Honeywell Developer Program

Honeywell Company announced the release of the Honeywell Developer Program oriented on mobile software developers who design mobile applications for Android-based devices. The aim of this program is to provide independent software developers and end-users with an opportunity to contribute to the creation of Honeywell mobile computers that will function under Android OS. The participants of the program can develop and test Android applications for new Honeywell mobile computers before their official release.

The results of the recent research in the smartphone market, conducted by the company Honeywell, show that the leaders of various software development companies where mobile devices are used in their work, include Android OS in their general technological strategy. Mainly that’s because Android OS has wide options for customizing and thanks to its huge success in the smartphone market it is popular with mobile users.

The participants of the Honeywell program get the access to the online store selling software for Honeywell devices (isvstore.com) and take part in joint marketing and advertising campaigns of Honeywell. Moreover, their apps will be demonstrated with other Honeywell products at the next conferences.

At the same time, due to the flexibility of Android OS, the participants of the program will be able to ensure maximum productivity and convenience in use for Honeywell mobile devices.  Among the independent software providers and end users registered in the program there are Aldata, ALK Technologies, Apacheta Corporation, Astea, ClickSoftware, Cornell Mayo, Countermind, Mobile Tornado, RetailPro and Vodafone.

Windows 8 Opens Its Own Application Store

In the MSDN blog Steven Sinofsky, President of Microsoft Windows Department, announced the list of software development companies employed for  developing the Windows 8 platform.

Apart from the teams, Steven Sinofsky mentions the App Store. The users have made a conclusion that Windows 8 will have the integrated tools for accessing the online application store.

Unfortunately, no details about the App Store service have been informed. But it is likely to be similar to the Apple Mac App Store service that offers a wide choice of various free and paid applications for Mac OS-based computers.

The preliminary version of Windows 8 will be released for software developers and testers in the nearest future. According to Mr. Sinofsky, the given software platform will let rethought Windows for the new generation of computing devices. Using this OS will be possible on x86-compatible computers and gadgets based on the processors with ARM architecture, in particular on tablets.

The final version of Windows 8 will be released in 2012.

New Java 7 Released

On July 28 Oracle announced the release of the Java Platform Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7). That’s the first release of the Java platform since the time when the control over the platform development moved from the Sun Corporation to Oracle.

Java SE 7 is the first big Java release for the last five years. The release is the teamwork of Oracle engineers and also the global community of Java developers who participated in the development of the platform within the OpenJDK community. In the process of development 9,494 bugs were fixed, 1,966 updates were introduced, 9,018 package corrections were released, 147 installations were performed and 4 requests for Java (JSR) specification were sent.

Java SE 7 includes the changes aimed at improving the platform efficiency and simplifying routine tasks of a programmer. Some efforts were also undertaken to make standard operations require less code and the language syntax be more transparent, which enables easy listings reading. Also the release presents the improved efficiency of the dynamic programming languages working on JVM, such as Ruby, Groovy, Python and JavaScript. The new interface for developing applications for multinuclear systems enables the breakdown of the tasks for concurrent processing between any numbers of processor’s nucleus.

Now Java developers, interested in the new language version, can start working with Java SE 7. The popular integrated development environments (IDE), such as NetBeans 7.0, IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 or Eclipse Indigo with the Java SE 7 plug-in, already supports new Java features. By the end of the year, the JDK 7 support will have been realized in the Oracle JDeveloper environment.

According to Oracle, there are about nine million java software developers in the world. The number of platform downloads is about one billion a year and the number of devices working with Java exceeds 2 billion.

PittPatt: Face Recognition System

Google has acquired a small company from Pittsburg, called PittPatt, which is developing the software for recognizing people’s faces. The PittPatt technologies are able not only to recognize faces in the frame but also define them in real time while taking photos or videos. According to software developers, their innovations will be used for the simplest tasks (image processing and sorting) as well as in the complicated applications on video-display processing. They will also be used in the cutting edge Android mobile applications.

It is expected that in the next Android version (Ice Cream Sandwich) the face recognition system will allow applications which use video recording to focus automatically on a person who is talking at the moment. These possibilities were supposed to be used for searching in Google Goggles but later this innovation was rejected due to some privacy problems aroused.

The PittPatt developments are most likely to be used in the new social network Google+, but in this case the user himself will be able to adjust and choose the privacy level– either automatically or only for the photos and videos added by the selected users.
Let’s wait and see what will happen after the implementation of this technology. Maybe it will lead to numerous lawsuits and claims? Or the range of software development services will be expanded on another service?