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One of the best Twitter clients for the iPhone platform – Twitterrific – has been provided by The Iconfactory. Until recently, there used to be a free version with ads and limited features and a paid “Premium” version with support for multiple accounts and without any ads. Both those apps have disappeared from the app store without notice. The Iconfactory has now released a new version, limited in features and ad supported that can be upgraded to a “Premium” version by making an in-app purchase for the same amount the old Premium app cost.

All of this is legitimate and I would not complain and bash The Iconfactory if not for one little thing. Twitter has changed its authentication API which means that existing clients cannot connect to Twitter anymore unless they update to the new Twitter API. Thus, my old Premium version does not work anymore and it will never work again as The Iconfactory killed the app in the app store. I’m forced to buy the new Premium version again. What’s making this worse is that there has been no warning ahead of this from The Iconfactory and there still is no usable explanation about this upgrade path on The Iconfactory’s website. Way to screw your paying customers, you morons!

I’m not going to buy any products from them again, given how they treat paying customers. It’s OK that a product has a limited lifetime, even though by common standards on the app store I would expect a little different from a so called “Premium” app. But a little bit of communication and consideration might have been all it needed to keep me a content customer.

Olympus has announced two special E-P2 kits, all in black. Take a look at 43rumors.com which first got word of the news.

The E-P2 Special Black EVF Edition will cost 1079€ and contains:

• E-P2 camera in black
• M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 17mm 1:2.8 Pancake lens exclusively in black
• VF-2 electronic viewfinder in black
• Historic lens cap with F logo

Do you consider this to be a good offer? I don’t. If you care about the color of your kit, you can get away with a much better lens at almost the same price – minus the superfluous “historic” lens cap. It’s not too hard to find the following items for a price totaling at around 1100€:

• E-P2 camera in black
• VF-2 electronic viewfinder in black
• Panasonic LUMIX G 20mm f/1.7 Aspherical Pancake Lens (also in black)

For about the same money you get a great little camera and an awesome and small lens without expressing how much you appreciate buying/carrying a camera as a fashion statement.

The most disappointing thing about the announcement of those special edition kits: it probably means that there won’t be any more new MFT cameras from Olympus this year. I am holding my breath for the successor of the Olympus E-3 though.

Nondeterministic tests are a common problem in test setups, especially with integration tests. For example, imagine you are doing an integration test of two components that exchange messages where receiving a message in one of the systems changes its internal state which you want to verify. However, the message exchange can be delayed due to external factors (network latency, load etc.). When running tests (for example using the excellent Cucumber framework), testing steps are usually run sequentially. It may happen that the tested system is lagging behind the testing steps, failing your test in some (but not all) cases. You need to make your tests more tolerant for these situations. Often, that means retrying for a couple of times.

Canon’s PowerShot S90 is a great little camera. However, my copy seems to suffer from a particular nasty “hot pixel” which even shows up at ISO 80. Another rather weird firmware bug I’ve encountered can even render the camera temporarily useless as the camera refuses to read memory cards from its slot.

Using Aperture’s Places to geotag my images has been a much desired feature on my Aperture feature wish-list when I still used the old version. It turns out that using Places is not as straight forward as I expected it to be. Manually dragging pictures to the map works perfectly fine, but when adding GPS tracks and automating the process of placing the images, it’s hard to get an accurate result.