The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

For some reason, browsers on OS X display colours slightly differently to colours in Windows. What the hell is this all about? I’ve only seen this problem on one website, or at least I’ve only noticed it once. This only affects images, and not colours in general. I only noticed this when an image didn’t blend in with the background on a site I was working on. The background was coded in CSS to be #231F20, and the image was displaying #231F20 in Photoshop’s colour picker, but apple’s color pick shows the colour as #191618. Now once viewed in a browser the image was displaying #1A1718 with browser colour pick plugin, but still #191618 with Apple Color Pick. But the weirdest thing is, I can see the difference with my bare eyes.

Picture one displays what I was seeing on my Mac. Please note at this point, PC users were seeing the site correctly (side panels blending into the background).

So I changed the colour of the side panels to match accordingly. It seemed to work, I could see the site all as one. But then PC users sent me the following screenshot:

Basically they saw the invert to what I originally saw. Messed up.

Why is the background showing a true #231F20 fill, but the image is being displayed as #191618. It’s almost as if Photoshop knows the image should be #231F20, but either the Operating System, or the Browsers (any) are displaying images incorrectly. But if the system can clearly understand the hex code in the CSS, why can the system not interoperate the correct colours from image files?

Any people say Macs are good for design…

No doubt you’re confused reading this post, because I’m very confused writing it! I thought we were well over the days of ‘web-safe’ colours.

The work-around to this problem was to use conditional PHP/CSS, to change the background colour to match the side panels. So if a user is on Windows, the background colour is #231F20, but if the user is on OS X they see a background of #1A1718. Perfect. I now see the site the way it’s meant to be. But I’m still left none-the-wiser as to why my Mac can’t show me the proper colours.

So iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5 is out … but before you go and upgrade, you may want to read on. MMS and Tethering are built into the current betas of OS 3.0, and we have discovered how to access them.Sporkings, May 2009

Checkout the whole article.