What in the World

The What in the World contest returns this week! The first person to post in the comments what the attached picture is of will win a Belkin Retractable Travel Mouse. Good luck!

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Facebook Open Graph API

As you may know, Facebook announced yesterday some key advancements around their Open Graph API. Essentially these are new features that extend more FB functions outside the FB walled garden. For example, this will allow developers to add the 'like' function to a site and that is automatically fed back into the user's FB stream. I encourage you to read about these new capabilities and consider ways they can benefit our clients. Check it out!

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Adobe Stops All Flash & Air Dev for iPhone OS

Recently, Apple changed their policy for Apps to only be written in certain code. This was to supposedly boost the quality of Apps available, but one downfall of this is that Adobe's Flash and Air dev department has had to stop supporting iPhone App development, which also means iPad development (since it runs on a similar OS to the iPhone & iTouch).

Mike Chambers of Adobe is losing trust in Apple and says that Adobe can no longer promote the closed system that Apple is trying to create. The future is open platform development and Apple is instead trying to close off their system. Creating a closed system hurts not only developers, but the consumers as well.

What happens next? Adobe will be beefing up it's Android support, which is quickly becoming the future's "superphone." -- I am still not too sure about that, but it's on the right track and is getting help without really asking for any.

To me, it seems pretty obvious that Apple wants to boost the rep of their apps. They want to get rid of the shovel-ware Apps on their network that are equally rampant on the Nintendo Wii. Honestly though, more than anything, I just like seeing these two big companies throw punches at each other. Haha.

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McAfee Anti-Virus Company Goes to Court

My oh my, how times have changed. When I was a wee bit younger, I remember McAfee being one of the best Anti-Virus programs around! It didn't take up too much of your computer's resources, always protected well, and was a pretty much nag-free piece of software.

Jump ahead to 2010 and McAfee is going to court because of misleading pop-up advertisements and unwanted purchases. It's sad to see a company that was once so high, crumble to the ground. Companies get desperate and really just dig themselves in deeper.

I had the pleasure of fixing a computer a few weeks back that was "infected by viruses." To my surprise, one of the most annoying viruses on the machine was actually McAfee AV, which was spamming the user with messages about viruses and needing to purchase McAfee to resolve them. It was spamming so much the computer was pretty much unusable - no joke!

Not only was it a pain in the rear to close the constant pop-ing up windows, but they made uninstalling the software a real treat too. The attack required me to use all sorts of ninja skills that I've acquired over the years, some I didn't even realize I had. In the end, I defeated the beast that is McAfee AV.

What should you use instead? I highly recommend Microsoft Security Essentials, which is completely free. http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

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iPad Printing is Possible Right Now!

The geniuses over at Theformgroup have found a way to print from your iPad. No need to buy any $10-$15 app for this baby*!

It's beautiful! Haha ;)

Apple - 0

Consumers - +1

*I have no idea if this would damage your iPad in any way, so I would not recommend doing this.

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Twitter 101 For Businesses

I'm in the process of setting up several Twitter accounts for various tasks and projects. Visiting twitter.com today I noticed a dedicated section they have created specifically for businesses, including the ubiquitous Twitter 101 training. I've seen many flavors of this over the past few years, but most are not specific to businesses, and none came straight from Twitter. Check it out!

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Boxing Goes Social - And Gets Personal

Earlier this week Russian boxer Wladimir Klitschko challenged David Haye, Britain's World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion, to a throwdown - on Facebook. His pointed an personal challenge to Haye is not the first of it's kind, and probably not the first via Social Media either, but I'm fascinated by the way Social Media has permeated all aspects of our culture, even professional boxing. The notion of a professional boxer creating the video, then posting it to Facebook is somewhat amusing, but that's what publicists are for. I plan to throw down my next digital gauntlet via the SRG InfoTech Blog, which will of course be published via Facebook and Twitter. Let the social smack talk begin!

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