I’ve joked with my friends that I want to get into building hand-crafted, artisan software. Then Lian Proven of The Register makes the case for it, such as higher quality and being more attuned to a specific group’s needs. I can think of a few examples of folks making hand-crafted software:
Category Archives: Software development
Twitter highlights: April 17–23, 2011
Sadat Shami: “Giving up tenure… and getting happiness in return? Reflections from someone who did” (The Scientist via Nick Diakopoulos) I think I’ll get a standing desk (New York Times) Jeffrey Bigham: “How languages may have diffused from Africa, modeling phonemes” (New York Times) Boris Smus: “Allow me to explain sorting algorithms through interpretive dance” …
Twitter highlights: April 10-16, 2011
Backbone.js is a model-view-controller JavaScript library in just 4KB (via Boris Smus ) SparkFun intros IOIO, which allows Android phones to control DIY electronics. (Engadget) Everyone in Google Doodle for Charlie Chaplin’s birthday are part of Doodle team, and like many of Chaplin’s films, it was filmed in the Niles District of Fremont, California. More …
Writing software for the iPhone
The long-awaited iPhone software development kit is here, and overall I’m pretty impressed with the amount of power and flexibility Apple is giving to third-party developers. Beating Daniel’s expectations, Apple is giving access to the iPhone’s native API. There are a few gotchas though. For example, only one third-party app can run at a time, …
Apple opens up the iPhone
Looks like my prayers (and those of many others) have been answered: Apple will release a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch in February, enabling developers to write their own native apps for those devices. I’ll be curious to see how the third-party iPhone/iPod app market will develop; I bet it will …
The Rich Internet Application arena is heating up again
Over the past month, there have been a slew of announcements that have the potential to rearrange the Internet development landscape. Building on the momentum of Flash and Flex, Adobe announces Apollo, a platform for building desktop applications using a combination of Acrobat, Flash, HTML, and JavaScript. This could be seen as direct competition to …
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Turboman lives!
The developer tools group in Borland, which is in the process of being spun off, is resurrecting the Turbo line of programming tools. They will include a free edition and a professional edition that will cost less than $500. (Currently Borland’s cheapest professional tools cost over $1000.) They’re even bringing back their old mascot, Turboman. …
Ajax libraries galore
Lately there's been a bumper crop of JavaScript libraries for creating Ajax applications. At first, it was largely a grassroots effort, and to this day some of the most popular libraries like Prototype, script.aculo.us, Behaviour, Dojo, and MochiKit are maintained mostly by one person. But now the big boys are joining the party. Yahoo has …
Microsoft’s highs and lows
Last week, Microsoft had its semi-regular Professional Developers Conference. I was impressed by the amount of new material it put out, much of it unexpected, including: LINQ — language enhancements to C# and Visual Basic to ease the "impedance mismatch" between data access and object-oriented programming The overhauled user interface of Office "12" — they've …
Web development: Ruby on Rails and Django
A constant theme in HCI and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is how hard it is to get a group of people to adopt and support new technology — being technically superior is not nearly enough. One good example, interestingly enough, is in the area of web application frameworks. For example, in my favorite language Python, …
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