Blogging platform WordPress just announced a major upgrade to its long-beleaguered app for the iPhone and iPad. The new version is awesome.

The company says it’s now solved most of the major problems, squashed the bugs that caused 75% of the apps crashes and now it’s time to add new features. New features added in the version now available in the App Store include: a “Quick Photo” feature that lets you snap and post a photo very fast, a mobile stats display, localization in 10 langues and more. This new version is the first one I’ve downloaded for awhile and I was thrilled to see how easy it was to add a self-hosted WordPress.org blog to the app now, too!

As someone who used WordPress.org for my personal blog these updates have got me feeling absolutely ecstatic. This should drastically increase the number of quick little mobile posts I put up and I’m sure I’m far from the only person who feels that way. Some WYSIWYG just for link adding (so I don’t have to type the a href= blah blah in with my thumb) would sure be nice.

For some reason I’m getting an error when I look at the Comments or Pages tab in the interface (I’m not using a plug-in) but hopefully that will be resolvable. The parts of this app that are working in my very initial testing are awesome.

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There’s an article in the Wall Street journal today about the demand and insufficient supply of mobile developers, which is becoming a huge problem for companies as mobile strategy becomes more and more critical. One of the main problems, as the WSJ draws out, is that these mobile platforms are relatively new so it’s tough to find developers with a lot of experience. Many companies are turning to good developers and retraining them as mobile developers to fill demand.

If a software engineer doesn’t have mobile experience, the company has sometimes been willing to spend several weeks training the engineer to work on mobile platforms, Mr. Rosenthal said.

Given the mismatch between supply and demand, many companies say they have no choice but to retrain software engineers in the art of mobile development. In the last year, Major League Baseball’s Internet company MLB.com nearly doubled the number of mobile engineers it has to 19, said MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman.

I thought this article was a perfect complement to the announcement this week of Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5, which are focused explicitly on helping Flex developers build applications for mobile devices like iOS, Android, and the PlayBook. There is obviously huge demand for mobile applications, and because of scarce supply and experience, existing developers are going to have to think about how they can gain mobile experience. Flex mobile does a fantastic job of making that learning curve smaller by letting Flex developers use what they already know and providing some key mobile features (like ViewNavigator for managing views, the ActionBar for managing global navigation, etc) so that they can quickly turn out Flex applications for these mobile devices.

If you’re a Flash or Flex developer, then with AIR for mobile devices and Flex 4.5, you’ve got the skills to go out and build applications for the biggest platforms. That’s a huge advantage to you as a developer and for any developer who doesn’t want to get locked into a specific platform. As the chart below shows, there are a lot of people looking for experts in iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, but there are a lot more people who are looking for Flash experts. With this release, you get the best of both worlds.

android, flash, iPhone, blackberry Job Trends

Android jobs – Flash jobs – iPhone jobs – Blackberry jobs

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Securing the Internet is no easy task but Google researchers think they have taken a step closer this week with a program called SSL False Start that decreases the load time of SSL connections up to 30%.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a certification that encrypts data between an end-users’ browser and the server. It is a headache to implement and increases connection latency and only a few of the major sites on the Web have instituted “always on” SSL/TLS protection on top of HTTP to create the more secure HTTPS. While SSL False Start is a good step in creating a safer Internet, it is not the cure for all SSL woes. But, it does look like a step in the right direction.

Google developers wrote on the Chromium Blog, “We implemented SSL False Start in Chrome 9, and the results are stunning, yielding a significant decrease in overall SSL connection setup times. SSL False Start reduces the latency of a SSL handshake by 30%.”

The developers were concerned that False Start would not be backwards compatible and that if it affected “user experience for even a small fraction of users, the optimization is non-deployable.” So they tested it out by finding every site that uses HTTPS in Google’s index and it came away with a 94.6% success rate, with 5% timing out and .4% failing. The time-outs turned up as sites that were no longer in service. The developers contacted the domains that failed and said that most have fixed the issue that made False Start fail. The list of sites that are not compatible with False Start is located in the Chromium source code.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Access have teamed up on a campaign called “HTTPS Now” that aims to secure the Internet. Yet, with SSL and encryption still a messy and expensive process, it could be a while before the EFF reaches its goal.

“There is no consistent library for implementing SSL in the browser,” said Tom Bridge, a partner at Technolutionary, a technical services firm. “Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome, they all use different processes for handling the SSL handshake. Encryption is still a heavy-math process, something that requires both RAM and processor time.”

After some high-profile hacks, including Mark Zuckerberg’s own profile, Twitter and Facebook have offered users options in their profile settings to always use HTTPS. Most of the major email clients use HTTPS as well.

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According to Forbes, Facebook may be launching a music streaming service any day now. Sources familiar with the situation have divulged that the giant social network is partnering up with European-based music service, Spotify.

The service is reportedly going through testing at the moment and could be available two weeks from now. When launched, it will be an integrated feature that youll find on the left side of your newsfeed right below your usual photos and events icons. When you click on the Spotify icon, the service will install on your desktop in the background and give you access to its library of millions of songs.

You would then be able to access the music via Facebook, and even listen to the same music simultaneously with your friends. Its not certain yet whether it will be called Facebook Music or Spotify on Facebook but either way its only available to those in countries where Spotify is supported. Currently, that excludes folks in the United States.

Spotify is still in the process of negotiating with labels here in the U.S., but as weve seen how unsuccessful Google has been with label negotiations for their Music Beta, it could certainly be a long road ahead. It also makes sense that the once rumored Google and Spotify deal didnt pan out.

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Google is unveiling its new flight search feature today, which makes it easier to search for flight information within Google. Notably, Google says this does not include any of the services it acquired with its controversial acquisition of ITA, the flight data search company Google bought last year and went through nine months of regulatory oversight before being approved in April.

The new flight schedule search feature is relatively minor by itself. It allows users to see all the flight schedules on a route as well as to explore all the outbound destinations from an airport. Yet, this is just a step in Google’s plans to take over flight scheduling data and search. What can users expect when Google finally does integrate ITA software into its travel features?

TA’s best travel search feature is called Matrix. It provides airport geo-search, event search to find things to do at your destination, an interactive calendar to explore date ranges for lowest fares, real-time filters to find the best flight for your needs and color-coded time bars. Google’s newest offering does none of this and is little more than flight data on a search page. Neither has Google integrated any of ITA’s mobile offerings, namely its “OnTheFly” app that is available for iOS and Android.

The theory is that Google will be able to take the ITA offerings and QPX software – with the data it harvests and the interface it provides – and display it in a Google search page. Google wants to know what users are doing so as to better push advertising and offerings such as the announcement of Google Wallet, and this revamp of its travel search offers significant insight into the online and real-world behavior of people. Google’s ITA purchase was as much about the rich data the company provides (and can manipulate through Needlebase) as the richer, real-time travel search options it can provide.

Will this set it apart from Bing, which partnered with travel search engine Kayak earlier this month? Bing had been using ITA data to power its search options and joined the coalition against Google’s purchase of ITA. Kayak by itself is an impressive travel search engine and the other market players – Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, Optifly – all have heavy marketing campaigns and a wide base of users.

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