With release of the latest iTunes 10, Apple has thrown it's hat into the social media ring. Ping is an addition to iTunes which allows people to spy on friends, strangers, and celebs and discuss the one thing you're most likely to have in common: music. Apple makes no illusions about Ping - this is a service created to help you buy more music. But the way it does it is delightful and engaging.

Throwback memorabilia is hot these days. From sneakers to jerseys some things are just destined to come back in style. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes technology can comeback, too. This week I talk about my recent experience of working with GNU Emacs - a feature-rich text editor created in the 1980's.

Much like marriage, as my iPhone and I continue to discover our relationship together, I have started to notice quirks that were never there at the onset of our relationship. For instance, the subtle way my phone drops calls when someone flicks a lightswtich. Or the way Facetime makes anyone using the forward facing camera look like Jabba the Hut. But perhaps the most fascinating quirk that I've recently discovered with the iPhone 4G is that it seems to have a mind of its own.

Downer is a little tool i've been working on in my spare time to help automate common download tasks. Over time, I'd like to see it evolve into a useful general purpose command line tool to help with frequent downloading needs, but for now, its feature set is limited.

One need I often have is to grab all of the images contained on a webpage. Downer will let you do this with the following call from your command shell:

In what has to be one of the most hilarious Facebook applications yet, software developer Ian Bogost has created a masterpiece with the Facebook game Cow Clicker. The object of the game is simply to "click your cow." That's it. Clicking your cow will earn you "mooooney" that can be used to either purchase more clicks or unlock premium cows. I've pretty much summarized the entire game and it took less than a paragraph.

If you spend a bit of time hacking Ruby, you may find this application useful. Downer is a tool I created to scratch a personal itch I have regarding downloading many files at once. You know web pages that have a lot of urls that need to be individually downloaded one at a time? Yeah, I hate those. So I made a general purpose tool I could integrate with existing tools in order to download things in a more automated fashion.

Frequently when developing web applications, we developers are lulled into false expectations of application performance while developing an app on a local machine. Network connection speed is an important and inconstant variable of application performance and depending on what you are developing, ignoring it until later stages of development can have regrettable consequences.

No one enjoys purchasing an expensive phone only to find out that its reception is poor when you do something outrageous - like hold it. Fortunately, the minds at Urban Influence have found a cheap and ingenious solution that will not only improve your cell phone reception, but allow you to talk with life in other planets (there isn't an app for that yet). Introducing the HiFidora: the first cell phone antenna you can wear.

In the midst of researching open source apps for a new project we're architecting, I've found a pleasant new ecommerce tool for Rails developers. Named Spree, this application aims to provide a solid framework for Rails developers to create engaging ecommerce solutions.

Personification is one of the great tools of communication. To quote Webster, personification is the attribution of human characteristics to something nonhuman. Using personification, we are able to look at the image of some thing and provide an admittedly over-simplified metaphor that others can readily understand. This week, I will be extending this tool to look at several of the internet's most popular websites and my celebrity look-alike that tells the story of this online experience.