This is one of "those stories" that just blows my mind:

Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core (full story)

About 3 months ago, we set off on a little experiment into the world of the Amazon App Store. Back then people were hailing it as the solution to the problems with the Google Market, industry pundits like Andy Ihnatko called it ‘An Excellent Work in Progress‘.

Amazon’s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here’s the dirty secret Amazon don’t want you to know, they don’t pay developers a single cent.

Amazing story of how the developer of an app called Pocket Casts (which had sold about 200 copies before being listed as Free App of the Day) suddenly had 101,491 copies downloaded in 24 hours with ZERO revenue to show for it!

Scary! 

Read all about it here.

A number of gamers might have noticed the recent fallout between two major players in PC gaming, Valve and EA. this article examines some aspects of it.

• http://www.maximumpc..._or_slayer_pc_gaming

A dc member wrote in to tell us about his dual-screen digital picture frame project, with step-by-step instructions on instructables.com, and how he used my Multi Photo Quotes program on it.

He writes:

"Thank you for this program.  I have used it for a Dual Screen Photo Frame.  I am making another for my parents, and was wondering if there was a way for MPQ to automatically refresh its photo directory, so when I add photos to their photo frame remotely, the photos wind up in the queue.  I know I could restart the screensaver, but I am trying to reduce the amount of remote access as possible.  I did notice that there is something in the commandline, but I am unsure of how to implement it, or how it would work.  Any help is appreciated, and thanks again for your hard work!"

Needless to say, I could not refuse a request for such a cool use, and a new version of Multi Photo Quotes was released to day with automatic detection and refreshing of image/quote changes -- so the software can now be used with dynamically updating images and text.

A really sweet review in today's PC World of my Little Voice Commander program for toddlers.

For those who are brave enough to turn the computer over to a small child, DonationCoder founder Mouser's new Little Voice Commander (free/donationware) could be a good program to start with.

Little Voice Commander helps teach kids vocabulary and pronunciation on your PC.Little Voice Commander shows photos to reflect what your toddler's approximation of English says.This simple program encourages toddlers to speak and experiment by showing pictures of words they are likely to know, such as "dog," "apple," or, well, "baby," whenever a word is spoken or when a key on the keyboard is pressed. A sound file also speaks the word out loud. Press K, see a kite, hear "kite." The pictures typically arrange themselves into a mosaic; sometimes these images are repeated. The translation of babyspeak into American standard English depends on Microsoft's speech-recognition engine, making it necessarily an inexact business, but that's part of the fun. For example, imagine a child saying "No!" and being rewarded with pictures of snow.

http://www.pcworld.c...teract_with_pcs.html

DonationCoder.com application Clipboard Help+Spell version 2 was publicly released, and featured on ghacks today (Aug 2, 2011):

http://www.ghacks.ne...s-clipboard-manager/

CHS web page: https://www.donation...pandspell/index.html

It's a been a long time since I featured as Tower Defense Game in this spot -- but not for lack of looking.

By way of the excellent JayIsGames site, Dora brings us news of a terrific new flash tower defense game called Kingdom Rush.  Dora has a great review it so i'll just send you over to her review.

Analysis: Kingdom Rush is an absolute gem of a defense game, and probably one of the best examples of the genre to date. Not only does it look and sound fantastic, but the gameplay confidently strides that invisible line between being too complicated and just strategic enough for players to really sink their teeth into.

http://armorgames.co...y/12141/kingdom-rush