Author Archives: Paul Ballard

Google I/O Is Here, What Does It Mean for Developers?

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Google-IOToday marks the first day of the Google I/O conference in San Francisco and as with any significant conference, the opening keynotes included a flurry of product and feature announcements.  Here is a quick rundown of the developer specific announcements made thus far.

Android Adoption – Developers looking to build applications for large audiences need look no further than Android.  Today Google announced that Android activations have passed 900 million.  They also showed that over 48 billion, with a  “B”, apps have been installed to date.  Revenue per user has increased two and a half times what it was just a year ago.

Android Studio – Perhaps one of the biggest announcement for Android developers is the launch of a new Integrated Development Environment called Android Studio.  Google chose to build this environment not on Eclipse but on IntelliJ IDEA and is currently available as an Early Access Preview.  The new IDE will include WYSIWYG designers for rapid prototyping of apps and direct debugging integration with the numerous emulators available.  Other features include:

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More Microsoft Build 2013 Tickets Available, If You Hurry!

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Build2013Microsoft has loosened it’s conference belt a few holes and is making room for more participants at this year’s Build conference.  Tickets for the conference originally sold out in under 3 hours leaving more than a few would be attendees out in the cold.  Tickets go on sale at 9am PDT on Wednesday May 15, i.e. tomorrow morning.

While Windows “Blue”, now officially named Windows 8.1 will certainly be the key topic of discussion at this year’s conference, there will most likely be other revelations on the Windows Phone front in time to coincide with the recent announcements of new flagship Windows 8 Phone based devices from Nokia.  And while its little more than hopeful whisperings, hopes are high that Microsoft will also unveil new Surface hardware including the recently announced 7″ version.

The timing of the release of these new tickets may be completely coincidental, but it just happens to start as the keynote at the Google I/O Developer’s conference kicks off.  Or maybe it’s not coincidence.  In any case, if you missed out on your first chance this could be your last shot so grab them while you can.

 

Windows 8 “Blue” Public Preview Releasing at Build in June

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windowsblue-100033369-largeMicrosoft’s latest Windows 8 release, not-so-secretly code named “Blue”, will be unveiled to the public in June at the Build conference in San Francisco.  The final version is expected to be generally available by the end of the year.  The feature set for this release has been slowly leaking over the past several weeks and is rumored to include a return of the Start button, Internet Explorer 11, and more options for viewing multiple applications at once.

The announcement came from the new Corporate VP of Windows Julie Larson-Green at the Wired Business Conference in New York.  Microsoft Windows 8 recently surpassed the 100 million license mark putting it on par with the more critically popular Windows 7 version at this point in its launch cycle.  It’s unclear why the overall analyst positions seem to be unfavorable for Windows 8 while the numbers from Microsoft seem to show something different.

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Video: Launch Your SQL Database Into The Cloud with Azure

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Who needs the hassle of SQL Server Database integration?  Not you anymore, now you can put your SQL Server data into Azure SQL Services even for on-premise applications.  In this video excerpt from Richard Seroter’s new course Patterns of Cloud Integration you’ll see how to do just that.  In the full course Richard also covers Cloud-to-Cloud integration, new considerations for cloud deployments, and patterns for file transfer.

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Android Reaches Number 1 for Tablets and Smartphones

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iStock_000008735804XSmallWhat was once thought impossible just happened…Android has displaced iOS as the dominant tablet platform. As reported by IDC, Android now has more than 56% of the tablet market as compared to iOS having less than 40%.

For a long time the attitude of both individual developers and organizations about mobile development was to ship an iOS version of an app first and then follow up with an Android version as time permitted. This is an attitude that’s been increasingly hard to justify given Android’s now long-standing dominance in the Smartphone market. With Android now being dominant on both Tablets and Smartphones, it’s time to put this idea to bed.

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Video: Bring Your App Back to Life with Fast Resume in Windows Phone 8

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A tombstoned app is not necessarily a dead app.  This video excerpt from Yacine Khammal’s new course Introduction to Windows Phone 8 will show you how to build an app that can be resurrected more quickly as well as the pitfalls to avoid in that process.  In the full course Yacine covers everything from setting up your development environment, working with the user interface, accessing files and managing navigation, to putting on the finishing touches with Live Tiles and Lock Screen background images.

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Video: Keep Your Data Safe with Windows 8 Known Locations

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Writing data to a file in Windows 8 isn’t quite as simple as it used to be.  In this video excerpt from Jesse Liberty’s new course Windows 8 – From Design to Delivery with C# and XAML you’ll see how to write data in JSON format into a KnownLocation in Windows 8.  In the full course Jesse also covers Layout, Databinding, Navigation, and Special Views.

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Video: Put Down the Old Plotting Calculator and Pick Up MATLAB

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When you need to create complex visualization of mathematical calculations, and who doesn’t from time to time, you no longer need your weathered TI graphing calculator.  In this video excerpt from Dmitri Neteruk’s new course MATLAB Fundamentals you’ll see how to use the MATLAB environment and language to create 2D and 3D plots from mathematical calculations.  In the full course Dmitri also covers Addressing, Manipulation, and Slicing, transposition and inversion, as well as using LaTeX.

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