Windows App Studio–Free Tool to create apps in Windows Stores|Microsoft "Windows App Studio. A free, online app creation tool that allows you to quickly build Windows (Store) and Windows Phone apps to publish, test, and share. Make changes, add content, and toggle between phone and tablet views to watch your app come alive.
And if you want to advanced programming features, Windows App Studio generates your source code ready for Visual Studio - a feature no other app-builder tool provides."
ASP.NET 5 is an open source web framework for building modern web applications that can be developed and run on Windows, Linux and the Mac. It includes the MVC 6 framework, which now combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework. ASP.NET 5 will also be the basis for SignalR 3 - enabling you to add real time functionality to cloud connected applications. ASP.NET 5 is built on the .NET Core runtime, but it can also be run on the full .NET Framework for maximum compatibility." ASP.NET vNext | The ASP.NET Site
Spark Electron brings inexpensive cellular connectivity to IoT "... a tiny $39 circuit board that you can think of as a cellular-connected Arduino with a SIM card. It also has an ARM Cortex M3 processor, 128K RAM, 1MB of flash storage, and a USB port... Spark’s plan runs $3 per month for 1MB of data; each additional MB costs $1."
Pyramids and cathedrals - Invisible to the eye Alan Kay: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piledon top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
... we were really trying to do pyramids, not gothic cathedrals. That, in fact accounts for much of the structure of modern operating systems today ... Or, you can come up with a new concept, which the people who started getting interested in complex structures many years ago did. They called it architecture. Literally, the designing and building of successful arches. A non-obvious, a non-linear interaction between simple materials to give you non-obvious synergies..."
"Instrumental reasoning" (most people care what contributes to their current goals)
vs. "interest in ideas" (about 5% of people, motivated by ideas, transform their goals)
Another contrast on reward: "inner motivated" (15%) vs. "outer motivated" (85%) people.
Because of this, it takes a long time from introducing new idea and accepting it.
Most of complexity is absolutely unnecessary. Most successful projects put effort in keeping things simple. Object-oriented is about messages, not about objects so much.
Optimal state for learning is "Flow", between being bored and being anxious. The way to make "flow" area wider is to reduce "anxious" and "bored" areas. Less anxious, by making it safer to try things, i.e. by introducing "undo". Less boring, by making it more "attractive / interesting", i.e GUI.
"Net neutrality (also network neutrality, Internet neutrality, or net equality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on theInternet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication."
"The Federal Communications Commission approved the policy known as net neutrality by a 3-2 vote at its Thursday meeting, with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler saying the policy will ensure "that no one — whether government or corporate — should control free open access to the Internet."
HTTP/2 Specifications Approved for Publication @ InfoQ "HTTP/2 specifications have been approved for publication, according to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 15 years after the launch of HTTP/1.1, IETF have gone through over 200 design issues, 17 drafts, and 30 implementations to get the specification approved to be published as standards-track RFCs."
Compared to HTTP/1.1 the key differences include
HTTP/2 is binary, rather than textual
Instead of being ordered and blocking, HTTP/2 is fully multiplexed -- using just one connection for parallelism
using header compression, HTTP/2 reduces overhead
HTTP/2 allows servers to “push” responses proactively into client caches
"The Atom Shell framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on node.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor."
"atom-shell-starter is a base application that you can use to get started writing your own cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux) Desktop apps via Atom Shell. This template is extracted from the Atom source code, cleaned up to be more generic, and to be a great starting point for a production app."
"Slack is a platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go."
A fascinating story about people and history of creating of computers and the internet.
I have slightly extended a list of links from (and to) Wikipedia.
A list is a not an optimal format for this, a visual graph would be better.
This story is still unfolding, with Mobile, IoT, biotech and many other areas of science and technology improving exponentially by efforts of innovators.
There is often a need for packaging web content as a portable file, like PDF but based on web technologies. ePub is a solution for this. ePub format is a simple zip of a XML index file and HTML pages, and it has an advantage of being flexible for various screen sizes: very important for mobile, and reading text documents.
Besides desktop and mobile apps, there are also JavaScript apps for that, even a "app" extension for Chrome web browser. And since future Microsoft web browser Spartan will also be compatible, this is almost universal and simple solution!
This could be a bigger business than electric cars, and could enable "smart grid" (and lower bill).
Quite appropriate for name (of Nikola) Tesla, and reputation of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk says Tesla will unveil a new kind of battery to power your home | The Verge: "...Musk had laid out his ambition to make something that would live in consumers' homes, instead of their cars. "We are trying to figure out what would be a cool stationary (battery) pack," Musk said. "Some will be like the Model S pack: something flat, 5 inches off the wall, wall-mounted, with a beautiful cover, an integrated bi-directional inverter, and plug and play."
Warm-Up Lap: Tesla P85D Demolishes Challenger Hellcat - Gas 2 "The Dodge Challenger Hellcat is a no-holds-barred quarter-mile machine that represents the 707 horsepower zenith of the American muscle car. The Tesla Model S P85D is the 691 horsepower poster child of the plug-in car movement... all-wheel drive Model S launches with precision and little fanfare, knocking down a record-setting 11.68 at 114 MPH, making it both the quickest and fastest production electric car out there."
While most of "industry" is moving to many ARM based (and Intel low-power chips)
Oracle/Sun is custom designing chips for in-memory database optimization...
What "Cloud" has to do with this?
Oracle's recent effort to become "cloud ready", so it is marketing...
Canonical wants Ubuntu Core to become the operating system for the IoT. Ubuntu Core, like CoreOS and Red Hat's Project Atomic, uses a lightweight Linux server to support containers. Unlike the others, which are pointed exclusively for the data-center and the cloud, Canonical also sees Ubuntu Core as being ideal for devices as well."
How about mobile phones and desktops?
This is where containers would be very useful, in particular for security, portability and efficiency.
Functional Programming in Javascript by Jafar Husain "Functional programming provides developers with the tools to abstract common collection operations into reusable, composable building blocks. You'll be surprised to learn that most of the operations you perform on collections can be accomplished with five simple functions:
"...a series of interactive exercises for learning Microsoft's Reactive Extensions (Rx) Library for Javascript... the key to learning Rx is training yourself to use functional programming to manipulate collections. Functional programming provides developers with the tools to abstract common collection operations into reusable, composable building blocks"
RSSBus - Integration Your Way "RSSBus provides high-performance, reliable, and fully-extensible products that simplify the process of producing, consuming, and integrating data."
This platform is developed by /n software, that sells excellent libraries of networking related programming libraries, also sold as subscriptions. RSSBus - About Us /n software - Contact Us
Mobile deep linking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "In the context of the mobile apps, deep linking consists of using a uniform resource identifier (URI) that links to a specific location within a mobile app (i.e.exampleApp://location/123456), rather than simply launching the app (i.e. exampleApp://). Depending on the mobile device, the URI required to trigger the app may be different (e.g. exampleiOSApp://location/123456 versus exampleAndroidApp://launch?location=123456). ... This link fb://profile/33138223345 is an example of a mobile deep link. The URI contains all the information needed to launch directly into a particular location within an app, in this case the Wikipedia page within the Facebook app, instead of simply launching the Facebook app fb://."
Badass: Making Users Awesome: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates: 9781491919019: Amazon.com: Books "...question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?
... The answers to what makes a sustainable bestseller aren’t in the successful product. The answers are in the successful product’s users."
The bar for making a product great is usually quite high ("Book awesome")
The bar for helping the user be better (by using product) is usually much lower ("User awesome") So it is much more effective to focus on helping user be great, by using your product. Design literacy
take our users up the expertise curve as much as possible, as fast as possible Definition of expertise: Given a representative task, experts perform in a superior way, more reliably, than non experts (not novices). Therefore, badass = reliably superior performance.”
Goal of Awesome Products: Creating "Badass" Users
Deliberate Practice (learning method) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ...how expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times. An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert andfocuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practicing a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it."
Making Badass Developers - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote - YouTube Published on Apr 22, 2015 "From Fluent 2015. "Every moment of every day there’s a new language, framework, format, protocol to learn. Nobody has a more dynamic skill set than a web developer. We’ll look at the one metaskill to rule them all: The ability to come up to speed and stay there, over and over again."
...as the challenge of an experience rises, the skill of the participant must also grow in direct proportion.
...If a user's skill exceeds the challenge of the experience, they will become bored. ...if the challenge exceeds the participant's skill, they will suffer anxiety. ...an optimal user experience is illustrated in the "Flow Channel" as the squiggly line.
How to Run Android Apps Inside Chrome on Any Desktop Operating System ARC: The App Runtime for Chrome (or ARC) is the piece of software that allows Android apps to run in Chrome. In the same way that ART (and the older Dalvik) currently run Android apps in Android itself. By making a modified version of the Android runtime for Chrome, Google can allow developers to add support for Chrome without rebuilding their apps from the ground up.
"Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively."
"What is Mesos? A distributed systems kernel
Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elastic Search) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. Project Features:
Scalability to 10,000s of nodes
Fault-tolerant replicated master and slaves using ZooKeeper
Support for Docker containers
Native isolation between tasks with Linux Containers
Multi-resource scheduling (memory, CPU, disk, and ports)
Java, Python and C++ APIs for developing new parallel applications
Web UI for viewing cluster state"
This is raising level of abstraction in data center to "task", that could include multiple processes running on virtual or physical servers, or preferably in containers. Already used at scale in Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Airbnb, and others: mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/powered-by-mesos/
With current smartphone hardware, there is no technical limitation to run multiple platforms, Android JavaVM and WinRT .NET for example, as well as Chrome/Spartan and Mozilla Web apps.
CyanogenMod may need a better name for wider audience, so they could mix Android and Windows to AndroWin for example :) With recent Microsoft open-sourcing of .NET, that may be possible. They the users could access
Android apps from Google store and
Windows apps from Microsoft store, and
Web apps from many places.
The name Androwin is already used for running Android apps on Windows desktop, but as Apple has demonstrated with iPhone (that was first trademarked by Cisco), getting name is not a significant issue.
So the mix may be the best of all worlds. Or is it?
The world does not need more platforms and confusion.
It needs a common apps platform, and open apps marketplace for developers and users.
RemObjects Silver "Silver is a free implementation of Apple's Swift programming language.
With Silver, you can use Swift to write code directly against the .NET, Java, Android and Cocoa APIs. And you can also share a lot of non-UI code between platforms.
...
Built on over ten years of solid compiler knowledge and technology, Silver is a truly native Swift compiler for the .NET CLR, the Java/Android JVM and the Cocoa runtime."
Why Ruby? by Jeff Atwood @ Coding Horror
Jeff selected Ruby for being open source and nice platform and community.
But most of web (and other) apps are mostly based on JavaScript now: "...Discourse is... even more of a JavaScript project than a Ruby on Rails project. Don't believe me? Just go to try.discourse.org and view source. A Discourse forum is not so much a website as it is a full-blown JavaScript application that happens to run in your browser."
iOS charts, grids, developer tools, custom UI controls, iPhone, iPad "From a developer's perspective, iOS 8 was one of the biggest updates from Apple in quite some time. In addition to an entire new programming language in Swift, there are also over 4,000 new APIs which enhance the operating system itself"
Announcing Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg @ .NET Rocks! "what happens next? Aurelia is Rob's vision of what web developers need to build effective browser-based client applications. Rob talks about implementing Aurelia to utilize ECMAScript 6 and 7 while still polyfilling back to ES5 - the Javascript you recognize"
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