September 23, 2011

Rackspace and Managed Cloud Services: “Magic” or Marketing?

“The Cloud” may be an industry buzzword, but many companies are starting to realize that it takes work to move to the cloud. There is no magic button that you press and instantly have your company utilizing the cloud. No matter how you slice it, IT is just complex, slow

Jenkins vs. Hudson Debate Continues in Conference Showdown

From the ‘If You Can’t Beat Them, Go Across the Street‘ files: Among the contentious open source projects that Oracle inherited from Sun was the Hudson continuous integration server. The Hudson project was forked into the Jenkins CI project, which has continued to go its own path. Oracle hasn’t given

Windows Phone Tools for Nokia Developers

When Nokia announced that it would begin selling smartphones based on Windows Phone 7, Qt developers who had created apps for Nokia’s Symbian platform wondered what would happen to their projects. Now Microsoft has posted several tools to help those developers make the switch to the new platform. Those new

72% of App Store Revenue Comes From In-App Purchases

According to a new report from Distimo, 72 percent of all App Store revenue comes from in-app purchases, an increase from 28 percent reported in June of 2010. Incredibly, only 4 percent of iOS apps offer in-app purchases. That means 4 percent of App Store apps generate 72 percent of

The Difference Between Software Developers and Team Leaders

In this article, Eric Spiegel recounts his experience of moving from his position as a software developer to becoming a project manager. One big first challenge was dealing with more experienced former colleagues who had been passed over for the promotion. Speigel concludes, “What I have learned over the years

Samsung Plans to Open Source Bada

According to an unnamed source, Samsung “is planning to make Bada software an open source platform next year.” Bada is Samsung’s internally developed mobile operating system that the company puts on inexpensive smartphones that it sells in Europe and emerging markets. Observers say that opening the code for Bada could

Adobe Unveils Flash 11 and Air 3

Adobe has announced that it will release version 11 of its Flash player and version 3 of its Air runtime in early October. Both boast better performance for 3D gaming, and Adobe says the duo are 1,000 times faster than Flash Player 10 and AIR 2. The big question is

Mango Update to Roll Out “In a Week or Two”

Developers have had their hands on the Mango update to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system for a couple of months, and soon end users will be able to access the new features too. In a tweet, Microsoft’s Brand Watson announced, “Boom? no more rumors. Mango to start rolling