Some time ago there came a update for  the Awesome note iPhone app. Because I have this application and I have done couple posts about it, I decided that it is good to post about the update also. There is couple new features that I like lot. Example new way to change themes, read only notes and ability to add images to notes.

But the greatest thing is that they finally fixed the “password protected” folders. Because now they are really secure. It is no longer possible to delete folder to see content of passlocked folder. It is also possible to lock the whole application.

Plus+ is gaming community for iPhone. It is application that runs inside of supported games, just like steam or xfire (or something like xbox live) But it is for iPhone.

Plus+ has couple nice I love features like awards(achievements) and leaderboards. Achievements is easy way to add more challenge to game and it is always fun to try to get all of the achievements. There is also Plus+ points and levels. Leaderboards works with globally or with your friends.

Game support is good, but more is always better. The way how iPhone works, it is not possible to create application like xfire that runs itself and attaches itself to game. But there is couple good free games supporting Plus+ and even more commercial games.

The system is great, but there is couple things I would like to be fixed. First is the way to communicate with friends, because there isn’t any! I would so much like this system if I could send messages to other people on my friend list. I would also like to search my friends from email/twitter.

In the end Plus+ is great system and I love it. It would just be so much better with ability to communicate

Check out Plus+ games at http://plusplus.com/

There is also competitor for Plus+, Openfeint. It has way to communicate with friends and ability to search friends from Twitter. But it doesn’t look so nice and it doesn’t have many good games. http://www.openfeint.com/

I have written about Amazon EC2 some time ago. I liked the EC2, but now I found new competitor that is better than EC2. Rackspace cloud is easier to use and has great support.

Prizing
Both Amazon and Rackspace offers virtually unlimited computing power/file storage for low cost pay-as-you-go prizing.

It looks like Rackspace offers cheaper servers. Rackspace also has small 256m server for 0.015$ and that is my most used server, because I usually don’t need big server.

Managing servers
Here is the point where the real difference becomes. Amazon has some kind of weird command line tools for managing the servers, firefox addon and a online  management console. The management console isn’t the best system, but it works. The main problem is that connecting to the server with ssh is damn difficult. It took 1hour for me first time to get the connection to the server…

Rackspace offers simple solution to connecting to the servers. They email the random server password for you. Then to can connect with normal ssh client to standart ports. No unnecessary key stuff etc. Rackspace also offers ajax console.

Support
I haven’t tried amazons support, because I haven’t a) needed help b) found where to get help

Rackspaces live support is awesome! There is always somebody to answer my questions.

In my opinion…

…Rackspacecloud is much better.

Aardvark is website/service that allows you to ask and answer questions. Aardvark forwards the question and tries to find person that can answer to your question.

The idea is that you send a question to aardvark and then aardvark sends the question to all people that it thinks that they may be able to answer. Aardvark knows who is the right person using tags, friends, location and good recommendation engine.

You can use Aardvark from many different applications. One way is to use Aardvark’s official website, Twitter, email, IM or iPhone app. Every of these ways to use Aardvark are nice, but the iPhone version is almost perfect.

The reason why the iPhone application is awesome, is that it uses Push feature. And that is so far the best push application that I have seen. It also makes it very easy to ask and answer questions. It is even better than the official website.

There may be some problems at first with IM client, because you are talking to the Aardvark bot, not the actually persons. But with good in-chat documentation. It is quite fast to learn.

Does it really work? Yes, if you are not going to ask anything stupid/incredible difficult, you have good changes that you get multiple good answers/opinions. Aardvark is not going to replace google as my primary information source, but in some cases I can’t live without Aardvark.

So, I recommend to at least try it

Problems multiple computers, wrong files on wrong machines, wrong versions, old backups? Dropbox may be your solution to these problems!

Dropbox

When I use 2 or more computers at same time I sometimes just want to move one single file to another computer. I could set up FTP server, but that’s a bit overkill for moving single files… I could also move it to another server and download it from there or I could move it via samba…

Sometimes I just don’t want to think. I just want that my file goes from one computer to another. And this is where Dropbox is awesome. Dropbox instantly syncs files on it’s directory to it’s own cloud server and to other computers that are linked to the account. With small files it is awesome, but with bigger files it can be annoyingly slow, because it moves it first to Dropbox server and then downloads it to other computer.

Sharing files is also possible. After placing file to public directory, you can find public link via right click menu. With the link you can share any file to friend easily. Actually, this way to share files is one of the best ways. I personally like to upload my files to ftp server and then share link, but for most users Dropbox is the best way. (Ftp gives nice directory list and it is just more 1337 way to share stuff

Best thing is that you get 2 gigs of free storage! (You can extend it to 3gigs by inviting friends… My own invite link below)

Try Dropbox now