Anders did brilliantly on Delphi - that was very widely accalimed as one of the best languages around. then Microsoft hired him to do their Java clone, and from that, he tweaked it and made C#.
I think that Delphi would make a great open sourced language, is Borland (or whoever now owns it) just released it into the wild, it could become the Linux client development tool and gain a new lease of life (and updates, of course).
to post a link - use the html tags. (open-angle-bracket) a href="url" (close angle bracket) then put your text, then put/a in angle brackets. then preview to see you got it right. Easy, but I wish/. would create a slightly better featured editor (like the one on stackoverflow) where you can just highlight text, click the link button and enter the url.
If small development companies are forced to choose a platform for desktop software front ends,...then they tend to choose web-based ones nowadays. There's a lot more interest in HTML based apps, especially since Microsoft declared their main GUI interest was HTML5 at that PDC (the one that pissed all the silverlight devs off) and started supporting jQuery.
And, of course, not only does HTML5 have some excellent promise for the future, it works on Linux just as well as Windows.
IIRC Gnote was started because someone wrote Tomboy and it was put into the ubuntu base distro. They pointed out that required a huge mono runtime dependancy, so they sat down and knocked out gnote in a day or two to prove that the 'super wonderful new cool' tomboy app wasn't; all that impressive and could be replaced with a 'normal' app.
I think you'd be best off writing for iOS if you want to sell apps, the people who buy an iPhone are most likely to buy apps too. However, there is good money to be made from Android - but you're going to get more there from advertising revenue instead.
I had a link a while back, someone with just a handful of Android apps was making $500 a month from them. I also know a friend who had a handful of apps, the for-sale ones had sold next to none but the free ones he released had strong download numbers.
The guy who made Advanced Task Manager for Android earned $80,000 revenue over a year for it (but that was pretty well-featured in top apps in the marketplace). So good luck.
What I did was I bought a used device off of eBay for development with WP7. The previous owner left all of her text messages and emails on the device, and she kept writing about how she hated the phone so much
This is your user base that you are developing your apps for. A wise businessman listens to his customers:)
or to put it another way, its Microsoft's version of the internet!
HTML is used to define the UI while codebehind (javascript) defines the logic. HTML includes a style system that allows you to control rendering. etc etc. There's not much difference in concept between them.
However, the binding between UI and objects is horrible and I expect MS will come up with 'XAML binding v2' in the next release of.net and everyone will say how crap the old way was - it reminds me of nasty XML elements being used instead of something simple.The objects are a nuisance too - I can't see why you have to define an object, property pair and then bind that to a UI element. MFC was so much simpler! (ie 1 variable, 1 line of code and you're done, much simpler when you're adding a load of UI elements, but I digress there:) )
I think if you're going to work with a html-style system, you might as well do it in HTML and get the benefits of the standard internet rather than the usual MS-only lockin. They've already realised this themselves, only to reverse the decision when they realised that WP7 used Silverlight (d'oh!). if WP7 doesn't make it, I wonder if Silverlight will go back to being canned in favour of HTML5. Again.
it means that all those WP7 developers might have the latest, coolest, Silverlight based.NET development tools, but once something doesn't work the way the pointy-clicky development environment says it will, they're pretty much clueless.
It means that they can't get an update to work on a handful of phone models running 1 version of the software. (think what would have happened if they had the hundreds of models that Android has been released on).
It means that dumbing down development only leads to very poor engineering practices. Most of the time you don't notice, but when you need that old-style expertise, you really miss it.
sigh, ok, positive comment to beat/. filters: its no good giving developers everything they could possibly want if no-one wants to buy the stuff they make. Its no good saying how great a phone is if those poor fools who bought one end up with a brick at the first update. Android or iPhone - they work, are very popular, have won the battle. If MS didn't have huge pots of cash from their monopolies, they wouldn't even think of entering this marketplace - no way would any other company do so.
when you get a PC-based PLC you are getting a base kit, just like the Linux-based SoCs or microcontrollers I gave you a link to. These have pretty much everything but your value added on to it. They even give you compilers and IDEs for free - unlike your PC-based stuff, so I guess you don't get as much as you say. Nearly all embedded stuff talks its own protocols anyway, so I'm sure that you can get IPX support on your PC isn't a big deal anyway - and guess what, Linux based stuff gets to talk a lot more protocols than you think - all that stuff Windows didn't want to support anymore still gets supported in Linux.
I don't care about Beckhoff, I was just educating you that there are more companies out there doing better things with Linux based embedded stuff than you know. These guys do more with them, cheaper and more cost-effectively than any Windows-based system. That's all. You should try them sometime 'cos you'll be surprised how effective they are.
fair enough - but my comment is really to answer the parent's post that basically said Nokia was useless and couldn't do anything right.
Yes, I think it is quite possible that the new Nokia under Mr Elop's rule will be a completely different thing to what it was - Microsoft's new bitch may just turn into a reseller and then get dropped when WP7 still fails to sell enough.
Don't forget WP7 has had great reviews too, yet has negligible market share.
I think he might be right - iPads are different beasts, they're not a big smartphone, nor are they a keyboardless laptop. So I guess the iPad owners do use them for different tasks than those commonly performed by smartphones and laptops.
In which case, the positioning for Android tablets needs to be more of a keyboardless laptop - ie like the Xoom and the N900 - one where you can dock it and turn it into a desktop machine (with bluetooth keyboard and hdmi cable to a monitor or TV) and un-dock it and it becomes a portable device that you can still use, though not as fully as when docked. I think that is probably the best place for Android to move to - it'll stop being a 'me too' copy of iPads and iPhones and start to become the future of all computing.
But then, if they did that, Android tablets are a non-starter, you can put all that power in a phone-sized form instead, and it's more compact and portable too. Maybe people will realise this when we get full-resolution HUD spectacles and tablets will become last years fashion.
I think its plain that if Nokia gets to customise the OS for their needs (either by themselves or by setting requirements to Microsoft devs) then the other manufacturers will be at a huge competitive disadvantage. I think they'll look at their current sales figures for WP7 and just get out of it. Microsoft has said that they will share the internal details with Nokia so they can develop better features than they'd otherwise be allowed to have.
Nokia undoubtedly had some very good coders - they make Symbian back in the day (even if it has certain... quirks that made sense back when phones were really resource constrained that don't make as much sense today) and they made Maemo which by all accounts is an absolutely stunning OS. If they can get rid of their management and become a lot more 'agile' then I think they will be able to do really good work with WP7. though, that does depend if political issues don't come between them and the original devs back in Redmond. What's the chances that the 'NIH' syndrome will kill off a lot of the useful collaboration they might otherwise have had?
you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.
These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about 2 or 3 different base manufacturers for these devices).
That's just those for an example, all the others are the same - base platform SoC purchased in bulk and customised by a company who then sells them to consumers. The same applies to a lot of other stuff that are built into closed boxes - they're still built into that by a 'higher level' manufacturer.
Linux has had a lot of GUI tools for a very long time, you're showing your ignorance if you don't even know about Athena widgets! (used for Unix GUIs since 1988 or so) but then don't forget a lot of GUI devices in this area might not even have a traditional screen so a VB GUI isn't really going to be of any use.
See, in the world of embedded devices, usually those put together as cheaply as possible (ie everything nowadays:( ) then Linux is the de-facto standard. After all, who'd want to build a brand new door lock control system themselves when they can just buy a Freescale microcontroller and modify its software using the supplied tools (in this case Codewarrior IDE)
I think you need to find out a lot more of this area, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what is out there. The world only runs Windows in a relatively small marketplace.
you don't understand how a corporate psycopath can take a profitable part of a business, decide that it is 'not key' or that it doesn't provide enough profits and that the money spent keeping it running could be better invested elsewhere ("maximising profitability", IIRC, a business bullshit approach to scrapping useful stuff in favour of a bigger personal bonus).
So Elop could easily stop Qt development group entirely, regardless of how good, profitable, or socially useful it is. I would hope they'd sell it to someone else though - Intel or IBM or Canonical for a pittance. That'd probably be the best outcome here.
and I can point you at many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers that have built businesses around SoCs running Linux. I was just explaining media streaming boxes to my friend yesterday - I think they *all* run linux, even my TV runs Linux (as it has a big GPL notice in the menu).
So 1 manufacturer standardised on Windows PCs, they could so easily have gone with mass-produced ARM or MiPS based solutions and produced the same quality of product, but without any per-item licencing fees to worry about. I feel they would have done just as well going this route instead as they sound sensible company. The fact they went with Microsoft products is just a coincidence, not a contributory factor.
not so, Nokia software was very, very good indeed. But you're obviously comparing everything to a single bar when you need to differentiate between what an OS that requires a very fast CPU and lots of RAM and an OS that requires a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM can do.
So Nokia had good software, they also had good hardware. The trouble is that they became to big and reliant on their old ways - the incredibly successful Symbian software and phones and simply failed to transition to the newer opportunities - probably because they were too big by then to deal with any different markets. A smaller Nokia *could* have released Maemo, and marketed it properly and become possibly the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the world if not the #2.
but they didn't, their management couldn't do it, and so now they're just another phone reseller for MS. However, there is 1 interesting thing here - if Nokia gets a special customise WinPho7 card to play, where does that leave all the other manufacturers? It'll probably leave Nokia as the *only* Windows phone manufacturer. Chances are the entire windows phone development group could end up 'outsourced' to Nokia entirely - why not, if they are building OSes designed only for Nokia hardware. I can't see the OS group going in one direction and the hardware group going in another in different companies to be a very efficient or successful synergy.
yes, and you've just described why the new UI is a bad thing. The old ways worked, people learned file menu had new, open, print on it and they would always be there. Simples!
Fast forward to today and we have a funny orb that pretends to be a sort of master properties menu, and on there is a button that is print, with different ways of setting properties than you've ever seen. At least MS 'fixed' it by changing the orb to a big orange file menu... in other words, fixing what didn't really need to be fixed.
Now I like the ribbon, but a replacement menu bar it isn't. As a replacement for a toolbar - yes, its great at that.
think of every shitty UI change you hate and loathe. Now imagine that they were the features your users wanted (they probably are. for them), now imagine changing your software to put those things in to 'make things better'.
You see, change sometimes isn't better. Often slow evolution is the best way to change things. Little by little, people get used to the new bits, then another then another and over time they get all the changes you want, without the massive disruption you want to impose on them.
Also don't forget - you write that software for the users benefit. Not yours.
the trouble with that concept is that the Ribbon is even more tiny/fiddly than the old menus it replaces. Look at Word, see the big squares that contain the options, then look at the little corner piece that opens the 'advanced options'.
I can see a ribbon UI where each square is a start-point, click it to open a sub-ribbon of large finger-friendly squares, but that's not really the ribbon we all know and love. That's a boat load of huge buttons that expand in a cascade like.... a menu. It shows that a) nothing sensible ever goes out of fashion, b) the more things change, the more they stay the same:)
thank you for that "search for snap" is the new Microsoft UI I find - type something into the search bar and hope you get the right link to properties:)
unfortunately that also means that some ISPs and big corporations have an excuse to maintain IPv4 - if they can make money selling their IP blocks or more likely buying them and then leasing them out.
This may seem like a reason to migrate away from IPv4, but some companies suddenly have a vested interest in keeping it around.
Slashdot Mirror
I care, Jenkins isn't as good a name as Hudson. It'll be good to get the old name back.
Anders did brilliantly on Delphi - that was very widely accalimed as one of the best languages around. then Microsoft hired him to do their Java clone, and from that, he tweaked it and made C#.
I think that Delphi would make a great open sourced language, is Borland (or whoever now owns it) just released it into the wild, it could become the Linux client development tool and gain a new lease of life (and updates, of course).
to post a link - use the html tags. (open-angle-bracket) a href="url" (close angle bracket) then put your text, then put /a in angle brackets. then preview to see you got it right. Easy, but I wish /. would create a slightly better featured editor (like the one on stackoverflow) where you can just highlight text, click the link button and enter the url.
only C# version 2.0 is standardised by ECMA and ISO, so forget using any of those nice new features like LINQ.
Unless you do use those features, accidentally or otherwise, then you're obviously no longer covered.
The comunity promise isn't strong enough for the community, I can believe that given the way patent lawyering has been going recently.
If small development companies are forced to choose a platform for desktop software front ends, ...then they tend to choose web-based ones nowadays. There's a lot more interest in HTML based apps, especially since Microsoft declared their main GUI interest was HTML5 at that PDC (the one that pissed all the silverlight devs off) and started supporting jQuery.
And, of course, not only does HTML5 have some excellent promise for the future, it works on Linux just as well as Windows.
IIRC Gnote was started because someone wrote Tomboy and it was put into the ubuntu base distro. They pointed out that required a huge mono runtime dependancy, so they sat down and knocked out gnote in a day or two to prove that the 'super wonderful new cool' tomboy app wasn't; all that impressive and could be replaced with a 'normal' app.
I think you'd be best off writing for iOS if you want to sell apps, the people who buy an iPhone are most likely to buy apps too. However, there is good money to be made from Android - but you're going to get more there from advertising revenue instead.
I had a link a while back, someone with just a handful of Android apps was making $500 a month from them. I also know a friend who had a handful of apps, the for-sale ones had sold next to none but the free ones he released had strong download numbers.
The guy who made Advanced Task Manager for Android earned $80,000 revenue over a year for it (but that was pretty well-featured in top apps in the marketplace). So good luck.
What I did was I bought a used device off of eBay for development with WP7. The previous owner left all of her text messages and emails on the device, and she kept writing about how she hated the phone so much
This is your user base that you are developing your apps for. A wise businessman listens to his customers :)
or to put it another way, its Microsoft's version of the internet!
HTML is used to define the UI while codebehind (javascript) defines the logic. HTML includes a style system that allows you to control rendering. etc etc. There's not much difference in concept between them.
However, the binding between UI and objects is horrible and I expect MS will come up with 'XAML binding v2' in the next release of .net and everyone will say how crap the old way was - it reminds me of nasty XML elements being used instead of something simple.The objects are a nuisance too - I can't see why you have to define an object, property pair and then bind that to a UI element. MFC was so much simpler! (ie 1 variable, 1 line of code and you're done, much simpler when you're adding a load of UI elements, but I digress there :) )
I think if you're going to work with a html-style system, you might as well do it in HTML and get the benefits of the standard internet rather than the usual MS-only lockin. They've already realised this themselves, only to reverse the decision when they realised that WP7 used Silverlight (d'oh!). if WP7 doesn't make it, I wonder if Silverlight will go back to being canned in favour of HTML5. Again.
it means that all those WP7 developers might have the latest, coolest, Silverlight based .NET development tools, but once something doesn't work the way the pointy-clicky development environment says it will, they're pretty much clueless.
It means that they can't get an update to work on a handful of phone models running 1 version of the software. (think what would have happened if they had the hundreds of models that Android has been released on).
It means that dumbing down development only leads to very poor engineering practices. Most of the time you don't notice, but when you need that old-style expertise, you really miss it.
developers, developers, developers, developers, developers....
consumers? fuck 'em.
developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
---
sigh, ok, positive comment to beat /. filters: its no good giving developers everything they could possibly want if no-one wants to buy the stuff they make. Its no good saying how great a phone is if those poor fools who bought one end up with a brick at the first update. Android or iPhone - they work, are very popular, have won the battle. If MS didn't have huge pots of cash from their monopolies, they wouldn't even think of entering this marketplace - no way would any other company do so.
when you get a PC-based PLC you are getting a base kit, just like the Linux-based SoCs or microcontrollers I gave you a link to. These have pretty much everything but your value added on to it. They even give you compilers and IDEs for free - unlike your PC-based stuff, so I guess you don't get as much as you say. Nearly all embedded stuff talks its own protocols anyway, so I'm sure that you can get IPX support on your PC isn't a big deal anyway - and guess what, Linux based stuff gets to talk a lot more protocols than you think - all that stuff Windows didn't want to support anymore still gets supported in Linux.
I don't care about Beckhoff, I was just educating you that there are more companies out there doing better things with Linux based embedded stuff than you know. These guys do more with them, cheaper and more cost-effectively than any Windows-based system. That's all. You should try them sometime 'cos you'll be surprised how effective they are.
fair enough - but my comment is really to answer the parent's post that basically said Nokia was useless and couldn't do anything right.
Yes, I think it is quite possible that the new Nokia under Mr Elop's rule will be a completely different thing to what it was - Microsoft's new bitch may just turn into a reseller and then get dropped when WP7 still fails to sell enough.
Don't forget WP7 has had great reviews too, yet has negligible market share.
apart from the nook and the Galaxy Tab I guess :)
I think he might be right - iPads are different beasts, they're not a big smartphone, nor are they a keyboardless laptop. So I guess the iPad owners do use them for different tasks than those commonly performed by smartphones and laptops.
In which case, the positioning for Android tablets needs to be more of a keyboardless laptop - ie like the Xoom and the N900 - one where you can dock it and turn it into a desktop machine (with bluetooth keyboard and hdmi cable to a monitor or TV) and un-dock it and it becomes a portable device that you can still use, though not as fully as when docked. I think that is probably the best place for Android to move to - it'll stop being a 'me too' copy of iPads and iPhones and start to become the future of all computing.
But then, if they did that, Android tablets are a non-starter, you can put all that power in a phone-sized form instead, and it's more compact and portable too. Maybe people will realise this when we get full-resolution HUD spectacles and tablets will become last years fashion.
I think its plain that if Nokia gets to customise the OS for their needs (either by themselves or by setting requirements to Microsoft devs) then the other manufacturers will be at a huge competitive disadvantage. I think they'll look at their current sales figures for WP7 and just get out of it. Microsoft has said that they will share the internal details with Nokia so they can develop better features than they'd otherwise be allowed to have.
Nokia undoubtedly had some very good coders - they make Symbian back in the day (even if it has certain ... quirks that made sense back when phones were really resource constrained that don't make as much sense today) and they made Maemo which by all accounts is an absolutely stunning OS. If they can get rid of their management and become a lot more 'agile' then I think they will be able to do really good work with WP7. though, that does depend if political issues don't come between them and the original devs back in Redmond. What's the chances that the 'NIH' syndrome will kill off a lot of the useful collaboration they might otherwise have had?
you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.
These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about 2 or 3 different base manufacturers for these devices).
That's just those for an example, all the others are the same - base platform SoC purchased in bulk and customised by a company who then sells them to consumers. The same applies to a lot of other stuff that are built into closed boxes - they're still built into that by a 'higher level' manufacturer.
Linux has had a lot of GUI tools for a very long time, you're showing your ignorance if you don't even know about Athena widgets! (used for Unix GUIs since 1988 or so) but then don't forget a lot of GUI devices in this area might not even have a traditional screen so a VB GUI isn't really going to be of any use.
See, in the world of embedded devices, usually those put together as cheaply as possible (ie everything nowadays :( ) then Linux is the de-facto standard. After all, who'd want to build a brand new door lock control system themselves when they can just buy a Freescale microcontroller and modify its software using the supplied tools (in this case Codewarrior IDE)
I think you need to find out a lot more of this area, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what is out there. The world only runs Windows in a relatively small marketplace.
you don't understand how a corporate psycopath can take a profitable part of a business, decide that it is 'not key' or that it doesn't provide enough profits and that the money spent keeping it running could be better invested elsewhere ("maximising profitability", IIRC, a business bullshit approach to scrapping useful stuff in favour of a bigger personal bonus).
So Elop could easily stop Qt development group entirely, regardless of how good, profitable, or socially useful it is. I would hope they'd sell it to someone else though - Intel or IBM or Canonical for a pittance. That'd probably be the best outcome here.
and I can point you at many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers that have built businesses around SoCs running Linux. I was just explaining media streaming boxes to my friend yesterday - I think they *all* run linux, even my TV runs Linux (as it has a big GPL notice in the menu).
So 1 manufacturer standardised on Windows PCs, they could so easily have gone with mass-produced ARM or MiPS based solutions and produced the same quality of product, but without any per-item licencing fees to worry about. I feel they would have done just as well going this route instead as they sound sensible company. The fact they went with Microsoft products is just a coincidence, not a contributory factor.
not so, Nokia software was very, very good indeed. But you're obviously comparing everything to a single bar when you need to differentiate between what an OS that requires a very fast CPU and lots of RAM and an OS that requires a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM can do.
So Nokia had good software, they also had good hardware. The trouble is that they became to big and reliant on their old ways - the incredibly successful Symbian software and phones and simply failed to transition to the newer opportunities - probably because they were too big by then to deal with any different markets. A smaller Nokia *could* have released Maemo, and marketed it properly and become possibly the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the world if not the #2.
but they didn't, their management couldn't do it, and so now they're just another phone reseller for MS. However, there is 1 interesting thing here - if Nokia gets a special customise WinPho7 card to play, where does that leave all the other manufacturers? It'll probably leave Nokia as the *only* Windows phone manufacturer. Chances are the entire windows phone development group could end up 'outsourced' to Nokia entirely - why not, if they are building OSes designed only for Nokia hardware. I can't see the OS group going in one direction and the hardware group going in another in different companies to be a very efficient or successful synergy.
yes, and you've just described why the new UI is a bad thing. The old ways worked, people learned file menu had new, open, print on it and they would always be there. Simples!
Fast forward to today and we have a funny orb that pretends to be a sort of master properties menu, and on there is a button that is print, with different ways of setting properties than you've ever seen. At least MS 'fixed' it by changing the orb to a big orange file menu... in other words, fixing what didn't really need to be fixed.
Now I like the ribbon, but a replacement menu bar it isn't. As a replacement for a toolbar - yes, its great at that.
think of every shitty UI change you hate and loathe. Now imagine that they were the features your users wanted (they probably are. for them), now imagine changing your software to put those things in to 'make things better'.
You see, change sometimes isn't better. Often slow evolution is the best way to change things. Little by little, people get used to the new bits, then another then another and over time they get all the changes you want, without the massive disruption you want to impose on them.
Also don't forget - you write that software for the users benefit. Not yours.
the trouble with that concept is that the Ribbon is even more tiny/fiddly than the old menus it replaces. Look at Word, see the big squares that contain the options, then look at the little corner piece that opens the 'advanced options'.
I can see a ribbon UI where each square is a start-point, click it to open a sub-ribbon of large finger-friendly squares, but that's not really the ribbon we all know and love. That's a boat load of huge buttons that expand in a cascade like .... a menu. It shows that a) nothing sensible ever goes out of fashion, b) the more things change, the more they stay the same :)
thank you for that "search for snap" is the new Microsoft UI I find - type something into the search bar and hope you get the right link to properties :)
The ribbon has all the same functions that were available before
like Print?
The ribbon is godsend for people who don't want to waste hours of their life learning where everything is buried.
which only works as a statement of fact for people after they've learned where everything is buried.
I still smart over the Print button.. find that on the bloody ribbon
unfortunately that also means that some ISPs and big corporations have an excuse to maintain IPv4 - if they can make money selling their IP blocks or more likely buying them and then leasing them out.
This may seem like a reason to migrate away from IPv4, but some companies suddenly have a vested interest in keeping it around.