Comments for Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Comment on Martin Fowler on the ethics of software development – QCon report by Peter Headland

Peter Headland — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:26:50 +0000

Sean Josiah:
> the lack of African descendants in IT

We are all African descendants; some of our ancestors left earlier than others…

The company I currently work for treats all employees equally, does not tolerate any form of harassment, and is very accommodating of individuals’ needs; in other words, there is zero barrier to women working here. Despite all that, we have very few female developers – we just can’t find enough to recruit. The problem is a long way upstream from here, in career choices made by girls in high school, and I don’t think that their perception is that IT is hostile to women, just dull, geeky, uncool, etc.

Comment on Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game by ahmoy

ahmoy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:06:25 +0000

The image for Acid3 shows that the current build for ie9 is only scored 55/100, pathetic!!!

Comment on No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash? by Fabio Ceconello

Fabio Ceconello — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:54:37 +0000

Microsoft is wrong, wrong, wrong!

They started a new product marketing effort by alienating all the developers for Windows Mobile/CE/PPC which will have to ditch their codebase and start from scratch. That’s the first big mistake.

They are forcing them to use only one platform/language, second big mistake. If you have native code support you could have VMs and runtimes for all the major languages, and I’m sure the open source community would be eager to make ports. And this would benefit anyone who had written code for such languages before and would have now a new platform to compete.

They are trying to attract new developers with a dev environment that is simple to use and RAD-oriented. Wrong! They should court the hardcore developers, those that don’t mind to spend some time to port their code if the platform is powerful and attractive. The result? Many small apps with a questionable utility, and no serious apps, which are those that really attract the users. Although this is not a case so serious as the ridiculous WebOS (.net is quite more powerful than some souped-up Javascript code).

Apple tried this and learned quickly. Palm blindly repeated the same error and is already a failure. Even Android already supports native code.

The irony is that the company that’s most reviled for being ‘closed’ (Apple) is the only major smartphone manufacturer now that gives a native-friendly environment, and therefore gives the developers more freedom to choose their development tool. Although most people write iPhone apps in Objective-C, this is not mandatory at least. Of course to have the approval to go to the app store is another story. But given that it’s the most successful platform, MS should get the hint.

Comment on Cannot open the Outlook window – what sort of error message is that? by Steve Parkin

Steve Parkin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:50:08 +0000

It works! – which is more than can said for Microsoft advice. Well done.

PS I cut and paste the link so I didn’t foprget the space.

Comment on The two specifications of HTML 5.0: WHAT WG vs W3C by Molly Holzschlag

Molly Holzschlag — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:58:07 +0000

“The goalposts keep moving on this one” – truer words never typed

Comment on Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in? by tim

tim — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:38 +0000

Roman

Answers to your questions:

app on your web site – no
certified in this case – n/a
native code (C+) – no

OEMs will have access for drivers at least.

Tim

Comment on No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash? by Peter Ibbotson

Peter Ibbotson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:27:07 +0000

I suspect this won’t last long. Personally I don’t care if you can’t get stuff in the app store that calls native, providing it’s still there as an option. For the most part this probably doesn’t matter but if I wanted to produce a background service or do some cryptography then I might care.

Wait and see what happens when the MS sales team ends up talking to corporate developers I suppose. (Since it’s CE6 under the covers I’d have thought a CE6 dev kit would work around this)

Comment on No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash? by Jonathan Allen

Jonathan Allen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:15:14 +0000

You don’t need to use native code to support Java. IKVM has proven that you can build a JVM using the CLR. Of course there is an open question as to whether or not IKVM can be ported to Silverlight.

Comment on Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in? by Roman Vasin

Roman Vasin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:45:00 +0000

Tim, I don’t understand the apps must be certified to be placed on Windows Phone Marketplace?
Can independent developer make an app and put it on his own web site, so customers can simply download and use it without visiting Windows Phone Marketplace?
Must be the app is certified in this case?
Can we use native code (C++) for such app?
I have heard that native code will be possible to use only for OEM vendors/publishers.

Comment on The two specifications of HTML 5.0: WHAT WG vs W3C by John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:16:56 +0000

“I do see Adobe as an entity being a more closed company than open, with the exception of some wonderful folks. So I apologize for spreading any FUD, not my intention, just my perception.”

No worries on the latter in this case! But note that the core here is a “feeling of closedness”, rather than an objective objection. The goalposts keep moving on this one. It’s as much a function of the feeling and the marketing as it is of any real thing that affects peoples’ lives, at least from what I’ve been able to draw out of prior online conversation.

jd/adobe