Did you say Xavier? We say spring – IT Spring! (Part 2)

So, what were we up to at IT Spring?

Mobile Trends

Where money is in the mobile and how to monetize your apps: myths and reality

Yuri Gursky, Alex Krakovetskyi and Maxim Babich showed us some nice figures and warned that all that glitters is not gold.

Takeaways:

Effective Management

Agile and Scrum are in the spotlight

We were ready to roll up our sleeves to pick up the best practices from Agile and Scrum experts, who mentored the audience on how-tos of effective project management. Tatiana Belova, Vladimir Dobrov, Alexey Minkevich, Vladimir Ivanov gave their views of the right project process and management.

While Maxim Dorofeev and Dmitry Maleev threw into the traditional approach some fresh ideas and food for thought.

Takeaways:

Money

How to get money in Outsourcing? Or is it better to go and build your own product

We have witnessed panel discussions with successful outsourcers and product owners (Arkadiy Dobkin, Pavel Obod, Viktar Khamianok), listened to several presentations on how to make money in outsourcing and software product development tips and tricks (Pavel Obod, Steve Mezak, Pavel Kravchenko, Tim Evgrashin, Dmitry Zavalishin).

Takeaway:

Be your own boss: startups and freelancing

This topic was elaborated in a session of presentations (Ivan Semizhon, Aleksandr Sorokoumov, Alexey Meandrov, Stas Davydov, Denis Shavruk, Aleksandr Orlov and Slava Pankratov, Serhiy Berezhnyy, and Tom Herman), in hands-on  tips from foreign investors (Seth Elliot and John Ason) and a round of startup pitches from Belarusian entrepreneurs and guys, who try to kick-start their own projects (Tripmate, Orderino, Cliqus, Survey 3.0). The round was hosted by a successful Belarusian entrepreneur Mikita Mikado, owner of Quote Roller, and assessed and advised by experienced venture capitalists and angels from the USA.

Takeaways:

Budgeting: how to treat your money right

Another round of presentations during our IT hangout was dedicated to the budgeting process with Kirill Golub, Mihail Sorokin, Sergey Dmitriev giving their view on this point.

Takeaway:

Dreams

We even talked a little bit about our IT dreams with Katherine Lazarevich and Maxim Dorofeev.

Takeaways:

IT Spring 2013 is said to be about money in IT. Honestly, it can be well pronouned to be about Smart IT.

Software For Developing Pluggable Mobile Java Games

SNAP Mobile has informed about the release of a new library for software developers (SDK 2.0) for mobile games.

The new SDK, having a simpler API, thanks to more effective emulation and testing tools, provide mobile application development specialists all the possibilities for creating plug-in mobile games for a wide range of Nokia telephones and smartphones as well as smartphones from other producers which correspond to the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0 and Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.1. standards.

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.

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.

Top 10 Most Welcomed IT Professions 2012

Despite the doubts in stability of the American economy in 2012, the research has showed that American companies are going to expand their IT staff. Analytics have found out what IT professions will be called for. The results of the annual research organized by Computerworld showed that 29% out of 353 IT-executive managers are planning to increase the number of their departments by the summer 2012.

‘The demand for IT-specialists in companies of all types and sizes is constantly growing’, says Mike McBrierty, the executive director of one of the biggest recruiting agencies the Eliassen Group. Moreover, according to his own words, the companies are planning to update the infrastructure and restart the realization of the projects postponed for the last 3 years.

As Computerworld claims, in 2012 the directors of IT departments have set teeth for implementing innovations and that’s why the most relevant for future employees will be the following nine main skills.

•    web and mobile application development skills
•    project management skills
•    technical support and maintenance skills
•    network technologies skills
•    business analysis skills
•    Web 2.0 technologies skills – more and more companies are planning to implement these technologies and the demand for php/java/.net software developers won’t decrease in 2012. Also there will be a big demand for Ajax GWT professional web developers as well as the specialists in .Net, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, Flash and Javascript.

Web App: Android Application Development Tool

At present the range of IT development services has expanded a lot: from simple web applications to video mobile apps. There are several tools for including video into Android applications: Native App, Web App, and AIR video player compiled in the Flash App. Now, let’s talk a bit about the Web App.

Web App is a special way of developing and deploying Android applications. The main idea of this method is in creating the application cover reflecting specially prepared web content. The Web App is a special browser based on the WebView element, the logic of the browser performance and its layout are defined by mobile application development.

The possibility of introducing HTML5 and Flash video player into the user’s interface is an important peculiarity of Android video application development. If you already have a video player already used on the website, you can easily adapt it according to the screen size of the Android device. Although, one shouldn’t forget about the adaptation of the control tools to the capabilities of various devices – smartphone and tablet user’s apply fingers for managing the device and not the mouse.

Using web applications is a very effective way of supporting all the range of new platforms (smartphones, tablets and even TV). One should mention one difficulty – the necessity of time-consuming optimization of web applications for more convenient usage of the application by users in case of slow Internet connection (dynamic content upload).

Advantages:
•    Speed and simplicity of development
•    Using existing web development experience
•    Application interface flexibility – server HTML makeup
•    Continuity of video player design
•    Effective usage of the existing video library
•    Additional cross-platform character of HTML

Disadvantages:
•    Peculiarities of Flash Player performance under Android OS
•    A user may not have Flash Player
•    Limitation of the supported video formats

New Azure Toolkit for Windows 8

Microsoft has released the new tool for mobile application development companies that allows using the possibilities of the cloud platform Windows Azure and the software Windows 8 Metro.

The new set of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 has been designed for the simplified apps development under Windows Metro which is able to work with the cloud operation system Windows Azure. The new tool is reported to let using the remote Azure storage as well as its computational capabilities.

The new tool includes the Windows 8 Cloud Application templates for Visual Studio, which allows working with it from the common environment for software developers.

Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 supports JavaScript and HTML5, as well as .NET, C#, C++ and Visual Basic. Among the additional options there are tools for checking dependency, Windows Push Notification Service libraries and Visual Studio 2010 templates.

June 8: World IPv6 Day

In the nearest future the Internet architecture is likely to undergo some dramatic changes: the current version of the protocol IPv4 has already become outdated, the resource of free IPs has been practically exhausted and the development of web can’t be stopped.  Thus, the companies who are responsible for the Internet performance (mainly providers and owners of web resources) agreed to have the World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011.

Surprisingly, the initiative was not very successful. The Internet Society (or ISOC) had been accepting applications for participating in the project by June 3rd . If we believe in the statistics, provided by the trading association CompTIA, the first global testing was not as good as it had been expected. Only 23% companies took part in the initiative. Of course, the biggest recourses such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, as well as providers, in particular, the American Verizon. All these services offered their services simultaneously via two protocols: the old IPv4 and the new IPv6.

Of course, there were some problematic situations; however, most of them were caused by not by some peculiarities of the new protocol but the fact that the resources had to work simultaneously in two modes. informationweek.com offered to consider that it was the day of working in a two-standard mode and not IPv6 Day. And the more separate participants of the Internet market think about switching to the new protocol, the longer the conflict two-mode performance will continue.

In the nearest future, software development companies will develop their applications taking into account this new protocol and web application development will enter the higher level of performance.

Samsung Developers: New Application Development Center

Samsung has announced the launch of the new site intended for simplifying the process of mobile application development. The development of applications for Samsung phones, smartphones and communicators has become a popular project for individual users as well as for large software development companies.  

Finding applications for various platforms and devices at one big and rapidly growing resource is very convenient. It has changed the conventional views on the online application support all over the world. Millions of users taking part in software development have made the company think over more exciting and advanced opportunities in future.

Samsung Developers has announced about the new site for mobile developers working with Samsung devices where everyone can get the latest news and updates, rich content and the forum for obtaining the technical support and it doesn’t matter at all whether you develop for Windows Mobile, Java platform or just simple widgets. Samsung Developers combines all the platforms into one unified resource with the latest SDK versions, training videos, hardware and software updates.

AndroidMarket: updated and simple

The online store of applications for Android – Android Market – has been updated. New ways of payment, new categories and some other features have appeared. Now if a user doesn’t like the application he can return it to the store only within 15 minutes, not within 24 hours as it was before.You can also find new sections – vidgets and ‘live wallpaper’ and in future the number of sections are likely to increase.

Moreover, all applications have been divided into several categories, such as ‘Video’, ‘Music’, ‘Business’, ‘Sport’ and some others, which, according to mobile application developers, will definitely simplify the search.

One of the interesting innovations is a possibility to pay using the operator’s account and not the credit card. However, this option is available only the AT&T subscribers. In future, as informed in Google, the same option will be negotiated with other operators.