Developers working on apps for the Windows 8 Metro interface say that Microsoft is pushing them to follow some fairly specific guidelines. For example, a Windows 8 search charm always appears on the right side of the screen. Application-specific functions live on a bar at the bottom of the screen,
A growing number of customers are complaining about fraudulent charges on their iTunes account. For example, tech writer Ryan Matthew Pierson’s account was dinged $437.71 for in-app purchases from iMobsters, a game which he has never played. Although the problem was eventually resolved to his satisfaction, it required quite a
The Amazon Appstore is officially one year old. On its first birthday, Amazon has revealed that the store now boasts more than 31,000 apps and “millions” of downloads. At launch a year ago, the alternative to the Android Market/Google Play had just 4,000 apps. “We expected that the Amazon Appstore
At the Black Hat Europe conference, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, said that secure software holds the key for IT security. In order to write secure software, he advised programmers to keep three rules in mind. “First you have to know what you have to do,” he said. In other words, developers
Research firm Forrester last year began using the phrase “NoOps” to describe an environment where developers rely so much on the cloud that they spend very little time on operations tasks like provisioning resources. Experts say that developers typically spend about 60 percent of their time writing code and 40
While Google usually sends checks to Android developers on the second of the month, it didn’t write checks for some developers until March 15 this cycle. On a forum, Google announced the payments and added, “We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced and appreciate your understanding.” However, many
Just days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) slashed prices for its cloud computing services, Microsoft has done the same. Azure Store now costs 12 percent less, and the price for the Azure extra small compute instance has dropped by half. In addition, storage customers who purchase six months in advance
With the mobile development industry increasingly concerned about discoverability, AppCode.es has unveiled two new utilities for App Store Optimization (ASO). ASO is a lot like the more familiar SEO (search engine optimization), except that it helps developers improve their rankings in app stores, not search engines. One of the new
On mobile development forums, many Android developers are expressing frustration that they haven’t yet received their checks from Google for March. Usually, checks for developers’ share of revenues arrive in the first few days of each month. However, this month Google is inexplicably late. Compounding matters, Google hasn’t responded to