Good to see yesterday Apple lowering the price of their iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks from $1.29 to 99 cents a track across the board.

They didn’t really have a choice with AmazonMP3 offering a better selection. ARS Technica raises a good point below.

What remains unclear is whether users will be able to upgrade their DRMed songs to iTunes Plus songs for free (since the songs are now priced exactly the same), or whether they will still have to pay extra to upgrade.

As of this writing this morning the iTunes Plus section in iTunes still describes this as an “upgrade” (pictured above) which it very much is any time you leave DRM content for DRM-free. They aren’t advertising the price change yet. I clicked on a few random tracks and they were all priced $0.99. No idea yet if the upgrade will turn from 30 cents a track to free upgrade. Apple has a chance to score some major points here.

Leopard has 300+ new features
And speaking of scoring points, yesterday was also the release of their 300+ features in Leopard which comes out next Friday 10/26, most likely at the customary 6pm release time. This was probably the most active thing people were posting about in RSS. Credit Chris Pirillo with the first mention on Twitter, and he has a nice roundup of his favorite Leopard features. I’m still digesting the list and will wait to comment in detail until I have Leopard in hand and installed which hopefully will be next Friday night.

Led Zeppelin to offer entire library for digital download
Led Zeppelin has announced they will be offering their entire library online for digital download (DRM-free too?) — finally. How long before The Beatles fall into suit? Zeppelin has timed this announcement with their one off concert reunion with Bonham’s son Jason on the skins.

AmazonMP3 developers
Back to AmazonMP3 and related, for fellow developer readers, in the 10/3/07 update of Amazon E-Commerce API, Amazon made available a new search index in the US locale: MP3 downloads. There’s our ticket for incorporating DRM-free music into our applications.

It’s a great thing seeing this DRM-free movement finally gaining legs and moving. Perhaps in a year or two we’ll be able to buy any song and/or complete album DRM-free online.

When it comes to the Techcrunch40 $50,000 winner Mint contracting Yodlee’s web scraping to get information that’s not being given them by banks with permission, Gerald writes:

“Well, OK. Gotta get after it somehow. I’m not overly concerned HOW the sausage gets made. I just want to eat.”

Oh Gerald, you can’t really be serious, can you? So you’d enjoy the stolen TV the neighbor gave you even if you knew it was stolen? Web scraping is a violation of the TOS of most sites and considered very, very bad netiquette. Unless/until Mint stops using scraping, I’ll be passing on their service. I don’t care if they are the most promising new financial Web pooh point app on the planet, how much they may or may not be able to make managing our finances easier and so on, scraping without permission is unethical behavior.

If Mint — or in this case their contracted provider Yodlee — can’t or won’t get the information through legitimate means — IE. cutting deals with financial institutions and using APIs — why should I trust them with any of my username and passwords? If they can’t follow the Terms of Service of other sites, why should I believe they will follow their own privacy guidelines with my or your sensitive financial information? What else will they fudge in the effort to provide a useful service to us? Sure, they are using TRUSTe and probably keep an otherwise clean kitchen, but this is a corrosive detail.

I covered why screenscraping is bad from a developer perspective over two years ago. My feelings on scraping, if anything, have hardened on the subject after continuing to see web app after web app acting like scraping is some kind of reliable business model or the right thing to do. And in a financial application where trust all around is essential, scraping is the rock chip in the windshield, soon to spider unless filled.

ProbargainHunter is right to label scraping “shady”:

This situation probably puts Mint in very uncomfortable position at very inconvenient time. It is ironic how life of a startup can depend on such a seemingly small thing. Web scraping has always been a shady business and I am surprised that Yodlee has gone with it so far.

Sorry for the cliche but just because somebody can doesn’t mean they should. Mint’s freshness, for me at least, has gone stale. Maybe I’m in the minority caring about these kinds of details, but so be it. I don’t just blindly do things because they are popular and/or provide me some benefit.

The last few days we’ve been experimenting with the newest overhyped blog service called Blogrush on our group blog and this morning we’re disappointed to see this message:

If your RSS reader was anywhere near a lot of marketing blogs these last couple days, you’ve probably read something about Blogrush. Although I didn’t count, but I’d say the number of posts seen yesterday alone was near 100.

Blogrush is a new sidebar widget that you put in the blog sidebar and displays contextually relevant posts to other blogs. It is a 1:1 link swap. For every impression where the Blogrush widget shows on your blog, a contextually relevant post from your blog is shown one time in the sidebar widget on another blog. There is also a ten level referral network that is being over-promoted as the promise land of traffic, but is way too early to be able to verify factually. I’m not going to use our referral link or any other link to Blogrush in this post because I think that would devalue the credibility of this post and because at this point I can’t recommend this service to any blogger with a serious face.

Blogrush originally launched on Friday afternoon promising to show stats within 24-48 hours. Here we are on Tuesday and those stats still haven’t materialized. Scaling problems? Of course. Beta? Of course. A long excuse from the guy behind the service, John Reese, saying they were blown away with the response, but the stats are still coming. Promise! Of course.

Take another look at the first screenshot above and Blogrush widget message:

We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes.

How many readers will understand who that message belongs to? A reference to “the site” is not obviously the Blogrush sidebar widget, but more likely the site that is hosting the widget. This is not a good example of how to degrade gracefully. A better option would be to show nothing, yes? No?

Goodbye Blogrush until you get it together
We removed the Blogrush widget from our group blog temporarily and may experiment with it again when/if things stabilize. It’s nothing personal but why should readers see ungraceful degrading messages? I’m not a big fan of third party Javascript in the sidebar anyway.

Update 3:38pm PST: Blogrush stats finally appeared an hour or so. See the comments for additional details.

Despite the title, CSSVista runs in Windows XP, and will allow you to edit Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in a split screen interface so you can see how your CSS changes will impact the actual design.

CSS is a freeware download. This could be handy WYSIWYG editor for blog theme designers.

UK Software developer Andy Brice smelled something foul when he created a program and saw five star award graphics from a number of different software download sites for competitor products.

He did some digging and found most of the download sites that gave him five stars gave almost all of his competitors five star awards too. Brice further tested the theory by creating a completely worthless application that was a text file saying “this software does nothing at all, it doesn’t even run” and named it awardmestars. You can Google awardmestars and find different download sites where it’s offered including the one pictured above.

Next, he used an auto submitter program to submit his worthless program to 1033 different software download sites. As of his blog post and some submissions are still pending 7% of the download sites that accepted Awardmestars gave him an award:

The truth is that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these bottom-feeders will be put out of business by the continually improving search engines, leaving only the better sites. I think there is still a role for good quality download sites. But there needs to be more emphasis on quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. reviews).

Since the site opened for business I don’t recall ever displaying an award on tdscripts.com. We do display a PayPal certified badge. Even when I first started out I carefully chose what sites to submit my scripts and I’m still very picky. When the popular site hotscripts opened for business they spidered all my scripts and listed them and then started sending me emails asking me to update the listings “you submitted.”

Like Mr. Brice I realize some of these software and script download sites are valid and provide honest reviews, but I’ve always questioned what seemed a clear conflict of interest with these awards buttons which often “must link back” to the awarding site. It’s not that I’m selfish about linking back to other sites, but if I earn an award it needs to be worth something. It can’t be something that anybody who submits something gets. That’s not an award, that’s a reciprocal link exchange.

It’s not just software where this happens. The blog here has received a few awards over the years, some of which I’ve acknowledged on the homepage others of which I haven’t after seeing how often the highest rating is awarded.

I decided to check my own backyard Hmm Reviews and see how many times an A+ grade has been awarded. Any guesses how many A+ grades have been given? I’ll give you a hint and keep in mind this includes a few paid reviews, the answer involves a zero.

From the list as of this writing there are 19 A- or better review grades and three F grades, one of which was a paid review. Perhaps Hmm Reviews should create badges for B- or better grades? Why award a badge to some site/product/service that is average or worse unless it’s purely done for link SEO reasons as mentioned above (something I wouldn’t be interested in doing)? Or maybe just create a badge for A and A+? Even more rare, even more valuable.

I welcome below your thoughts below on the pros and cons of creating a legitimate awards badge system.

Don’t laugh, I can think of a couple legitimate uses for the fake name generator. It’s not only name, fictional data is randomly generated containing the following fields: name, address, zip code, email address, phone number, mother’s maiden name, birthdate, credit card number and social security number (remember, all bogus info).

For developers needing dummy data to test their program, they offer free bulk generation in seven different output formats: MySQL, MsSQL, CSV, tab and pipe delimited, EXCEL and HTML table.

Don’t want to use your real name blogging and elsewhere online like Thomas Hawk? No problem, you could be Jewel B. Day, George Smith, Bobby Clutts or Marie Daggett. I’d rather read a comment here from Wayne Stallworth than Anonymous (another good possible usage). Need a pen name for that great novel you’re writing? Now you know where to go.

Added to our growing Hmm generators list.

I found myself paying more attention to the game component than the passing news stories, but diggtris remains a curious Tetris + digg mashup. What about digg these days? My own interest in the site has lessened since they started trying to be the digg of everything, versus focusing primarily on tech. For better or worse, Slashdot has kept its roots.

As for making games out of non-gaming sites like digg, this is an area I’ve been interested in for quite some time. There are a lot of websites out there that could be made stickier by adding some sort of integrated games function. I don’t mean just throwing up an arcade of Flash games, I mean some sort of game that is played while people interact with the site normally. A market exists here for gaming developers.

This morning I checked out a new developer-oriented beta project from Google called Google Gears which boldly promises: “enabling offline apps.”

Google is trying to solve one of the deficiencies with JavaScript by enabling saving of data locally.

Pros
1. Runs on Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.2+, Linux
2. store and serve applications locally
3. store data in a local relational database
4. run asynchronous JavaScript calls locally
5. browser extension is open source. If anything bad is going on it will be spotted by the developer community.
6. Uses SQLite DB syntax. If you are familiar with SQLite use say with PHP, you’ll be able to get up to speed fairly quickly.

Cons
1. Everything must run in the browser. This could be a real deal breaker if you want to have a unique UI for your application. Google Gears should be viewed as a supplement to programs viewed in browsers.
2. Client must download and install the Google Gears browser extension. While it seems not much more than downloading and running a Firefox add-in, it is an exe file. Some users could be leery of downloading an exe. Will they get Google Toolbar? No. Will they get some other Google program they don’t want slowing down their browsing? No.
3. Client must approve execution of local saving to each application. There is a checkbox that is unchecked which will allow the client to allow all applications from the domain that looks like this:

4. for users (like myself) that frequently use multiple machines, I may not want local databases duplicated across each machine. Programs could (and should) offer people like me the option to choose which machine(s) to save local data and which ones not. There doesn’t appear to be any option yet (?) to allow me to access data from another Google Gears database on the network, nor is there any option yet for allowing sharing of resources from multiple domains on the user’s machine via source:

Sometimes web applications on different origins may want to share resources. We are investigating ideas for granting permissions across origins.

Developer links
Google Gears developer area
Google Gears Groups - 241 members as of this writing
First time Google Gears tutorial

Demo applications (these all require Google Gears installed)
Google provides four different demos:

1. database phrases - store user created phrases in a database
2. resource store - shows how to create an remove a ’store’ which is the equivalent of a local file save operation.
3. Managed resource demo - capture a collection of files online and store them together offline in a newly created store
4. Workerpool demo - shows how to run an expensive operation asynchronously

Possible real world uses
The first benefit that comes to mind when thinking about a Google Gears enabled environment are really power Office-like applications in the browser. I’m certain this is the primary motivator to get Google Gears installed everywhere. How long before this is installed as part of the Google Toolbar? I’m guessing not that long.

From a developer point of view being able to store more than you could store in a cookie could be very handy.

For example, let’s say you want to give your website visitors the ability to store searches they make on your website in their own searchable database offline any time. Or maybe you have a fun game you’d like them to be able to play offline and store their high scores. They can play the game and store the results of games in the database and then rejoin their highest score to the online server when they are back online.

How secure is the data? Google’s response:

Google Gears data files are protected with the user’s operating system login credentials. Users with separate login names cannot access each other’s Google Gears data files, as enforced by the operating system … two people using the same OS login could theoretically access each other’s Gears data files, just as they could access any other file on the machine.

Others are saying
I will continue to update this section as I find others saying interesting things about Google Gears today.

USA Today: “The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”
Paul is receiving Google Gears sync errors.
GigaOm points out there is a new version of Google Reader with offline functionality. Another great use of offline functionality. The walls of “you must be connected to play” are breaking down.

Onward
I can see some interesting uses for Google Gears but need some more time to play around with it. Perhaps later today. Any readers built something with Google Gears yet?

Update 7:37am PST: Wow, there is also a Google Mashup Editor:

The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.

Lots of activity late yesterday!

Nice 3D view of Safeco Field, Microsoft.

Today Microsoft released a 3D versions of New York City and other locations while Google released a new street side map view.

Beyond tourists, virtual travelers and developer creations (count on those in the coming days), this won’t be as useful until detailed maps are available in every major city. Would also like to see this not be so US-centric. What about other places in the world? Seems like Microsoft has more cities than Google pimped out but who knows how long that will remain. Whomever gets the most street-level 3D maps of the entire world and makes them available for mashups in other applications first is going to be at least the short term victor.

Google has extensive street side views in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York. Want to walk the Las Vegas strip tonight without getting tired feet or spending a penny, try this:

Google’s implementation is better than what Microsoft’s street side views back in February 2006 and the A9 street view from Amazon. None of this has done much to increase Microsoft’s search penetration over Google, so take the eye candy part of my title literally.

Microsoft’s version also requires downloading an add-on in Firefox (see below) whereas Google’s does not (correction: Google Maps does require newer version of Adobe Flash player).

In the Google street view demo video their street side guy or whatever he’s called has some resemblance to the Channel 9 guy, check it out:

Odd that they wouldn’t use a Google guy type character with different colors. Strange coincidence?

Phillip from Google Blogoscoped points out Google is also releasing something called mapplets, via the mapplets developer documentation:

“Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.”

You can try out some mapplets in the mapplets directory.

Microsoft and Google have had a showdown at the map corral before. Virtual Earth vs. Google Maps was the first time.

I knew about Skype Extras after buying one of the commercial extras (Pamela Systems) but didn’t really expect them to actively promote Skype as a serious gaming platform. Does this make sense?

Wagner James Au seems to think no:

This is a great idea bound to succeed– rather, it would have been, if it had been launched a few years ago. Now, they’re competing in an already crowded market.

Is Skype starting to look like a shoe two sizes too small for a foot? Have they forgotten about what made them popular: good call quality? Or is this a good strategic move?

Being a developer who has created and sold games commercially since 1999 and for fun since the eighties (my how my gaming gray is showing), I’m definitely checking the platform out in more detail before making any serious decisions, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not skeptical of Skype as a successful gaming platform. It makes some sense for them to move this direction but I can’t help hoping they don’t forget their core service.

Should eBay add a games channel? No, they do auctions. Should we be playing the next MMORPG through the PayPal games channel? Umm, no. Skype admittedly makes more sense than these examples but I can’t help thinking this stuff could clog the pipes. The smart turned dumb Skype phone?

Another example elsewhere
Wordpress 2.2 released sans tagging and instead of keeping their widget code an add-on plugin they baked it into the core code. Good for those who used and relied on the widgets but of questionable merit for those who don’t use widgets. Somebody call a plumber or get some Draino ready as the Wordpress core becomes even more constipated. Spin it, Matt.

Skype game dev links
Back to Skype land, have any developer readers scoped out what this Skype GameXN platform offers yet? New paint smell I realize but any early thoughts, concerns, issues, compliments?

The Skype Games Dev Channel is the place to start. The list of existing Skype games includes some party favorites: chess, bingo, a Yahtzee clone called Jazz, checkers and Backgammon (played that yet, Sterling?). Must admit I’ve never played a single Skype game yet, so I need to try that experience on for size before saying any more.

I’m downloading and digging in.