November 11, 2011

Building Touch-Based Apps

Now that smartphones and tablets are becoming so popular, enterprises are beginning to demand applications that use touch-based interfaces. “The whole idea of touch as an interface mechanism is taking off massively in these enterprises,” says Daniel Dura of software development firm Dedo. But building touch-based apps can be tricky

Adobe Stops Developing Mobile Flash Plug-Ins

Adobe has officially confirmed that it will stop developing Flash plug-ins for mobile devices. Instead, it will focus its efforts on supporting HTML5 and its AIR technologies. “Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for

Apple Bans Security Researcher from Dev Program

Security researcher Charlie Miller recently uncovered an iOS bug that could allow any app to download and run unsigned code. He told Apple about the problem, and they plan to issue a fix. However, he didn’t tell Apple that he also created a proof-of-concept app that they approved for inclusion

70% of Survey Respondents Use Agile Software Development Processes

A new survey of SD Times readers found that 70 percent of those surveyed used some agile software development processes in their work. The most popular agile method was Scrum, adopted by 39 percent of respondents. Other popular agile methodologies included test-driven development (22 percent), feature-driven development (15.3 percent), lean

IBM’s System for Grading Developers

How can you tell which developers produce quality code and which need improvement? In order to answer that question, IBM has begun using a software platform from Cast that provides a quantitative analysis of code based on performance, security and technical depth. IBM developers now earn grades that can help

RIM to Continue Work on Flash

The folks at RIM like to brag that their PlayBook tablet is one of the few that support Flash. But now that Adobe is canceling support for mobile Flash, where does that leave RIM? For now, RIM plans to continue supporting Flash-based apps. “As an Adobe source code licensee, we

Java Stays on Top of Tiobe Chart

Tiobe had predicted that November could be the month that C would overtake Java as the most popular programming languages, but it didn’t happen. Thanks in large part to the growing Android market, Java stayed at number one with 17.87 percent of developers saying they use the language. C was

2012 Developer Salary Outlook

Based on data from Robert Half Technology, Datamation says that average developer/programmer salaries in 2012 will range between $60,750 and $107,500. That’s a 5.2 percent over 2011’s numbers. Developers can expect a salary boost for in-demand skills like Microsoft Sharepoint (12 percent higher), .NET (8 percent higher), C# (8 percent