Many, many thanks to Jitouch for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote Midori. Midori is a beautiful and powerful Japanese dictionary and translation app for iPhone and iPad. It has hundreds of thousands of entries, example sentences, and names to help you translate and learn Japanese.

Midori’s sponsorship was booked well before last week’s tsunami in Japan, but I can’t think of a more fitting app to be promoted on the RSS feed this week. And it’s worth noting that purchasing a copy of Midori means you’ll be directly supporting the work of a Japanese iOS developer.

You can pick it up for ten bucks as a universal app from the iTunes App Store.

Midori

As if the list of prizes weren’t already amazing enough, a few more classy Mac OS X apps have been added to the Membership Drive giveaway. Sign up for a membership before midnight CST on Sunday, March 20 and you just may win something.

(Note that the ability to become a member, support this site, and get access to Shawn Today will continue indefinitely. But only those who sign up before Sunday night will have a chance at winning something next week.)

Additional Prizes Added to the Membership Drive Giveaway

Ben Brooks wrote the smartest thing I’ve read all day. A great companion piece to the aforelinked Jason Fried article on how to make money.

Also, Kyle Baxter wrote some good comments on Ben’s article:

[Twitter] assumed if they reached a critical mass of users, turning it into a profitable business would be easy—and they’ve discovered that isn’t really true. It takes just as much thinking as building the actual product does.

“Fragility of Free”

A side-by-side comparison of the original iPad and the iPad 2. The original had to re-load 4 of the 9 open browser pages, and all the pages showed checker-boarding when scrolling around. The iPad 2 didn’t re-load any pages and showed no checker-boarding.

As I’ve been using the iPad 2 over the weekend it’s not that there is one specific element that really stands out as the premier factor which makes the 2 better than the original. Rather, it is all these little things — the faster processor, the better graphics handling, the increased memory, the slimmer form factor — which, when added up, do their part to make the iPad 2 an altogether noticeably better device than the original.

iPad vs iPad 2: RAM performance in Mobile Safari