With 1 million iPhone sold and 10 million apps downloaded in three days, the App Store is a huge success. Top developers already made a shitload of money.

After the iPhone 3G activation debacle, MobileMe is officially functional. I subscribed to the one month trial but something bugs me: HTTPS is not supported. All services (e.g., calendar, mail, contacts) are accessed through plain (unsecured) HTTP, which is a deal breaker for me.

However, during the guided tour video of MobileMe, you can observe that Firefox on Windows Vista uses HTTPS whereas Safari on Mac OS uses plain HTTP. I tried on Windows XP and it’s not working either.

Weird.

An activation debacle. Apple has decided to disabled the 2.0 software update for iPhone 2G (it’s still not available for me). People who tried before have bricked their phone.

Rule #1: never, ever, buy a new product (or software update) on day one.

Joel Spolsky:

Realistic schedules are the key to creating good software. It forces you to do the best features first and allows you to make the right decisions about what to build. Which makes your product better, your boss happier, delights your customers, and—best of all—lets you go home at five o’clock.

Touch Arcade unveiled details of the iPhone’s hardware capabilities but the graphic chipset specs draw my attention,

[…] Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR MBX Lite 3D accelerator, likely running at the iPhone’s bus speed of 103MHz. This fourth-generation PowerVR chipset is basically an evolution of the second-generation graphics hardware used in the Sega Dreamcast (an amazing console, to those unaware) and which, like its console predecessor, utilizes a unique tile-based rendering system.

I know the Dreamcast pretty well, I worked on a game project for it in 1998: 4 Wheel Thunder. At the time, the console could deliver 5000 polygons per frame, about 3M polygons per second.

The Dreamcast CPU ran at 200Mhz whereas the iPhone runs at 412MHz — twice the power of the console. The Dreamcast was a game changer at the time, bringing the next generation of 3D games, such as the amazing Soul Calibur II from Namco.

Now, you really know what the iPhone is capable of.

(via Daring Fireball.)

Loic wrote a very interesting serie of articles about starting a business on the blog Envie d’Entreprendre (french only).

Karim A. founder of NoiseRiver:

NoiseRiver is a web application based on the friendfeed’s API that aims to extend friendfeed with some notions like: interests and neigborhood. You still have all the flow that is in friendfeed but the flow is, from now, on colored. Green meaning that you’ll probably like the entry and red meaning that you’ll probably hate it.

Noise filtering is the next step in social networks, being able to surface what you’re interested in and content from people you trust, is very important.

FriendFeed recently added personalized recommendations but NoiseRiver works differently by giving you more fine-grained control about your preferences.

Louis Gray wrote a nice wrap up about the service.

Karim is a very nice and talented guy and I’m happy to have given my (humble) contribution to the project. I wishes the best for NoiseRiver.

Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft he founded in 1975, to focus on his philanthropic foundation.

Love him or hate him, Bill Gates created an entire industry. Thanks to him, he made the PC technology affordable to everyone. We can enjoy his legacy.

This is an end of an era. I wish him the best.

Engadget celebrates Bill Gates day and Techcrunch wonders who will fill Bill Gates’ shoes.