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.

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.

Intel optimizes ОS Google Android under the х86 architecture

The Intel Corporation is working on the optimization of the operation system Google Android for using it at the devices with х86 compatible processors.
The Android platform was originally developed for smartphones and ARM chips are usually used in such devices. However, the operation system is compatible with other architectures, in particular, with MIPS and x86. By the way, last year Acer presented a netbook with the processor Atom and Android OS.
It should be noted that the modification of Android optimized especially for x86 compatible chips will be based on Version 2.2 (Froyo) of the platform. This innovation will enable Android application development not only for smartphones, but also for netbooks and smart books. This version of the operation system is planned to be released by the end of the summer; third-party developers will be able to get acquainted with the source code of the product if they want.
The Intel version of Android is expected to be used in netbooks, tablet computers and other gadgets with the х86 processors. First of all, it refers to the Atom chips with little energy consumption.
Let’s remind that moving Android to the х86 platform is also done by the participants of the Android-x86 project.