Oops: Nokia reinstates ‘terminated’ star app developer
You may think Nokia needs to keep all the app developers it can muster loyal to the company - but last week it terminated VIP privileges for a star Symbian programmer. Nokia has since changed its mind.
The brains behind the highly regarded Gravity application, Jan Ole Suhr, was one of a number of Symbian coders who discovered their membership of the Nokia Developer Champions programme had been terminated early. This is a scheme that recognises key programmers and gives them early access to tools and technical information.
But Symbian - the mobile phone operating system now officially known as "Nokia Belle" - is no more: there are no future handsets on the drawing board, and just a small fraction of the 3,000 Nokia engineers who worked on the platform are actively developing Symbian at Accenture. Nokia spun them out last year. Read more...
Devs can’t be bothered with Nokia’s Windows Phone – report
Interest in building applications for the current generation of Windows phones from Nokia has plummeted among developers.
Just a quarter of developers are very interested in developing apps for Windows Phone 7 devices compared to 37 per cent in the second quarter of this year, according to the latest Mobile Developer Report from IDC and Appcelerator.
The drop is blamed on "somewhat disappointing" sales of Windows Phone 7 handsets and Nokia's "widely reported competitive challenges".
Nokia sold four million Lumias in the second quarter of 2012, down 20 per cent from the year before. Read more...
OSCON: Akiban targets MySQL users with its new database software
To generate interest from developers, Boston-based Akiban Technologies has released as open source its flagship database software, called Akiban Server. The company also released a connector for replicating a MySQL database within Akiban, and it has forged a partnership with platform hosting provider Engine Yard.
"The data that we capture grows more and more complicated. We designed a database that can handle increasing levels of depth and complexity," said Ori Herrnstadt, who is a cofounder and Chief Technology Officer for Akiban.
The company announced the release at OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Conference), being held this week in Portland, Oregon.
Through a novel way of grouping data, the Akiban database can complete operations 10 or more times faster than MySQL, the company has claimed. It also provides developers multiple ways for their applications to work with the database. Read more...
Dice.com: Java developer most difficult tech job to fill
Java developers remain the most difficult tech pros to land, followed by mobile developers, .Net developers and software developers, according to new data from Dice.com.
Hiring managers and recruiters cite these positions two or three times more frequently than other skill sets in the employment marketplace, according to Alice Hill, managing director at Dice.com
The IT jobs site polled 866 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters to come up with its list of hard-to-fill positions. Rounding out the top 10 list are candidates with skills related to: security, SAP, SharePoint, Web development, active federal security clearance, and network engineering.
In general, companies are looking for candidates with at least a few years of experience. Read more...
Wi-Fi Direct may get a reboot for better ease of use
The Wi-Fi Direct standard may get a much-needed boost next year from work by the Wi-Fi Alliance to make it easier to use for both consumers and developers.
The specification for peer-to-peer links among devices debuted in 2010 and has been delivered in some products, including the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone, but it has yet to become a major platform for new uses of Wi-Fi across a wide range of devices.
The Alliance's Wi-Fi Direct Services task group, formed last month, plans to develop new software mechanisms to help devices and applications determine how they can work together, Wi-Fi Alliance Executive Director Edgar Figueroa said in an interview on Wednesday. Those efforts are on a fast track and should be completed within 12 to 18 months, he said. He spoke at a daylong event on "The Power and Potential of the Unlicensed Economy" at Stanford University, saying Wi-Fi is expanding beyond the home and office wireless LAN technology most familiar to consumers. Read more...
IBM database strategy chief on DB2: Devs are people too
Developers are exerting greater influence on new versions of IBM’s DB2 database, according to one of Big Blue's information management strategy chiefs.
Bernie Spang, director of strategy and marketing for database software and systems, said while IBM has historically consulted DBAs on new features they’d like in IBM’s mighty database, that has changed.
In an interview with El Reg, Spang said IBM is now taking a more balanced approach. “It’s not shifted from one to the other, it’s got to be both,” he told us.
Driving the change is a need to make DB2 more comfortable for developers building web and big data apps that suck on the DB2 data store.
One recent consequence of the shifting approach was the addition of tripled graph-store capabilities for graph analytics in DB2 10.1, which was released in April.
Graph stores find connections between data, so you don’t have to search through piles of relational tables or raw info using Hadoop. Graphs are popular with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn trying to establish connections between individuals on their sites. Read more...
Total bankers: Twitter and LinkedIn’s cynical API play
In tech today, it has become a truism that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on someone else's platform - or API.
Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has described APIs as "self-serve [business development]". It's a great story: open and document your API and watch a thousand businesses bloom, bringing you cash and legitimacy. All of which may be true, if done correctly. Read more...
Windows Phone joins the Windows 8 and corporate parties
Today, Microsoft revealed Windows Phone 8, which has long been rumored under its "Apollo" code name. As expected -- and long hoped by both developers and IT -- Windows Phone 8 will share the same core OS as Windows 8, as well as graphics drivers and Direct3D. And developers will be able to write apps using native C and C++ code, instead of being restricted to the HTML, Silverlight, and Xbox frameworks, though Microsoft continues to recommend use of XAML and its support of C# and Visual Basic via its Visual Studio 2012 IDE.
And -- finally! -- Windows Phone will support key enterprise security needs, including on-device encryption, corporate app distribution, IPv6, MDM (mobile device management) tools, and secure boot. Microsoft also promises a real version of Office for Windows Phone, based on the Windows RT Office version being developed for ARM-based Windows tablets. Read more...
Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead
The next free version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio programming suite won’t build normal Windows desktop apps, it has emerged.
Visual Studio 2011 Express edition will only allow developers to build touchscreen-friendly programs for the new Windows 8 Metro UI, according to the software's product page here. Read more...
Apple’s WWDC sells out in 2 hours
Apple today announced that its annual developers conference would run June 11-15 in San Francisco. And inside of two hours, Apple said the event had sold out.
Tickets for the five-day Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were again priced at $1,599, the same as for the last two years' confabs.
The quick sell-out wasn't a shock: A year ago, Apple exhausted supplies in under 12 hours, a huge acceleration over 2010, when tickets were available for eight days. Read more...
Developers Are Divided Over Adobe’s Plan to Take Revenue Share For Higher-End Flash Games
Developers are at odds over Adobe’s plan to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues.
So today, Adobe announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a popular gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile’s Battleheart.
This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics. Read more...
Google locks up cloud apps and throws away the keys
Google has introduced certificate-based authentication for developers requiring secure connections to the advertising broker's cloud.
Google Service Accounts - announced today in a post in a blog post - will validate web apps' access to the company's servers with a certificate rather than passwords or shared keys. Read more...
Facebook takes a toll on your mental health
Facebook's initial public offering of stock is likely to make a lot of developers and designers of the site very wealthy. But for many users, frequent Facebooking may not be so beneficial.
According to three new studies, Facebook can be tough on mental health, offering an all-too-alluring medium for social comparison and ill-advised status updates. And while adding a friend on the social networking site can make people feel cheery and connected, having a lot of friends is associated with feeling worse about one's own life.
The thread running through these findings is not that Facebook itself is harmful, but that it provides a place for people to indulge in self-destructive behavior, such as trumpeting their own weaknesses or comparing their achievements with those of others. Read more...
‘Occupy Flash’ movement wants Adobe’s plug-in dead
A small group of website and mobile app developers have kicked off an "Occupy Flash" campaign to put a stake in the heart of Adobe's popular browser plug-in.
The organization, which launched a website earlier this week, said its goal was to "Get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in from their desktop browsers."
And the group didn't mince words why it was after Flash Player.
"Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates," said the Occupy Flash site. "It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology."
Last week, Adobe announced that it was halting development of Flash Player for mobile browsers, but that it would continue work on the plug-in for desktop browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. Read more...