Contribute to shutup.css on Github

Shutup, the custom stylesheet from Steven Frank that automatically hides the comments section of many popular websites, is now hosted on Github. You can contribute to it by adding features or a bug fix. Thanks to Maximilian Schoening (@mschoening) from Bylinebreak and Steven (@stevenf).

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It Could Be a Mac App: LiveStats 2, A Real-Time Look at Your Visitors

Once upon a time, there was a group of guys somewhere near London that believed website analytics could have been so much more. They could have been different, focused on users. Then, it came the day that belief took shape and they crafted LiveStats, the one and only live traffic monitoring web application. And I mean “one and only”, because anything else was just nothing compared to LiveStats. The guys were called GoSquared, and maybe they didn’t realize they created a “king” back then.

LiveStats was a great tool, I’ve been using it since it first release, and it provided a great way to monitor your incoming traffic in real time. But hey, why am I talking like this? “Was”, “provided”? Because the GoSquared team has just released the 2.0 version of LiveStats, and many things have changed. LiveStats has just got a lot better.

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Apple Rolls Out iTunes Web Previews for the App Store

A few months after the iTunes Store got web previews, Apple finally decided to implement the feature for the App Store too. The layout of the page is clean and very similar to the App Store’s one, but you can’t obviously buy an app from there. Also, Apple removed the “customers also bought” form the bottom of the page.  It was about time, anyway.

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App Store Web

App Store Web

Marco Arment on iPad Apps Sales

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“But there’s another dilemma: it looks like there will be significant pressure, both political and technical, for universal apps that run on both the iPad and the iPhone. Like multiple-iPhone owners, this only counts as one sale, since one purchase of the app will run on both devices. So for any apps that use a universal edition, their entire existing customer-base will result in zero new sales. “

3D Bookshelf: When eBooks Feel the Power of Graphics

They say that most of times releasing a product is just about good timing. Understanding what people need in that precise moment, being sure that your app will be the only one that can appease the users for months. Until a new app will show up and beat yours to death, people usually adds. Then there’s another situation, pretty weird actually: you announce and release a product while one of your biggest competitors has announced a similar app that will go out in a few months and it promises to revolutionize your same market niche. Yeah, that sucks.

In this case, if you consider that a) the biggest competitor is Apple and b) the aforementioned app is iBooks, you can easily realize that c) it’s a game over before the game even starts. Man I wouldn’t recommend this stuff to my worst enemy. Or maybe yes. Anyway, fortunately the Ideal Biunary guys are not my enemies, and their newest app 3D Bookshelf is very good and promising.

Even though it’s very similar to iBooks and Classics, we should take a look at it. Because it has some chances to survive.

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An Open Letter to Loren Brichter, Developer of Tweetie

Dear Loren,

Let me state this straight up: I don’t want to sound like one of those creepy fanboys that daily knock at your door asking for a “BETA VERZION PLZZ”. These are just my thoughts, hoping that you won’t be disappointed by my position.

I understand that making a good app requires time. A lot of time. Guess how much time an high-quality app such as Tweetie would require. But the situation is getting a little bit awkward.I’m talking about Tweetie for Mac and the long-awaited 2.0 version which, in your words, was due to be released after Tweetie 2 for iPhone. You said Tweetie for Mac was upcoming back in September. It’s four months ago.

Now, please define “upcoming” Loren, because I don’t get it.

Really, I do understand that you don’t have a 30+ people working team and that you’re an independent developer, but you can’t treat the people who purchased Tweetie for Mac like this. They believed in your product, I still believe in it and I’m sure many other people do, but this is just wrong. Promising an upcoming huge update and then not giving a single hint about it. No news about the development, no replies to the users who daily ask you on Twitter about it - nothing.

I agree with the “don’t promise. just ship” policy, but the problem is you actually promised something months ago and never shipped anything. Not a single blog post about it. To me, it seems like you just don’t care about the situation and prefer to cover this buzz with silence. This is wrong.

And you know why? Because customers want to trust the person they’re paying. It’s not about “I give you money, you give me updates”, it’s about believing that the person you gave part of your money to will care about you and your trust in the future. I strongly believe that an application isn’t just some lines of code thrown up together, it’s so much more. A good application can change a life, I dare to say so. I would have never been able to achieve 10k Twitter followers if it wasn’t for Tweetie. It’s become part of my workflow, so seamlessly integrated that I just can’t imagine how can I work without it now.

But you’re making that fantasy a real thing, Loren. I’m finding myself looking for a new Twitter client for Mac everyday - I still haven’t found a good one. That’s because I still trust you, man. It’s just that I don’t understand this way of acting.

Glad to be proven wrong.

Your truly,

Federico Viticci