On June 13th, 2013, Google announced that they would be discontinuing support for their ChromeFrame plugin for Internet Explorer. For those of you who are not aware of it, ChromeFrame enabled older versions of IE to support the newer HTML5 protocols by running Google Chrome from within.
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This week Microsoft posted a series of videos on YouTube clearly mocking Apple’s creative process. One of the actors is obviously supposed to be Jonathan Ive. Some have said the other bears a resemblance to Steve Jobs and that if that’s who they were mocking, it’s in poor taste. While Microsoft is no stranger to poor taste, I think they were mocking Tim Cook, not Steve Jobs.
Comments closedLast week, the country of New Zealand (or “Middle Earth” for Lord of the Rings fans like me) joined the EU in passing legislation banning software patents. They did this because it’s becoming impossible for software developers to innovate without finding themselves violating someone’s patent. This drives up the cost of software development and drives down innovation.
Comments closedDumb Ways to Code
By Geoff Perlman
Sung to the tune of “Dumb Ways to Die” by Tangerine Kitty
Use an object that's out of scope
Don't escape your SQL quotes
Ship without a beta test
Think Google Translate to localize is bestComments closed
Nearly all CPUs used by your devices, from computers to tablets to phones, now contain multiple CPU cores. With a multi-core CPU, your computer can literally do multiple things at one time, which is called multiprocessing. And with a little careful planning, your Xojo apps can use multiprocessing for significant performance improvements in your apps.
Comments closedI’ve discovered a way to potentially speed-up your Internet access. Before we get to that, it occurs to me that the way in which computers find each other on the Internet may be a bit of a mystery to many. If you’d like to understand how it all works read this first.
Your devices (computers, tablets and smartphones) are constantly accessing their assigned DNS server and since they often can’t continue until a response is received, the speed of your DNS server can have a big effect on the speed of your Internet access. If you’re using any of the Internet classes in Xojo, this will of course affect the performance of your apps as well. Not all DNS servers are created equal. You are probably using one at your Internet provider and it may not be the fastest DNS server available to you. But with all the DNS servers out there, how can you know which one is fastest?
Comments closedThe LA Times is reporting that the Los Angeles Unified School District has awarded Apple a $30 million dollar contract to provide 35,000 iPads to students in the district. The iPad was chosen after students and teachers tried several tablets and gave the iPad the highest score.
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Since the introduction of iCloud, I have wanted to have a single Apple ID. When Apple recently added the two-step authentication for Apple IDs to make them more secure, I decided to sign in and update my Apple ID account. Part of the process is to verify a device you own which will be used, along with your password, to authenticate that you are who you say you are should you want to make changes (such as your password) to your Apple ID in the future. The webpage said it would list my devices, but none were listed. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The Apple ID I was updating was for iTunes, while the Apple ID Apple was using to find my devices was the one associated with my iCloud (MobileMe/mac.com) account.
Comments closedXojo is the modern alternative to Microsoft Visual Basic. Xojo is a single language to build apps for Mac, Windows and Linux desktop, plus web, mobile and Raspberry Pi. Cross-compile desktop apps and use the same powerful language to develop for web and mobile too.
Comments closedThere was a time when the idea of running the same code on different computers wasn’t even imagined. Programming languages were written specifically for a particular computer. And computers were purchased for very specific purposes so why would you even want to run a particular program on another type of computer?
It was the desktop computer revolution that changed that. By the mid-to-late 1980’s, there were more and more desktop computers and developers wanted to target all of them. Soon, however, Windows became so dominant that many developers chose to focus on that one OS. Some Mac developers, not wanting to miss out on the potentially enormous Windows market, either went to the trouble of writing two versions of their applications or used a tool/language that would allow them to target both Mac and Windows from a single code base. This was the beginning of cross-platform development.
Recently, I was asked by tech blogger Chris Pirillo if cross-platform was really important anymore. Cross-Platform is actually more important than ever. Why? First of all, while the Windows PC market is seeing flat or declining sales, Apple’s Mac marketshare is growing. We are seeing this at Xojo. More and more Windows developers are coming to us because they can no longer ignore the Mac market. Linux is the predominant server OS. If you want to write server software that can run on some combination of Linux, Windows and OS X, you’ll want to be writing cross-platform code.
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