IBM’s PR machine is full steam on developerWorks Open. It is an open collaborative platform based on GitHub where outside developers can collaborate on projects with IBM engineers. Among the many projects published on the platform, there is an analytic tool for Apache Spark: Spark Kernel.
§Monday, July 27, 2015
After Federico Viticci’s warning on installing finished softwares on an unfinished OS, it is not possible anymore to put reviews on iOS 9 beta. But what about Mac OS X ? Craig Hockenberry reminds how far behind the tools available for Mac developers lag behind iOS ones:
TestFlight has been available to internal developers since iOS 8 was announced in 2014. The system was opened up to external testers who have an iTunes account in the early part of 2015.
Mac developers have never had access to TestFlight, either internally or externally. It’s “coming soon”, and until that day comes, there’s no way to test apps that use the iCloud servers. Which sucks for both the developer and the customer.
But wait, there’s more.
§Friday, July 24, 2015
Peter Bright reports for Ars Technica the release of the new version of Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net with the support of cross platform development: Android, iOS and WatchOS (thanks to Xamarin libraries for the last two). But there is one more thing:
The C++ text editor also includes some refactoring support for the first time.
No comment.
§Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Following the introduction of iOS9 ad blocking extensions, the focus has been set on how intrusive and how much weight ads add to the body of web pages. Frédéric Filloux comes up with some interesting figures from the biggest news sites:
Consider the following observations: When I click on a New York Times article page, it takes about 4 minutes to download 2 megabytes of data through… 192 requests, some to Times’ hosts, most to a flurry of others servers hosting scores of scripts. Granted: the most useful part — 1700 words / 10,300 characters article + pictures — will load in less than five seconds.
But when I go to Wikipedia, a 1900 words story will load in 983 milliseconds, requiring only 168 kilobytes of data through 28 requests.
§Thursday, July 16, 2015
We’re in the middle of July, and it is too darn hot down here. Why not spend a few minutes refreshing our minds by learning something interesting for us, developers ? Jamie Talbot from the Medium team explains very clearly what Bloom filters are, and how Medium is using it:
Bloom filters can very quickly answer variations on the Yes/No question “is this item in the set?”, like “have I seen this item before?”. There are two important caveats though. Very rarely, it will say Yes when the answer is actually No (although it will never say No, when the answer is actually Yes). You also can’t remove an item from a Bloom filter.
§Thursday, July 16, 2015
I really missed this one:
Geotagging. Yes, in Photos 1.1 you can add a location to an image or batch of images that weren’t geotagged, as well as edit the location of data of already-geotagged images. To do this, you open the Inspector window. A not-yet-geotagged image will offer a section of the window labeled Assign a Location. Clicking in this area will let you enter a street address or a name of a point of interest, and Photos will search Apple’s Maps database. If that location isn’t good enough for you, you can always click on the pin and drag it around the map, placing it wherever you like.
§Monday, July 13, 2015
Paul Mayne (Day One), has posted a screenshot of a one star review, because the public beta of iOS 9 was crashing his software. Federico Viticci reminds users what the consequences are for applications in the App Store and the Mac App Store:
For third-party developers — the folks who make the apps you use every day — the problem is compounded by the fact that their finished apps can be installed and run on an unfinished version of iOS/OS X and that users can leave regular, public App Store reviews for them. This is the core of an issue that presents itself every year.
UPDATE (July 22, 2015): You can no longer post app reviews from prerelease iOS versions.
§Monday, July 13, 2015
Less than a year after being hired to reboot Bloomberg’s website, Joshua Topolsky is leaving as Mr. Bloomberg did not agree with the new direction of the website. Ravi Somaiya reports for the New York Times:
The dismissal of Mr. Topolsky is a sharp manifestation of what nearly a dozen current and former Bloomberg staff members described as the chaotic environment that has existed at the company since Mr. Bloomberg returned in September 2014. [...]
A major issue, the people said, is that Bloomberg, as a media organization, is struggling to determine exactly what it wants to be.
§Saturday, July 11, 2015
Dina Bass and Adam Ewing report for Bloomberg Business after Microsoft published the next step of the strategy it announced last month:
Nadella is scaling back its mobile ambitions, seeking to tailor Windows devices for a narrower set of customers, instead of trying to sell as many mobile phones as possible in a market dominated by Apple Inc. and Google Inc.
The articles states that the new phones will target three markets:
Peter Bright (usually my “all things Microsoft” reference) criticizes Nadella’s strategy in a long form analysis at Ars Technica, stating that Microsoft is giving up on its ability to influence computing when it is giving up on mobility:
This leaves Windows stuck on the desktop. The desktop will probably never go away, but its ability to influence the computing landscape is clearly diminished. With it, so too is Microsoft’s ability to influence computing. And in time, this is sure to hurt even the cloud and business productivity segments; it leaves developers and users alike less invested in Windows and Windows development, and more willing to look at other platforms for their needs.
I don’t think that Microsoft’s ability to influence computing is tied to its leadership on the desktop. Microsoft is very relevant in the cloud industry. Cloud services are now shaping the business computing industry. It is usually considered good practice in the computing industry to loose coupling between tiers, as it eases maintenance. It allows good competition between suppliers as well, with Microsoft’s customers not getting stuck with Microsoft’s tools. Microsoft already faced this situation in the 90’s, with IDE/languages/compilers from Borland for example.
It is the whole point of Microsoft’s current strategy: focusing on business cloud services instead of wasting time and resources on markets it has already lost. A company will be billed for using Azure services no matter from which platform nor with which tool it is consuming them.
§Thursday, July 9, 2015
A piece that adds to the one from Brent Simmons:
Like it or not, indie apps are becoming like indie games and web pages: markets that behave more like art than technology.
§Tuesday, July 7, 2015
s2n is a library that has been designed to be small, fast, with simplicity as a priority. s2n avoids implementing rarely used options and extensions, and today is just more than 6,000 lines of code. As a result of this, we’ve found that it is easier to review s2n; we have already completed three external security evaluations and penetration tests on s2n, a practice we will be continuing.
The library is abailable on GitHub under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0.
§Thursday, July 2, 2015
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