The report said that “the last week of 2011 was the largest week for device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.”

This shouldn’t come as any major surprise to people though as many people would have received new tablets and smartphones for Christmas, but also that app stores had a great many cheap deals on over the holiday period.  Even so, these numbers are huge and very clearly indicate that our hunger for smartphones and tablets isn’t going away any time soon.

When you factor in the number of people who would have picked up cheap Blackberry Playbook tablets over the holiday period we can expect activations to be much higher.

Flurry, which gets its data directly from Apple and Google said…

Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place.   While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent.

It’s very likely that they are correct and that 1 billion app downloads a week worldwide will not just quickly become the norm, but that the number by the end of 2012 will in fact be considerably higher.

Factor in the launch of ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets, now probably scheduled for early 2013, and that number will rise exponentially as people try out Metro apps for the new operating system.  It is a reasonable predication though that by the time this happens the weekly app download figures for iOS and Android will have exceeded 2 billion a week.

Most interesting from a developer point of view are the store’s fee structure and the ways to earn money with apps. Individual developers pay $49, businesses $99 to register for a Windows Store developer account. Developers earn 70% of every customer dollar for the first $25,000 dollars of an app’s sales, and 80% afterwards.

Microsoft will be handling all the payment processing. Software companies and developers can earn money through other means, including in-app purchases, advertising and even third party commerce transactions.

Windows Store agreements have been published which contain standard application license terms and other information important for app developers. Both the agreements and the business terms are preliminary and subject to change.

Windows Store contents are indexed by search engines, and users can directly link to app web pages.

The Windows Store will be available when the Windows Beta ships. It will offer free and commercial apps alike. Microsoft is currently trying to stimulate app development with the first apps contest for Windows 8.

A windows Store video has been published that highlights the known details of the store.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s store fares in comparison to Apple’s store or the Android market. While I’m not 100% certain it seems as if the store is only about Metro style apps and not about standard software programs for the Windows operating system.

While it is to early to tell if that’s really the case, it feels like as if Microsoft is missing out on this great opportunity to sell software to Windows users via the store directly.

What’s your take on Windows Store? Let me know in the comments.

The user data, which is gathered quite legitimately by apps on the site, was found to have been sold to data brokers.  Facebook published have a statement saying that certain app developers have been banned from the site for non-compliance with the website’s policies.

Their blog post said the company’s own investigation had shown that user identifiers (UID) were being sold and was conducted after media reports that lists of contacts were being sold to advertising agencies.

Facebook have said that they are “determined that no private user data was sold and confirmed that transfer of these UIDs did not give access to any private data”.

This story really shouldn’t surprise anybody however as Facebook has, for a very long time, allowed apps to collect personal data about users without ever monitoring these individuals and companies to see if they are complying with data protection legislation.

This is far from the first time Facebook has faced allegations about its privacy.  The fact that the number of app developers being punished was “less than a dozen” and that none had any of the top-rated apps on the network is irrelevant, as Facebook need to reflect with the utmost urgency on privacy right across its website.

The move which is backed by €10M in funding, aims to create apps that would work on any device from Internet TVs to smartphones and tablets.

There are some big names behind the project too including Telecom Italia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and the World Wide Web Consortium.  It is being led by the German Graunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (Fokus).

The move would be very welcome with consumers and reminds this commentator of the introduction of the C programming language, which also came with claims at the time of unifying code across platforms.  It was relatively successful in this regard, but now companies such as Apple have moved to different language and instruction sets and are forcing developers to use specific development tools for their own platforms in the name of security and stability.

“The problem is the extreme platform fragmentation,” said project lead Stephan Steglich.  “We have a lot of different platforms that apps run on – the iPhone, Android, Symbian – and that’s only on the mobile side. If you extend that to include the automotive part and consumer electronic area you have more platforms,” Dr Steglich told BBC News.  

“Companies can afford to have an app on two or at most three platforms – they’re extremely costly to develop and ensure the user experience.  “That’s what we want to address – to provide a system that runs on all these platforms and domains, where the developer comes up with one application for one platform and lets you run it on all these devices – mobiles, automotive, gaming, and so on.”

There is really little reason why modern operating systems cannot allow programs written for different platforms, and using different tools and languages, to run effectively.  This is doubly relevant as we are now beginning to see examples of virtualization demos on smartphones and as the mainstream processors become fast, powerful and cheap enough to accommodate this.

The move aims to develop web apps that will work across these platforms.  ”The greatest common denominator among all these devices is the web browser – that’s the only thing people can use to accept the same content,” Dr Steglich explained.  This will enable cross-platform compatibility and slash development costs.  Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 beta software is demonstrating how web apps can look and be treated by an operating system as though they’re installed on the computing device itself.

The move isn’t without its critics and many believe it won’t get off the ground, but it will be welcomed by consumers and app developers alike and, sometimes, that’s just enough to create a critical momentum.

If you take a look, you can’t argue that it has a superb no-frills interface, and you can shoot out and manage tasks very easily. It supports inline tagging (use @tag to quick tag a task) and priorities (use !p1 or !p2 or !p3 to quickly add a priority), notifications, task indentation for hierarchy, and a handy search box, which you can use to search based on any word, or task data.

So far this is not unheard of for task managers, I just simply connect with this one better than others. However, where I feel Todoist excels is that it offers a wide range of ways to add tasks, best of all, complete Launchy integration.

If you log in, and go to Todoist Help (if you have no tasks yet, you should see this page displayed anyway), you can see a section named plugins. Apart from finding Netvibes and iGoogle and a Mac dashboard widger (all excellent), you can find instructions on how to use Launchy to add tasks without even opening your browser. I usually find that ideas come in the stupidest situations, where I don’t want to be distracted from my work, so pressing alt+space and quickly typing a task is much easier than going to the site.

Another way you can use laucnhy is from your iPhone, using the application named Doings. I have not tried this personally, I will purchase it in the next few days, so if any of you have first hand experience, share your thoughts in the comments please! It looks as simple as the online counterpart, and supports offline mode too, so you can be sure your tasks will all be there wherever you are. Apart from the name sounding like something you do on the toilet, this seems like a perfectly usable application.

If you really love Todoist, you can also opt for a paid version. The developer stylishly chose to include features in the paid versions which only the most avid users need, so the free one is extremely useful on its own. The paid version gets you Email, Phone, or Twitter reminders, an improved label system and SSL security. At $3 a month, if you really need these, I think they are at an affordable rate.

If you re-install Windows (or OSX) a lot, you know that you need to go through the process of installing Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, VLC Player and a whole lot more, and at times this can get a bit tedious. With the help of WinLibre or MacLibre all you need to do is download the installer and you can choose what you need, installing it with one click.

You can either get the 150Mb standalone version that contains everything you could install, or the 0.6Mb online installer version. I recommend the later, since you will be downloading the most recent updates for the apps. When you run the installer again, you can check for the latest software, without the need to download all 150 Megs again.

You are free to create new folders, sub menus and separators and fill them with the content that FileMenu Tools offers. New options vary from the very useful Command Line From Here option which opens the command line window from the selected folder. You may also run a selected program with parameters (defrag or anti-virus for example) and perform many operations such as copy path, move to, advanced delete and advanced renamer.

Besides that you can edit the Send To dialog which I personally rarely use. You can disable current options and add new ones with ease. One application could be to move files to a special data folder once they have been downloaded and checked. There are certainly other and better options but this is just to show that adding new send to entries can be useful.