We're pleased to announce the App Store Volume Purchase Program. Education institutions in the United States now have a new way to purchase your apps in volume for distribution to their students and faculty. You can also elect to offer special education pricing on your app when purchased in volume.

Read more about the App Store Volume Purchase Program and how to get started in iTunes Connect.

“Imagine a world where the best ideas have the best chance to succeed. No more favoritism that places the wrong people on creative projects. Cut out the middlemen that arbitrarily recommend cost-efficient talent over the most deserving talent. Forget the corporate nepotism that appoints leaders based on relationships over merit. Every individual, team, and industry would benefit from a world where the most talented people got the most opportunity.”

Want to know more? Click through to the article!

This one is a doozy... As we approach the final week before launch, we're putting the finishing touches on lots of little things around the site.  Most of the changes are subtle ones that you probably wouldn't notice unless we pointed them out... so here we go:

• Spotlight minis - On the Start page there are three little rectangles that will hold what we call "spotlight minis".  Spotlights have become insanely popular.  So much so, that when the really really big stuff happens on campus, its hard to get the word out.  Spotlight minis provide a way for institutional news and events to get a little bit more visibility.  Who gets to have a spotlight mini?  Well, that decision is made by a blue-ribbon panel of university representatives.
• Feedback - Your thoughts and opinions are very important to us, so we've added a new Feedback button at the bottom of the page to let you quickly and easily send us what you love and hate about the new myUMBC.  We can never get enough feedback.
• Group Categories - Now each group can define a set of categories that it can use to organize the content created inside of the group.
• YOUR Favorites - Yesterday we enabled the new Favorites menu, well today imported everyone's favorites from the old myUMBC into the new one.  Be sure to check your links though, as something may not work any more as we've done some web shuffling.
• Comment Notifications - You should now receive an email when someone comments on your content.  A great way to stay on top of what people are saying.  We're working on a mechanism to allow you to get notifications about comments anyone else's content, but that's probably a few weeks out.
• RSS, XML, and iCal feeds OUT of myUMBC - We've talked in recent days of being able to get content into myUMBC.  But we've also spent a lot of time making it easy to also get content out.  In the bottom-right corner of many pages, there will be links to get a feed of myUMBC content in several popular formats.
• Weather on Start - The weather is now available in the upper-right corner of the start page.
• About the Team and Acknowledgements - myUMBC is the result of a lot of work by many dedicated people throughout the university.  So we posted a page featuring them all.  Also, we've posted a page showing some of the technologies that have made the new myUMBC possible.  A little geeky, but some might find it interesting.
• Bug Fixes
• Fixed a bug that was causing some content to show in places it shouldn't.
• Made it so everyone can now choose to hide their role switcher.  Before we fixed it, once one person turned it off, no one else good.  We had a good laugh at this one.
• Various typos and tweaks.

We’re proud to announce the arrival of our new wide format printer, Betty!

I'll keep this one short since its late...

• Favorites - you can now easily bookmark various pages from the new Favorites menu.  You can also now reorder, rename, and easily delete favorites.  Take a look at the Billing & Personal Finances topic and see how easy it is to add items to your favorites menu by clicking the gray stars.  Fancy, eh?
• MEGA FOOTER - ok, so its not really a feature, but we're trying it out to see how we feel about it.  It is kinda big, but so is myUMBC.
• Bug fixes, typos, and the like.

The Final Stretch

The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!)

This article discusses the necessary qualities/skills for someone to be successful in the creative field. This may be useful in thinking about how to write your resume or help you talk about what qualifies you for a job.

With the new Version Release Control in iTunes Connect, you can control when an updated version of your app goes live, rather than have the version go live as soon as it is approved by App Review.

Read the Version Release Control section of the iTunes Connect Developer Guide for more information.

With the new Version Release Control in iTunes Connect, you can control when an updated version of your app goes live, rather than have the version go live as soon as it is approved by App Review.

Read the Version Release Control section of the iTunes Connect Developer Guide for more information.