New Service From Apple

According to Bloomberg Agency, software developers creating mobile games for Apple iPhone operating systems will be able to sell to users subscriptions to their games for the certain period.

In April 2011 Apple presented the service that allows iPhone app developers to introduce a paid subscription for regular updates into their apps.  At this Apple charges 30% from the profit. Some publishers of e-magazines and newspapers have already offered their readers the similar periodic subscription for updating the content.

The Big Fish Games Company became the first game development company that obtained from Apple the right to offer the access to all its releases for $6.99 per month. So far users have paid gaming apps only once when they download it to their devices.

However, the service has got one clear drawback – if the downloaded game requires the Internet connection only for downloading updates, the subscribed gaming service presupposes the wi-fi network availability at least. Moreover, most popular games at the App Store are available either for free or for some small price (for example, the price for the application Angry Birds is $ 0.99), so that’s still a question whether user are ready to pay for the gaming service.

New Platform Allows Controlling Personal Data

Last week at the conference Web 2.0 developers presented the new platform Singly 1.0 that will allow users to control where and how to use their data. Singly lets users collect the information published about them on the Internet and choose the data that can be used by third parties. Singly 1.0, introduced in the framework of the Locker Project, is an open source platform and is financed by the WordPress general director Toni Schneider and the Best Buy technical director John Battelle.

It should be noted that Singly and Locker Project are Jeremy Miller’s developments who is the developer of the XMPP protocol used practically in all instant message exchange programs based on XML. Jeremy Miller started working on the Locker project in February. According to Battelle, the aim of these developments was to provide users with a possibility to control confidential information.

The release of Singly 1.0 will allow software development companies a possibility to create applications with the help of which it will be possible to search, sort and provide users’ contact data as well as the links used by users online. Moreover, the applications developed on the Singly platform will allow searching by the content of the links, sent to the users subscribed to some account in social services.

In future, software developers are planning to expand the functions of the new platform and let is gather financial information and data about the users’ state of health.

Symfony Development Community Encourages Every Contribution

Fabien Potencier and SensioLabs have started a new initiative to foster further development of Symfony community and recognize every single contribution, made by Symfony devotees either it’s a new piece of code or just an active support of Symfony development values in the online community.

The Symfony project has such a success with IT development companies and professional web developers not only due to the intellectual investment of experts in Symfony development, who write new Symfony plugins.  It’s also the efforts of those, who promote Symfony development knowledge exchange and best practices. They also make web application development with this framework as smooth and convenient as it is now.

That’s why the founders of the Symfony project have decided to acknowledge the Symfony volunteers and aficionados in a game fashion. Fabien Potencier and SensioLabs have introduced a new profile-based network of the community members, enhanced with badge-award system. Now the community members can be awarded with different badges for their contributions to the development of the Symfony framework.

But Symfony project acknowledgements are not limited to badge exchange, SensioLabs also announced its Symfony Community Awards in the following nominations:

• Best blogger.
• Best support on mailing-lists.
• Best support on the forum.
• Best support on IRC.
• Best evangelist (awarded for the best networking effort).
• Best contributor (awarded for coding efforts and debugging).
• Personality of the year.

The results will be made public at the beginning of 2012 and will be based on the votes of the community members, who evaluate the contributions of their counterparts.

Business software development

The key aspect of any successful business is a possibility and ability to attract and preserve profitable clients. The effective management of relations with customers requires more than simple sales process automation. A company should be able to use the key information about the clients and internal business processes for making correct and timely decisions.

Business software gives a company a chance to interact with the client via the channels that are most suitable and convenient for him; it allows a company to develop standard marketing, sales and servicing models, which considerably expands the number of potential clients and improves the quality of the service.

When do you need to order business software development?

If your office is filed with papers and documents; if you need much time to find the reports for the previous periods; if you have many orders but you don’t have a convenient tool for handling clients’ orders; if your company has expanded a lot and you can’t manage all workers, calls or orders, time to apply to the IT development company and have your business optimized.

All the above mentioned problems will be solved and your productivity will double. Moreover, the software developers will create special software package customized to your needs.

Microsoft Roslyn: New Type of Compilers

Microsoft has presented an interesting project named Roslyn. Within the framework of this project, all the concept of compilers and compilable programming languages itself has been reconsidered. Apart from the realization of completely new functions, such as .NET-tools, C#, Visual Basic and the Visual Studio development environment, the Roslyn project offers the completely new concept ‘compiler as a service’, laying a road to the .NET platform to the most promising area – into clouds.

Once Microsoft gave many professional software developers the hope for well-off and predictable future, having moved the development of its own and third party technologies on the .NET development platform. So far, the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET platform are the most popular and convenient development tools, having adopted the best features of java technologies and having made some important steps ahead. When Microsoft presented the new development tools for writing apps with the help of JavaScript and HTML5, many software development companies started to worry that the .Net development had been folded up. However, the reality has exceeded all expectations – the presented project Roslyn has proved that the .NET platform has exciting future.

The Roslyn technology can be described as ‘compilation by request through the providing service’, although this description is a bit complicated. Technically, the new technology is not a service in comparison with such cloud solutions as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). The Roslyn technology is more similar to the Windows system services that offer completely new principles of compiling .NET applications – each phase of compilation is presented in the form of service that can be requested by other applications.

Usual compilers throw away all intermediate data while getting ready-made files and in Roslyn compilers all intermediate data is available via standard .NET API-interfaces. For example, the request to one single API will retrieve the whole syntax tree for the given code fragment in the form of an object. The request to another API can return the number of methods in code.

So far, one can’t predict how soon the Roslyn technology will find its place among standard development tools  – now only the trial version for C# and Visual Basic is available.

Symfony 2.0.5 Release