstalled on no devices, and can't even work on most AT&T droids. I don't see why, then, I should publish there.

Another problem with the appstore, which is a minor one, is the fact that there is no easy way to remove an app from sale. One has to go through an email channel, and plead to have an app removed from sale. Every other appstore has an easy way to remove it from sale, in most cases just a button. Even the struggling AppWorld has this. Seriously, amazon. Get with it.

Lastly, the free app of the day. This is the thing that's been getting the most negative publicity. Amazon, every day, decides to take one paid app and make it free for every Amazon AppStore customer. As a consumer, this is great. "Free apps!!" everyone says. But from a developer standpoint, this is really scary. Everyone will download your app for free. What if 1,000 people download your $1.99 app? You're out a large sum of money. Why? Amazon doesn't give you anything but free marketing, and no profit as a result of being the free app of the day. As a developer, i have no desire to loose all my possible profit for an app I put time into. No way.

In short, i will never put any of my apps on the Amazon AppStore. I see absolutely no compelling reason to do so, and even more reasons to stay far away.

All for now!

Well, the 2010 holidays have come and gone. For me, they were a time to spend with family, and also playing with my newest gadgets and tech. So here, I offer you a roundup of the neat things I got, and recommend that you go and check some of these things out for yourself.

First of all, we got, for our house, a new Hitachi TV. It's pretty swell, but that's not what I want to talk about. Remember way back when, when I had said that we had gotten a Logitech Revue from Adobe MAX? Well, a few weeks ago that arrived, but we were still without a tv to plug it in to. Well, that has changed.

We hooked it up, it completed its system updates, and within 20 minutes we were rolling. At first impression, it's a very slick and refined system. You can set it up to connect to your netflix account, cable box, tv, stereo system, and just about anything else that can be controlled. Currently, we have it set up to control only our TV, as the basic cable we subscribe to does not come with a cable box. Now, many people had complained about the controller that goes with the Revue. I do agree on some level with their complaints (i.e. it's bulky, and almost too big), but to a much larger level I do not agree. Honestly, I enjoy being able to sit down on my couch and dial up a youtube video or web address without having to use the keypad on my remote. Having the full keyboard there is extremely helpful. Pair this entire system with the logitech harmony app for iPhone or Android, and you have a perfect home entertainment system. I highly recommend this one.

The next thing I received is a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex. This drive has 1TB of storage, which is about triple what I had before. Half of this drive is now my Time Machine backup, and the other half has become my main unit for external storage. I don't have much to say about this drive, except that it's fast, reliable, and small. I highly recommend this one too.

Lastly, the thing that I liked the most was the Nook. For those of you who don't know, the nook is essentially Barnes & Noble's answer to the rest of the E-Reader market. Now, I did not get a NOOKColor, nor did I want one. I don't have much faith in an LCD display being as readable as an E-Paper display. I trust those much more. So far, it is a very fast, ver versatile e-reader. I can from it very easily download books off the B&N market, and also use Borders Desktop to sync books to it from the Borders eBook store. The E-Paper display seems to be very quick to refresh, and the small touchscreen on the bottom also seems much more responsive than I had expected it to be. This too, I highly recommend for any student or anyone who reads a lot and doesn't like to carry around many books.

In the end, the holidays went pretty well for me. What about for you? Let everyone know how your holidays turned out in the comments!

All for now!

In this tutorial, I show you how to get an AIR app up and running on your android device in less than 10 minutes!

All for Now!

As everyone out there on the internet already probably knows, Adobe this year at their annual MAX conference has given out some pretty fantastic prizes. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend MAX this year, however my father, James, is currently there. So what has he come away with? Well, here's the major things.

First, at yesterday's keynote address, amidst a slew of announcements about new features in the Flash and Flex platform, Adobe gave all MAX attendees a free Motorola Droid 2. Their hope in doing this is that everyone will take these fancy new devices and install AIR and get developing with the new version of Flash Builder that the announced. Flash Builder "Burrito", as it's called, has the Flex SDK 4.5 Hero built in. It has built in a template for an AIR for android AIR application. I have yet to try building for this, as my small Motorola Backflip cannot handle AIR. Once James gets home with the Droid, I hope to try it out and post some videos of how to get an AIR app running.

Yesterday the also announced some fantastic new technologies that will be built into Flash player. First of which was completely accelerated 3D graphic in flash running at 0% CPU. That's amazing. Now, for me, that will not make a difference as I still have an ancient macbook and just watching youtube videos makes my computer's fans go into overdrive. Also they officially announced AIR for TV. I have a feeling that this will eventually be installed onto Google TV devices as an additional platform for building apps.

In addition to this, at the end of the keynote address today, every MAX attendee received a free Logitech Revue with Google TV. This really is a fantastic giveaway. It shows that Adobe is really pushing towards alternative technologies to iOS for entertainment. Again, I haven't tried this out for myself, but once I have one in the house, I will try it out and post some videos.

In all, it seems from afar as if this year's Adobe MAX conference is turning out to be quite the fantastic experience. It's too bad I missed it!

All for now!

Image via Wikipedia

"In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store."

"We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need."