If you like games, nip over to Humble Indie Bundle and splash out some cash (how much is up to you) on the five available games, knowing that you’re supporting indie devs and charity. That’s like some kind of karma rainbow dolphin.

But how much you splash out might have something to do with the platform you’re running. At the time of writing, from about 90,000 purchases, about 60 per cent were from Windows users, with the remaining 40 split evenly between Linux and Mac. Interestingly, though, that smaller number of Linux users has raised almost as much for charity as the Windows crowd, due to higher average purchase prices. Donation averages right now are:

• Average Windows: $3.83
• Average Mac: $6.15
• Average Linux: $10.79

Conclusions to draw from this: Linux users, despite advocating ‘free’ seem perfectly happy to splash out money on a good cause and for great indie software; Mac users pay a bit above the average, presumably due to being trained to do so after years of high-quality shareware; and Windows users are, relatively speaking, a wee bit tight-fisted, perhaps suggesting that any ‘app store’ on that platform will see an even faster ‘race to the bottom’ than what we’ve seen on the Mac App Store and Apple’s iOS store.

Update: World of Goo’s ‘pay what you want’ sale ended up with similar patterns. (Hat-tip: Bruce Phillips.)

Hat tip to Felix Metzger for pointing me at Electronista’s MacBook Air review, which contains some oddball pros and cons. First, cons:

Not as fast as costlier rivals.

Is that really a ‘con’ of any hardware? The more expensive iPhone 4 is superior to the cheaper iPhone 3GS, but is that a ‘con’ regarding the older hardware? Surely if an alternative option is cheaper and faster, that might be something you should criticise, but more expensive and faster is just par for the course.

Battery life could still be longer.

That’s a statement, rather than a criticism. If Apple had a MacBook Air battery that lasted 24 hours, there would still be people who’d moan that it could last longer. But Apple’s 13-inch notebook lasts around seven hours, which is at the forefront of this technology. Again, if Apple was falling behind its rivals, that would be a ‘con’. “MacBook Air doesn’t include technology that doesn’t yet exist” isn’t really a criticism at all.

And then there’s a lovely pair of opinions. First, the ‘con’:

Display isn’t as vivid as on a MacBook Pro or similar.

Then a ‘pro’:

Sharp, low-glare display.

The gist is that Apple’s toned down its MacBook Air display, so it’s no longer akin to a mirror! Hurrah! But then that means it’s not quite as vivid as it once was. In this case, Electronista has a valid complaint, but it strikes me that you get one or the other (with current display technology): either you have glare with vibrancy or matte with dullness. Apple’s struck a balance, and so the review has complained about something it’s earlier championed. Odd.

Note that this doesn’t showcase that Electronista is stupid or that reviewer Jon Fingas needs a slap. The review itself is imperfect but pretty good and balanced. What it does show is that if you run a publication that forces reviewers to add ratings or the inevitable and rather pointless ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ lists, you must take extreme care on those overview elements. They are the things readers are driven to first, and they can so easily mislead, unintentionally or otherwise.

Apple Q3 results:

• Record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion, up 82%
• Record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, up 125%
• 20.34 million iPhones sold, up 142%

Nokia Q2 results:

• Sales of €9.275 billion, down 7%
• Operating loss of €487 million (operating profit of EUR 295 million, down 41%)
• 16.7 million smartphone sales, down 34%

I wonder how many people are still deluding themselves that Apple isn’t now a major player in the smartphone industry.

Damn You, Auto Correct (DYAC), if you’ve not seen it, is a site that showcases amusing typos in text messages. These mostly occur due to the auto-correct functionality in iOS, which aims to guess what you’re writing, replacing misspellings accordingly. It’s pretty clear that a good number of the submissions to the site are set-up, but some are unintentional errors.

With DYAC having been in my RSS feed for a while now, I’ve started to notice a number of patterns. A good number of the replacements are down to user error. There’s a trend, especially in the US, to add a bunch of letters to the end of words, for emphasis. This is illustrated in the entry Learn From Your Fail:

There are also many examples on the site of people who simply do not know how to spell certain words, and so iOS makes its best guess, often to comical effect. However, Father And Son shows another side of auto-correct:

This post’s contributor said his mother was trying to remind him to drop his dad off, not, er, something else entirely. There are quite a few posts along these lines on the site, often from older users. People claim their phone (typically their iPhone) is ‘changing’ their words. I therefore wonder if there’s a discoverability problem here, in people not noticing when iOS offers an alternate spelling; either that or there’s a usability issue in people not knowing how to pick a word when iOS isn’t sure what you meant to type.

It’s also pretty infuriating that iOS still denies you access to its custom dictionary, yet is insanely over-zealous about storing and offering back your more bizarre words. Type a long string in caps and deny iOS changing it to a string of its own devising and you’ll find it subsequently popping up time and time again. While you can nuke your entire custom dictionary in Settings, it’s absurd that Apple doesn’t enable finer control over custom words and mappings, although I suspect DYAC is pretty happy about that, as are its followers.

I just had a quick look at my stats and about 80 per cent of my search traffic is now coming in for variations of “Lion” and “A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer”. Presumably, people who’ve used beta versions of OS X Lion are now having installation problems. I had a similar experience with Reeder.

If you have the error, unmount any disks—including back-up volumes and internal partitions—that may have a copy of Lion installed. You should then be able to install the latest version. If not, hold Option (Alt) while clicking the ‘Buy app’ button and the download will begin.

Should you have this problem with another app, you may also need to trash the beta version of the app from /Applications.