developers

Creator of iPhone Installer.app on Apple's native app stance, the future of Web apps and more

We recently spoke with Maskim Rogov, president of Nullriver Software. His development team created the software -- Installer.app -- that represents a tipping point of sorts for native, binary applications that run on the iPhone. The program installs itself on iPhones via a graphical Mac OS X program that deprecates previously necessary, multi-step Terminal routines. It can then find, install, uninstall, and update native iPhone applications from the device itself over a Wi-Fi or EDGE connection: a veritable sea change that made third-party iPhone binaries feasible for the userbase at large. [See our guide for Installer.app usage instructions] … Read more

Notes from Apple's iPhone Tech Talks: "Energy friendly" Web apps and more

Apple's iPhone Tech Talks -- an event for Web developers that features Apple employees speaking on ensuring Safari on iPhone compatibility, creating Web 2.0 applications for iPhone, and managing content and synched data on iPhone -- have already hit LA, San Francisco and Chicago, wrapping up tomorrow and Friday in New York.

Mike Brophy of RIActant.com has posted some thorough notes from the event, which largely focused on best practices for designing Web content for the iPhone. Among the salient points:

Safari 3.0 beta for Windows, Safari 3.0 beta for Tiger, and Safari 3.0 … Read more

iPhone-optimized site preview tool gets "view source" function

Marketcircle has released a new version of its Mac OS X application that simulates the size of the iPhone's screen, offering a built-in WebKit-based browser. Dubbed "iPhoney," (the new release is version 1.2) the application can simulate the iPhone user agent, rotate to display pages vertically or horizontally, and show or hide the location bar. You can zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone, and turn off plug-ins (including Flash).

Sites are rendered in a 320 by 480-pixel (vertical) or 480 by 320-pixel (horizontal) window, with a stylized … Read more

Learning how software is built

Just came across this blog, which details how software is built in the open and closed-source worlds. It's pretty interesting, even though (or perhaps because?) it's sponsored by Microsoft.

I should have remembered it, as Scott and Sean (the two bloggers on it) contacted me some time ago to do an interview for the blog. It was end of quarter so I failed to keep my appointments....My bad, because it seems like a good series.

Here's a taste from an interview with John McCreesh of the OpenOffice project. I hope Scott's and Sean's comments here aren't intended to sway the written record in Microsoft's favor....… Read more

Ribbit to bring voice to Web developers

A company called Ribbit came out of stealth mode this week, showing off a "phone component" that will let developers embed Internet calling into Web applications.

Company executives showed off the Ribbit Phone Component at the 360 Flex conference in Seattle earlier this week. The Ribbit application is written in Flex, Adobe's development tool used for writing Web applications, including those that use Flash.

"The Ribbit Phone Component will give rich Internet application developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voice mail, as well as add and manage contacts," according … Read more

AMD helping developers get ready for octo-core

It seems only fair that since the hardware side of the computing world plowed ahead with parallelized computing, they should help out the software development community.

In that spirit, AMD plans to let developers take a crack at its Light-Weight Profiler Tuesday as a possible assist for the growing problem faced by PC software developers: just how the hell are we going to effectively use processors with multiple cores? AMD's LWP could let applications written for runtime environments like Java or .Net interact directly with hardware to know how much performance is available across a series of cores, said … Read more

Free versus paid support in open source

As I watched Arsenal beat Ajax this afternoon, I kept an eye on an interesting piece of research from The Journal of Systems and Software written by Sowe et al. and entitled Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study [PDF]. The research revealed something that I suspected but had not yet seen data to prove: developer communities are great for developers, and not so great for anyone outside them.

What does this mean if you're an enterprise hoping to hitch a free ride on an open-source project? Well, it means that you're better off paying a little money for professional support. Free support is good up to a point, but if that point ends when your job begins, you may be in a world of hurt without it.… Read more

Microsoft in desperate need of a new development model

Microsoft clearly has serious problems with its development and distribution methodologies. Problems that open source could help. Problems that far too many entrenched interests within the company would kill before they could be given a fair chance.

That's the lesson I take from yesterday's Wall Street Journal profile of Craig Mundie. The man puts in over 200,000 miles on planes every year, desperately trying to help the company become less like itself, and more like open source software communities. Mundie describes Microsoft and his job within it thus:… Read more

Aping the worst of proprietary software

Dave Dargo has written a thoughtful piece on one problem with proprietary software today: it spends too much time isolating itself as a product, rather than opening up itself and combining to create solutions. As it turns out, open-source software is following in these same destructive footsteps, as we notes:… Read more