Today during Google’s Nexus One event, Android lead Andy Rubin revealed something that’s sure to be a relief for Android users and developers alike: you’ll eventually be able to store a vast number of applications on your phone — even large ones — the same way you can on an iPhone. The change will come with a future software update, when Android begins storing applications as encrypted files on the SD card. Rubin didn’t say how long it will be until we see the update, but it’s clear that the team is working to resolve the problem.
Up until now, developers have been hampered by the fact that every Android phone to date has had a relatively small amount of storage available for applications (a couple hundred megabytes as opposed to the iPhone’s many gigabytes). Apps are stored in the phone’s ROM rather than the phone’s removable (and cheaper) SD storage, which grants developers enhanced protection against having their apps against piracy. But it’s also proven to be a handicap.
Many of the iPhone’s most popular applications are graphics intensive, rich games. But these games often require high quality visual assets to go with them. The iPhone handles these fine — you can download massive apps over Wi-Fi or through iTunes sync. On the other hand, while the newest Android phones are certainly capable of rendering high quality graphics, their ability to handle large apps is limited by the phone’s available storage. Yes, developers can choose to download their app’s assets to the SD card after the initial install, but this isn’t a good experience for the end user.
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On deviantART, the site for anyone who thinks they are an artist, member submissions are known as “deviations.” The site’s been around since 2000, attracts 33 million monthly visitors (comScore), and just recently passed its 100 millionth deviation. It is, appropriately enough, a short story about gay sex.
I could quote from it, but it is more of a deviation from good writing than anything else. I might as well just show the “Blizzard” drawing above featuring some sort of black unicorn frolicking in the snow with an arctic fox. How should I put this? There are some creations which are better left in a drawer and maybe shouldn’t be shared with the world. Seriously, would you pay $150 for a print of this drawing?
I’m sure there’s some great art on deviantART among the 100 million submissions of drawings, photos, videos, and stories, but they are hard to find among the 99.9 million pieces of mediocrity which seem to fill up the site. It’s as though every kid from your high school art class who dropped out to draw dragons is on the site, telling the other drop-outs how amazing their art is. Some of it is so bad that it’s given rise to parody blog divineART, whose slogan is, “When art becomes visual pollution!”
But, hell, what do I know? Those 33 million visitors a month are enough to classify the site as mainstream (shhh, don’t tell).
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If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked.
It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.
Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them.
This isn’t a security issue, of course, and in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. For the full list, simply download this TXT file, but here are a couple:
- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters
What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past, rendering them ‘too obvious’. If the latter, that means this list is probably representative of most Web services.
(Thanks to Dario Manoukian for the tip; a quick search turns up a post on The Wundercounter featuring the list too)
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Clear Channel Radio already had mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Chumby devices, but today it’s adding an Android version to the line-up.
Not that there’s a lack of decent radio streaming applications on well, any platform these days, but here goes: Clear Channel Radio’s iheartradio app gives users free access to some 350 American radio stations, including a couple of artist-hosted stations from the likes of Christina Aguilera, Megadeth, Eagles and Weezer.
The app also enables you to get ‘frequently updated’ traffic reports for large markets including New York, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco and Houston.
Like its iPhone / iPod Touch sister, the iheartradio app for Android can be configured to automatically start playing a specific station upon launch, includes artwork and lyrics and also enables users to tag songs for purchase on iTunes.
To download the free app, simply log on to Android Market from your handset (Android v1.5 or higher).
Enjoy the music.
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