As a facebook hacker, I'd be interesting in seeing what the instructional popups you made look like.
I think asking for the bare minimum as you need it is absolutely the way to go as tons of people bounce out of apps that need all kinds of permissions before they get to even see the app. I get sick of seeing apps that want offline publish access before I even know what the app is because the developers are lazy and just request all permissions available.
Article cleary states which Android phone was used in the test but doesnt state which iPhone was used. It just says iphone 4.2 and iphone 4.3. Does that mean a iphone 3g on 4.2 and a 3gs on ios 4.3?
And the countless crappy paid windows video converter apps that don't credit FFMpeg and all they do is do shell out to ffmpeg. I get a chuckle out of the the FFMpeg wall of shame (which is honestly smaller than it should be): http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html
Yeah I went down this route and lost a lot of time also. I ended up cross compiling it for windows on ubuntu and it has worked out well enough but even that took nearly 2 days to track down how to do it and then add the filters and plugins I needed (for doing things I took for granted as being easy like video rotations, overlays, etc).
FFmpeg has to be the best example of OSS done wrong. While it is incredibly powerful in what it can do and is overall a great project, it is crazy difficult to get it to build right, documentation of anything is scattered across newsgroups, the developers are always having arguments like this lately, and the API has breaking changes all the time, including completely removing functionality without any sort of replacement.
I never understand why people get overly emotional about teacher salaries but not other public positions like fire, police, military, etc. While I empathize (my mother and 2 sisters are teachers), they do only work 9 months out of the year, and less than 40 hours per week. And teachers insist on remaining unionized, basically ensuring bad (non-criminal) teachers can't be fired once they get tenured after 2-3 years in most states. And the degree needed isn't difficult or technical to earn compared to laywers, doctors, engineers, etc. So I think their salaries at their current levels are justified.
I created a free test server on Windows Azure a few weeks ago with remote desktop access enabled and had failed login attempts within 2 minutes of the server going live, without publishing the ip address or dns name anywhere.
This makes sense as to why a lot of recruiters don't tell you who the company is in the email (for ones that they are not the sole recruiter on) because they don't want you to apply directly and lose out on their 15% cut. However, 2 minutes of googling and you can usually find the same job posting on dice or monster with the company name on it.
The app store effect on pricing will be coming to ebooks. With e-books being way overpriced (sometimes more than the print version), this has to be a good thing for consumers and authors - at least to an extent.
Getting my masters in computer science was the only time I ever used those tools (thankfully). It was somewhat helpful to learn a few of the UML diagrams as they are referenced in design pattern books, etc. - but I've never had a desire to create my own diagrams, let alone use a tool to create them for me.
Its true that you can't have an in-app donation process but you can have the user fill out their information and have them press a donate button that opens up a Safari window to process the actual credit card transaction.