October « 2012 « Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Microsoft posts decline in revenue and profits on the eve of Windows 8 launch

By tim, on October 18th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has announced its results for the first quarter of its financial year. The quote from Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein sums it up pretty well:

While enterprise revenue continued to grow and we managed our expenses, the slowdown in PC demand ahead of the Windows 8 launch resulted in a decline in operating income

…continue reading Microsoft posts decline in revenue and profits on the eve of Windows 8 launch

Twilio adds support for WebRTC: real time communications in JavaScript

By tim, on October 18th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Cloud telephony company Twilio has announced beta support for WebRTC at its conference in San Francisco.

WebRTC is a project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera and lets you do real time communications, including access to camera and microphone, using a JavaScript API without a plug-in. There is also a W3C Working Group.

WebRTC

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Adapting the Items Page template in a Windows Runtime app

By tim, on October 14th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

A while back I adapted a sample application in order to create an app for Windows 8. I am mulling over putting it in the Windows Store, but it needed some work. In particular, I wanted to add a Twitter feed to the front page. There is plenty of space:

Sounds easy; but inspecting

…continue reading Adapting the Items Page template in a Windows Runtime app

Will Windows 8 save the PC? Gartner reports 8% year on year sales decline

By tim, on October 11th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Gartner has reported on third quarter worldwide PC sales and they do not look good:

At 87.5 million units, they have declined 8.3% compared with the same quarter in 2011 HP is down 16.4%, Dell is down 13.7%. Lenovo managed 9.8% growth and is now number one with 15.7% of the market

Key quote: “The

…continue reading Will Windows 8 save the PC? Gartner reports 8% year on year sales decline

Microsoft’s Server 2012 Essentials: a good replacement for Small Business Server?

By tim, on October 9th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has completed Windows Server 2012 Essentials, the kind-of replacement for Small Business Server (SBS) in the Server 2012 range.

I say “kind-of” because it does not replicate the old SBS idea of bundling Windows Server, Exchange, and optionally SQL Server into a single keenly-priced bundle designed to work on one or two servers.

…continue reading Microsoft’s Server 2012 Essentials: a good replacement for Small Business Server?

Visual Studio 2012 hits and misses

By tim, on October 8th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

A few quick reflections after writing a rather large review of Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft’s development tool for everything Windows.

Several things impressed me. The Graphics Diagnostics Tools for Direct3D, for example, is amazing; you can capture a frame, select a pixel, and drill down into why it is the colour it is. See Amit

…continue reading Visual Studio 2012 hits and misses

Windows 8 discoverability: users searching for search

By tim, on October 5th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

I have been poking around in the Windows Store as the public launch of Windows 8 approaches, and was intrigued by the reviews for the Wikipedia app, which is nicely done. Several users complain about the lack of a search function:

In fact the Wikipedia app has excellent fast search, on the Charms bar:

…continue reading Windows 8 discoverability: users searching for search

How Adobe turned on a pin to embrace the web (and Google)

By tim, on October 4th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Adobe’s Create the Web world tour – which came to London yesterday – is in the public unveiling of of Adobe’s new wave of tools, the first since it turned away from Flash and towards open web standard, hardly a year ago.

Michael Chaize is a developer evangelist at Adobe. I asked him when

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Appcelerator mobile developer survey shows Windows 8 progress, uncertainty

By tim, on October 3rd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Cross-platform mobile tools vendor Appcelerator has released its latest mobile developer survey (in conjunction with IDC) representing the views of around 5,500 developers using its tools.

It is worth a read this time around. I was particularly interested to see what Appcelerator developers think of Windows 8, launching later this month. There is a chart

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Here comes TypeScript: Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript

By tim, on October 1st, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Anders Hejlsberg has introduced TypeScript, a programming language which is a superset of JavaScript and which compiles to JavaScript code.

The thinking behind TypeScript is that JavaScript is unsuitable for large projects.

“JavaScript was never designed to be a programming language for big applications,” says Microsoft’s Anders Hejlsberg, inventor of C#. “It’s a

…continue reading Here comes TypeScript: Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript

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