dailylicious!

If you’re a web developer, on a Mac, and you’re not using Coda, what’s wrong with you? Anyway, Today Panic announced Coda 2, the long anticipated update to its highly popular web development app. With several new features and long awaited support for MySQL, Coda aims to maintain its place as the preferred app for web developers.

Speaking of which, Panic also announced Diet Coda, an iPad app that works together with Coda 2, which lets you take web development on the go. As John Gruber said, it’s the best named iPad app ever.

As the competition in the cloud heats up, Apple is rumored to be preparing a major upgrade to its popular iCloud service. After languishing for over a decade under various monikers and collection of services, Apple may have just hit the right notes with iCloud. At the moment iCloud offers an email service, a cloud-based contacts list, mobile and desktop instant messaging, photo synchronization, device backup and locator, and a storage service for applications. iCloud members get 5GB of free space with paid options for additional space.

Following a leak last week of a web based reminder and notes apps on the beta site of iCloud, more services are said to be coming to iCloud, which is expected to be part of the upcoming iOS 6 announcements at WWDC in June. The Wall Street Journal reports that iCloud will feature photo and video sharing services that could put it in competition with sites such as Flickr, Facebook, 500px and others.

The Internet remembers. It stores all. Well, almost all. Sometimes things get pulled down and despite the best efforts, people may not be able to find certain things online anymore because they become to obscure and hidden. The Internet is quickly becoming that attic in which everything gets stored but it would take forever to find what you’re looking for.

Snapchat however is one of several apps that would automatically erase its content after it was viewed for a limited time. It even has a mechanism to prevent people from taking a screenshot of the photo (although taking a photo of the photo with a separate camera is till possible)

This Mission:Impossible approach would obviously be used for items that are meant for private consumption and it’s getting popular. Local iOS app Harpoen already implements this sort of mechanism for its location-based notes or tags. It has an option to erase items from its database after it has been left for certain period.

The Atlantic mentioned that Snapchat is among a recent wave of apps that implements such a measure but unfortunately did not say what apps they are. Snapchat and Harpoen are the only two that we know of. Would love to know what other apps employ such methods.

Wired puts forward arguments from a number of developers who say that Android apps don’t look as good as iOS apps because they have to make sure the apps don’t mess up on different screen sizes and resolutions. Despite the Android environment having a far greater flexibility and freedom to design apps, it seems that the range of device sizes forces designers to conform to the lower end of the scale whereas having a single screen size for iPhone and iPod touch makes things much easier.

Of course, with iOS apps there’s the issue of retina display on the more recent iPhone, iPod touch, and the latest iPad, but the problem there is less about overall design, more about redrawing elements because the aspect ratio remains the same compared to the older devices. This means the icons and other graphical items as well as placements don’t change, they just need to have higher resolutions.

Essentially, consistency across iOS devices and its SDK makes things easier to come up with well designed apps.

There’s a Discover tab on Twitter’s iPhone and Android apps that doesn’t seem to be all that useful other than having Twitter’s search built in to it. In fact, it’s unclear what the tab is meant  for in the first place. In it is a list of news or stories that nobody in your following list links to and are not relevant to your interest at all. It’s almost like Twitter is trying to push any random news to you.

Today’s update is meant to address that somehow by adding the Activity stream into the Discover tab to show what people you follow are doing. This feature was removed from the website when Twitter introduced the new approach but it seems that Twitter may have a reason to have it after all.

Still, the Discover tab seems to remain a catch-all dumpster to shove anything that doesn’t fit in the other tabs.

Up to 75 per cent of the energy used by free versions of Android apps is spent serving up ads or tracking and uploading user data: running just one app could drain your battery in around 90 minutes.

Astounding discovery. Doesn’t it make you want to by apps instead? Surely this applies to iOS apps as well, not just Android. The mechanism and code involved in sending data from in-app ads are similar after all.