A hefty update to the TestFlight SDK today brings in-app upgrading for users, crash reports for developers, and much more. TestFlight is the greatest thing to happen to iOS app beta testing since Apple’s iPhone SDK.

This year’s September 11 cover of The New Yorker is wonderful. It makes a great tribute to their 2001 September 11 cover that was black on black, as well as nodding to the reflecting pools and the memorial that will open this Sunday.

This new-to-me website — officially known as “ifttt” (how do you pronounce that?) — is brilliant. I signed up yesterday (it looks like it’s currently in public beta), and it only took about a minute to realize ifttt’s potential handiness.

The whole basis of ifttt is that it puts the internet to work for you. You can create tasks based on the structure “if this then that”, and the site has dozens of triggers and actions to populate that equation with.

An example action (ifttt calls them recipes) would be: “If it’s going to rain tomorrow then text message me.”

I set up a recipe so that I get an email with the link to any item I star in Google Reader. It used to be that when I was reading feeds on my iPad and I came across an item I wanted to link to here on the site, I would email myself that article. Now I simply star it and it’ll still show up in my email inbox.

A great article by Fraser Speirs regarding iPads, public schools, and the need for a better student:computer ratio.

Speirs sites the GSMA’s prediction that there will be 50 billion internet-connected devices on the planet by the year 2025. This would equate to approximately 7 internet-connected devices per person. At first that number sounds outrageous, but then I thought about it for a moment.

In my home there are 10 internet-connected devices:

1. Thermostat
2. Blu-Ray Player
3. Apple TV
4. iPod Touch
5. iPhone
6. Original iPad
7. iPad 2
8. MacBook Air
9. MacBook Pro
10. PowerBook G4

In another 15 years that number could easily double or triple.

We have long envisioned the future as being one where everything was completely automated and connected. In some ways, we are closer to it than we think. Or, as Speirs wrote:

To paraphrase William Gibson, ubiquitous computing is here – it’s just not built into the furniture. We don’t have smart floors or LCD walls, sensor grids in the ceilings or the Internet on our fridge. We are almost all, however, carrying a pocket device that connects at some level to the network.

An interesting look by bitly at the lifespan of their links:

The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter.

(Via Rands.)

Great piece by Dan Frommer:

Apple, once a victim of the pricing game, is now able to exploit it, while still recording record profits.

It’s true. For $499 you can’t buy a better tablet than the iPad. For $999 you can’t buy a better laptop than the MacBook Air. For $29 you can’t buy a better operating system than Lion.

Nice scoop by Jim Dalrymple at The Loop.

Many thanks to WhereCloud for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

WhereCloud is an iOS app design and development studio. You can hire them to help you build an app, and they would love to work with you. They “breathe, sleep, eat and drink mobile technology, business strategy, product design and user experience.”

Their portfolio is very impressive and diverse. The apps they have designed and developed are attractive, clever, and usable. These guys are in it for the art and the passion of what they do.

Over the years I have received many questions from friends, co-workers, and readers who have an idea or a need for an iOS app they want to build but don’t know where to get started. For some it’s an app they want to build and sell on the App Store. For others, there’s a custom-app that they would love to put on an iPhone or iPad and implement at their place of work. (Even Apple is doing that now.)

If you’ve got an idea for an app, WhereCloud is a great place to start.

One of WhereCloud’s mottos is that every app starts with a question. And to prove it, their phone lines and email inboxes are open, and you can talk with them at no charge. In confidence you can contact WhereCloud to discuss your goals and ideas, hear their feedback, and then from there it’s your decision if you want to work with them.