Magic from Apple

Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and other famous people from Apple often call their products ‘magic’ and in some respects they are right. In many cases Apple is ahead of the market for years, it manages to create really incredible devices that change the world — isn’t it magic?

Do you need examples? Here you are. Let’s remember iPad — What’s this? What for? Who needs this ‘iPod on steroids’? And it turned out we need it! Step by step this strange toy is being transformed into an extremely convenient and user friendly tool for professionals and can be a gaming console, an internet tablet, an e-book and many other things as well.  The fantasy of iPad app developers is not limited and it means that iPads opportunities also. Isn’t it magic?

Or let’s take, for example, iPhone. Look at the market of smartphones today: Android, webOS, Windows Phone, many various sensor devices, Nokia smartphones based on Microsoft OS — they are the result of releasing the first Apple phone in 2007. Without it today the market of would be completely different. Isn’t it magic?

Last year Apple presented MacBook Air of the second generation and this year Intel has introduced the concept of ultrabooks which are Windows analogues of that very ‘air’ macbook. Plagiarism? Piracy? No, that’s the natural development of the market when consumers win and the Apple magic was the impulse for this development.

Thus, every software development company tries to conquer this magic and design and develop something new, exciting and magical.

Rising popularity of Android OS

The distribution of Android OS is going on with a frightening speed. Already at the beginning of August, according to the general director of Google Erick Schmidt, the number of daily activations in the world was about 20,000. Since that time, the popularity of Android among the users of mobile devices has increased by 50%. According to the recent data, published in Twitter by the vice-president of Google Andy Rubin, now in the world about 300,000 Android smartphones are activated. This tendency can also be followed in the Android market where mobile application developers place their apps and the number of them is really high.

In comparison with this, every day 157,000 iPhones find their owners. Apple reported that the October sales of the company’s gadgets including iPhone smartphones, iPads and iPod Touch were 230,000.

Thus, Google has overtaken Apple mobile devices all together.

If the Android based smartphones are sold with the same speed, in a month the sales will reach 9 mln smartphones. Annual sales will be equal to 108 mln gadgets.

By 2012 Google platform is likely to become the dominating platform in the world.

Microsoft announced Silverlight 5

Microsoft announced the release of the fifth version of the Silverlight multimedia platform.  At the conference Silverlight Firestarter 2010 Scott Guthrie, a vice-president of the Microsoft Developer Division, presented the new functions of Silverlight 5.

The new version of Silverlight has an improved support of HD video. Thus, according to Guthrie announced that using Silverlight plug in users will be able to watch HD video on the netbook screens with the reduced load on the system resources. It will contribute to a longer time of the offline work of the devices.

Thanks to the option Trickplay, users will be able to change the speed of music and video presentation and launch them in the reverse side. Also Silverlight 5 will have a remote control support.

The beta version of the platform as well as the corresponding plug in will be released in the first half of 2011. The final version will have been released by the end of 2011.

Silverlight is one of the main competitors of the Adobe Flash platform and is used for creating multimedia content and interactive elements for web pages. For reproducing the content, users have to install a special plug-in. The first version of Silverlight was released in December 2006. At present Silverlight exists in the versions for Windows and Mac OS X as well as for the browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Silverlight is very popular among web application developers.

New versions of development tools from Intel

Intel has announced the release of the new versions of its software development packages Intel Parallel Studio XE 2011 and Intel Cluster Studio 2011 for the platforms Linux and Windows. These new products contain the best compilers for C/C++ and Fortran, the libraries for increasing the productivity and the application parallelization, the analysers of code consistency and profilers. In addition to the functions of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2011, the Intel Cluster Studio package includes additional options for programming the distributed memory using the MPI technologies.

The emergence of the Linux versions became a very important event in the development of the Intel Parallel Studio 2011 package – now software developers can check the memory and the standard parallel programming models even in Linux. The utility Intel Inspector XE 2011 has replaced the former utility Intel Thread Checker which is responsible for checking the memory.

The new function of Ideal Interconnect Simulator in the utility Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector helps model the application behavior in the ideal communication environment. What concerns the support of the Fortran programming language, which is very popular in the projects with intensive calculations, Intel provided a special interface for the Microsoft Visual Studio environment (you don’t have to purchase an additional license for Visual Studio) and the utilities Intel Composer XE and Intel Amplifier XE work directly via this interface.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management System

CRM is a computer program which gives any company a chance to become a highly organized company oriented on customers having placed them in the center of all information channels related to them and provides sales people the access to the required data. In the customer oriented company sales people will have the access to the whole information which, one way or another, influences their relations with customers. Negotiations, informal discussion, letters, complaints, reclamations, all the information which has been sent to the customer – everything that can influence the ability of the sales people to provide services and, as a result, sell more goods and services.

The customer oriented companies handle clients’ requests more quickly and accurately as the whole necessary information is stored in one place. Thanks to this, the company can have a higher index of client retention than the competitors that are organized traditionally.

С++ is celebrating its 25th anniversary

The first official guide on the new programming language С++ appeared 25 years ago. On October 14, 1985 Bjarne Stroustrup introduced a new programming language of a high level that allowed writing programs for various computers using practically unchangeable programming code that was closer to the people’s language rather than to the machine codes.   

Recently С++ has become the most widely used programming language that supports object oriented programming. Stroustrup became the pioneer in the sphere of using object oriented techniques in software development where effectiveness is the priority quality in such things as simulators, graphics, user interfaces, application system, and systems for scientific calculations.

Stroustrup’s book ‘C++ programming language’ is one of the bestsellers in this sphere. It was translated into 19 languages. The next book ‘Design and evolution of C++’ opened much new in programming language description: new ideas, ideals, problems. In addition to his five books, Stroustrup published more than a hundred academic and other popular articles.

Bjarne Stroustrup took an active part in creating the ANSI/ISO standard for C++ and now continuous the work on supporting and reviewing the standard.

Mono 2.8 – Development environment .NET

Novell has released the new version of its cross platform development environment Mono 2.8 for web application development based on the .NET architecture. The new version of the platform Mono is a final step on the way to the release of the next version Mono 3.0.

The development environment Mono is an open alternative to the Microsoft tools for the development of .NET applications. Here web developers get all the necessary tools for writing and moving .NET applications oriented not only to the Windows operating system but to the various modifications of Linux or Solaris.

What is new in Mono 2.8? Firstly, its improved productivity of the SGen mechanism for collecting ‘garbage’ in the memory with the dynamic compression of the used memory. Secondly, Mono 2.8 contains a powerful Low Level Virtual Machine used in scientific and financial applications where large volumes of calculations are required. Thirdly, now Mono 2.8 has full support of the new specification of the programming language C# 4.0.

Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight: which platform to choose?

SD Times, the first and only newspaper that was launched for software development managers in February 2000, has become interested in our expertise in Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. So we have got an opportunity to share our experience with more than 60,000 subscribers in more than 130 countries.

Mr. Sergey Marchuk, the Chief Technical Officer of Oxagile, disclosed some secrets in his interview. First of all he explained whether it’s correct to compare Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, and noted that speaking about AIR on this point we should considered Flash / Flex development and such technologies as JavaScript / HTML.

Discussing pros and cons of both platforms he provided interesting data about their percent abundance. Silverlight was proved to be less popular than Flash (50% of PCs with preinstalled Silverlight plug-in vs. 97% of machines supporting Flash). Moreover their rates of popularity can change as new version of HTML (HTML5) becomes available. As we know, it allows watching video without any additional plug-ins (Flash Player or Silverlight). So, as the CTO of Oxagile stressed, nowadays it’s very important to find “the right” software developer and consult on how and which platform to use for every specific software project.

Flex programming – flexible RIA development

What is Flex programming?

Adobe Flex 2 is a very special solution that enables development of RIAs based on Flash related technologies. Interface description and other features are based on XML – MXML dialect. Client logic description was done using ActionScript3 (hereinafter AS3). Adobe Flex translates usual AS code which is transmitted to mxmlc compiler for swf generation (as a result of MXML compilation).

Flex consists of several products:

Adobe Flex Builder – IDE based on eclipse. It allows quick development AS3 and MXML. It has a powerful visual design interface. Syntax highlighting and useful hints, built-in Debbuger, help and other features inspire flex developers.

Adobe Flex framework and SDK was based on the framework components. It contains a huge number of expandable components to develop interfaces of any complexity. It’s free (as a unit of Flex Builder).

Adobe Flex Charting – it’s a library that allows you to create all sorts of interactive charts and graphs (paid application).

Adobe Flex Data Services – it’s a set of server-side component that responsible for fast and convenient exchange of data between Flex and JAVA applications.

The cornerstone of all these applications for flex development is Flash Player (you need the 9th edition for correct work with Flex applications). The main advantage of this player is that its work does not depend on the platform or browser!

Something about mobile applications and more tips for those who don’t want to be a retrograde

#11 Software development for mobile devices

In the late 1990’s, Web development became mainstream in programming and obtained universal recognition, standing apart traditional desktop applications in many areas. In the year 2008 year the development of mobile applications has left the launching pad. The development of this type of programming will become extremely important over the next 5 years. Of course, there are many approaches to develop software for mobile devices: web applications, RIA, and also the applications that can run on the device itself. It doesn’t matter which of these directions you choose. What is really important is that adding skills of development for mobile devices in your resume you can be definitely sure that your experience will be great demand in the labor market in the future.

#12 Newsletter subscriptions and self-education

Nowadays it’s not enough to get the diploma of any profession in IT. Some years without experience and self-education and you will become a retrograde. Of course it’s a sad tendency, sword of Damocles for all the programmers, but fortunately it’s not so difficult to change the situation. Reading news and studying articles about new technologies and the last tendencies in software development will allow you to be always sitting pretty.

to be continued…