A bit of technology

There's a nice story on Phandroid about Spacetime Studios — creators of Pocket Legends mobile MMORPG. Their story is that they make more money from Android users then from iOS users even though there is still no in-app payments in Android world. This is rather uncommon as of today. But I think I know the answer - Android lacks high quality games. So such titles (and yes, Pocket Legends are awesome!) are rare. So they do generate a lot of money - people are hungry for hi-end entertainment here.

Thinking about making Android app? Make it REALLY hi-end! Everyone will love it!

A few days ago new audio player for Android was released. It is called PowerAMP. And I think it is the best out there! But why? Well...

First of all it supports tons of formats: MP3, OGG, FLAC, APE, WMA, WAV, WV and some more. That automatically makes it better then everything else, because all other players use Android's own sound sub-system which does not support lossless audio in any way. There are some players with lossless support, but they all are buggy, unstable and eat battery like Godzilla eats people.

Next major feature if equalizer and tone control with all bells and whistles. Yet again Android does not have support for EQ and every player lives with that. EQ is good and does not kill your device's performance together with battery.

And there are a lot of minor for most people features, like having both music library together with folder listing, tag editor, tag encoding chooser, widgets, lock screen, etc - lots of them!

PowerAMP has a trial version, full one costs 5$ - not much and definitely worth every penny. It works on 2.0+ devices, supports low resolution screens and works on older devices without FPU. It can be laggy and will drain battery on devices with FPU, but hey - it's the price to pay, sound processing is very resource intensive. So if You lack FPU then either upgrade your device or live with that.

All in all PowerAMP is great and there's no choise. Many people were waiting for proper audio player for years and now it is in Android Market. Grab your copy today!

Translation:

Metal hook and durable string will save a lot of data from accidental erasure if you have a PC.

That might sound dumb today at first sight, but back in the days journalized file systems were rare and power outage could easily destroy data on your HDD. The brilliance of advice is that it has potential even today - this trick prevents cleaner woman from unplugging your servers/pcs like they love doing every day.

LA Times runs a story about why SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters. And the man behind is Friedhelm Hillebrand back in 1985 (:

Check out this image! Click to view full size (: