Last night a rumor started about how Apple blocked an application called Ninjawords which is described as:
“[Ninjawords] use awesome, fresh, high quality data with more words and synonyms than you can throw a ninja star at. And best of all, when you look up your words, they all stay on the page. No need to flip back and forth between different pages as you look up multiple words.”
It turns out that rumor has been clarified by Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller. Apple said that they never tried to censor the dictionary application, but the company wanted to give it a 17+ rating. Instead the developer of the application removed the swears words before publishing it on the App Store.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball started the rumor and then later clarified it. Ninjawords was developed by Matchstick Software.
Last week Digg introduced the DiggBar, a web-based toolbar where anyone can see the number of Diggs a story received, the number of comments, etc. There is also a random button that shows stories that have received over 2,000 Diggs.
The DiggBar also has a built-in URL shortening feature so that it makes it easier to share stories on Digg through Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Some of the critics believe that the toolbar makes the original website look ugly. This is because when clicking on an external website through Digg.com, the toolbar appears with a frame of the original website below it. The original website still gets the page views, but Digg gets some extra page views too.
Some clever guy put together a reason why the DiggBar sucks by redirecting a DiggBar.com URL to another DiggBar.com URL four times. Below is a screen shot of what it looks like:
Another DiggBar critic John Gruber and writer of the DaringFireball blog created a custom website for anyone that arrives on his website from Digg.com. It reads “Dear Digg, Go f**k yourself. Your pal, JG.”
Several other critics are comparing the DiggBar to the design of websites from the 1990’s. Frames have no longer become acceptable in web design because of cross-compatibility issues. The DiggBar can be removed altogether by turning it off in the user preferences.
StumbleUpon also recently created a web-based toolbar of their own for those who don’t have access to their StumbleUpon toolbar plugin.
