Aloha Cocoa

To celebrate the launch of Flickpad, we are giving away copies of Flickpad, Flickr Pro accounts, and an iPad!  Each day from today until Friday, we will post a message on Twitter. All you need to do is retweet the message and follow @flickpad, and you are automatically entered to win.  Each day, we will randomly select ten winners for a copy of Flickpad and one winner for a one year Flickr Pro account. Finally, on Friday, if we reach 815 or more followers, we will choose one lucky follower who will get Flickpad, a Flickr Pro account, and a brand new iPad!  You will be notified via direct message if you win.  Good luck and enjoy Flickpad.

Contest Rules:
1) You must have at least 10 Twitter followers to be eligible
2) One retweet enters you for all days of the contest
3) Multiple/Excessive entries will make you ineligible
4) Obvious spam or fake Twitter accounts will be treated as ineligible
5) Anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible
6) Make sure @flickpad is in your retweet
7) Make sure to follow @flickpad
8) Must be US resident to win iPad

Update (8/24/2010) - The contest officially ended on 8/20/2010 but we will still be giving away an iPad when we hit 815 Twitter followers.  Make sure to follow the rules.  One tweet and a follow is all it takes to enter.

Facebook is awesome, and I love browsing photos from all my friends, but I must say that I find it cumbersome.  I often miss new photos that have been posted because I don’t happen to check Facebook soon enough after photos were posted and they got lost in the news feed.  Also, clicking through albums often leaves me with a browser history that makes using the back button in the browser pretty much useless.

When the iPad was first announced, I saw a huge opportunity to improve the way people view Facebook photos.  The iPad by it’s very nature, encourages interaction and enjoyment of photos.  The iPad received a lot of negative press early on because of what it was not, a laptop replacement.  To me, the iPad has always been meant to primarily sit on a coffee table and take the place of magazines, newpapers, tv guides, remote controls, internet browsers, handheld games, game consoles, and more.  

It is with that use in mind that we designed Flickpad.  While having your morning coffee or vegging out after work, you can quickly catch up with all the photos your friends have been posting on Facebook.  It really is addictive and fun to use.

Check out Flickpad in the app store.

I am one of those people that tote around a 17” MacBook Pro and love it.  The MBP has been my primary development machine for going on four years now and I continue to think it is the best setup for the average nomadic Mac developer.  Even with the 17” MBP though, extra screen real estate is always nice to have, and historically I have used an external secondary monitor via the DVI out of the MBP.  This is a great setup that mainly developers end up using. Recently though, I have taken it one step further and I must say, I am totally loving the new setup.

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There is no doubt that the AppStore has revolutionized the distribution and sale of mobile applications, but for all its success, it could use some major improvement in a couple areas.

One of the most publicized issues is the app approval process and the seemingly random nature with which guidelines are enforced.  To be fair, this one is more of an Apple failing than the AppStore in particular.

The main issue with the AppStore itself is not the apps that are getting rejected but the ones that are being let in.  There appears to be no minimum standard in terms of quality for app approval.  Apple likes to boast about the number of apps in the AppStore but sadly a huge percent of them are complete junk.  This has resulted in the AppStore’s single biggest problem, separating the wheat from the chaff.  A large percent of the apps have little to no sales, yet they continue to clog the store.  One particular category that annoys me is the apps that just provide a slideshow of photos, often with blatant theft of copyrighted images.  Endless variations of the same app but with different photos litter the store.

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