candl

They've just announced they are making WinJS cross-platform and open source (under Apache license). Now I haven't used WinJS, I haven't ever developed a WinRT app (just a few for the Phone), but doesn't WinJS have a ton of quality components, even more so than WinRT XAML? This seems pretty awesome.

ECC1 claims are simply false. His Lenovo x120e can barely handle Eclipse. It's no wonder the experience is worse than his '10K$ Mac setup' ...

I've developed native apps for BB10. The tooling is decent. It's a bit heavy since it's based on Eclipse but I had no problems with it. You can also use QtCreator with BlackBerry 10, but I've never tried it. You will mostly use Qt-based APIs anyway in your app, so there's no issue with support. The documentation for BB10 Cascades APIs is very good. There are also lots of official and community submitted samples on Github. For questions I've always used their developer forums which were active.

Meanwhile Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, was placed under house arrest on Friday and ordered not to use the Internet or telephone for two months, thus removing President Vladimir V. Putin’s fiercest critic from public life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/world/europe/aleksei-naval...

must kill humans.

And how is HTML any better?

This is a good example : http://fb.html5isready.com/ a fairly sophisticated facebook application in HTML. It's barely usable on my Lumia 920 (IE10), barely usable on my BlackBerry Z10 (webkit based browser) and doesn't even render properly on a Nexus 7 2012 (Firefox). All these are pretty powerful devices.

Doesn't look like HTML is working everywhere as people claim.

Me too. I believe somewhere between 2003-2005. I have even browsed the archived match reports from cups on ClanBase a few months ago to see what I have been up to in the past :) Good times.

Dropwizard is pretty great, but one unfortunate aspect is that it's stuck with Jersey 1.x for JAX-RS and as a result is missing some nice features, like async responses, etc.

Can't seem to find Qt 5.2 anywhere. Are the installers yet to be released?

Does it mean it's limited to running only pure Java android applications that don't rely on any native extensions?

Seems like BlackBerry 10's Android Runtime had this exact limitation but is now being improved to address this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/revealed_how_blackbe...

I wonder how they both compare.

So I've watched the video review and I can't help but notice how chaotic is the new PS4 user interface. I am not really a fan of the current PS3 store design, it looks like they have taken the same approach to the overall UI on PS4.

Win 8.1 64-bit

Chrome 30: 15842

FF 25: 14621

IE 11: 11039

Not really that far apart...

Durandal and Knockout make a great combination for SPA applications. My only gripe about Knockout is that some of the useful built-in utilities (ko.utils) are not officially documented anywhere and of course the observable syntax can get unwieldy at times (parentheses) and difficult to maintain (this can be remedied by durandal.observable plugin if we target newer browsers, though).

Here's a video of a continuous upgrade from ms-dos through every windows version all up to windows 7 (a timespan of ~20 years) that proves it's possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

Sure, at this point HTML/CSS has grown to accomodate many features. But there's a lot of ugly and non-obvious cruft that has been inherited over the ages and it won't change soon.

Perhaps a tool can bundle resources, but in the end it's still going to be inserted into the DOM and can potentially clash with other code since everything lives in a global namespace. There's also the problem of competing tools and the dilemma of which one to choose. Any other additional library that is meant to augment/fix HTML/CSS is another dependency that can cause problems and needs to be maintained.

QML is meant to be extensive. Not happy with how the drop shadow works? Write your own shader that does it the way you want it. Feeling that there's some primitive like an Ellipse missing? You can write your own in C++ and expose it to QML easily. In fact you can expose any native code to QML.

With HTML/CSS you are constrained to the environment it works in.

QML supports components, animations, transitions, particles, states, bindings, i18n and much more. It's also very smooth, qml is hardware accelerated. In the case of CSS so you get some hardware acceleration only for animating properties like translation, etc.

Here's the dialog I posted before which I changed to support states and transitions and also added an inline shader and particle emitter:

http://pastebin.com/hh7xARTS

http://i.minus.com/iATg82IRCaMa9.gif (result 4MB gif)

As it can be seen it's highly declarative and it basically contains no javascript logic at all besides setting the states.

Of course a lot of such features are available indirectly in HTML/CSS by piggybacking on third party libraries/frameworks, but wouldn't HTML be so much nicer if it were designed with those things in mind from the very beginning?

HTML/CSS is generally quite flexible when it comes to operations on text. No surprise since it was its intended purpose to be a format for documents.

Making any layouts and god forbid centering elements has always been a headache for me. Even by looking at the CSS examples provided by the link my first thought is how random they all seem and how ugly they are not to mention difficult to remember and use. There should be a single way to center an element. It should be an obvious operation given how important and common it is.

Some very useful CSS properties might take a lot of code and be hard to implement in native GUI toolkits like floats, overflow, height/width with percents, text wrapping etc. This is a sweet spot where HTML/CSS shines.

I have been playing with QML lately and decided to implement the Dialog (Absolute center within viewport) that pops after visiting the linked page just for comparison:

Here's the dialog equivalent that just fills the entire screen of an application done with QtQuick 2.0 for Desktop.

http://pastebin.com/mnN3Zr6N

Layouting is easily done by anchors. Filling a rectangle to match a parent's container, centering an element inside a parent, etc. Other containers such as Rows, Columns or Grids are also provided. Property bindings are used for centering the dialog even if the viewport changes. Text wrapping is also done explicitly and binding was necessary to limit text width to the ScrollView for it to work.

One big difference compared to CSS is that by looking at the source I can see at glance what the layout structure is and what might be happening with the element.

Another cool thing about QML is that it's as simple as taking the code, creating a new file 'Dialog.qml', adding a few properties, a signal and some functions and we get a reusable standalone component:

http://pastebin.com/CSbxrnK3

that is very convinient to use:

http://pastebin.com/XKnhW4wN

result: http://i.minus.com/iGTQhAxP55bBP.gif (3MB gif)

hands-on demo of the device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxv7iXwIgno

Could you give more details as to how you develop with Python? Is it done via PySide? My impression was that you could only use C++/Qt, HTML5/JavaScript or Adobe AIR for BB10. I plan to get a Z10 soon with the intention to port an application from Windows Phone along the way. I was mentally preparing for C++, but if Python works good enough then I may skip C++ altogether (I did some small PySide apps in the past, but this time I'd like to learn QML).

Samsung should have made their Bada smartphones eligible for an upgrade to Tizen as the OS is supposedly capable of running Bada apps. This would at least establish a user base. Instead all of Bada adopters got screwed badly. I don't think anyone is going to fall for the same trap again.

While I can't test the demo as I don't have an iOS or Android device around I don't think this is anything special. It's been done already, see for example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brassmonke...

Windows Phone 8 applications (C#) get AOT compiled to machine code.

Here's an overview: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Windows-Phone-8-Compile...

Some video sessions:

[Deep Dive into the Kernel of .NET on WP8 - (talk about compilation starts around the 22 minute mark)] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-005

[Inside Compiler in the Clound and MDIL] http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy-and...

Ruby block syntax may have been inspired by Smalltalk, but this is where the similarities end. Ruby block implementation is simply awful (an afterthought?), and no way near as powerful (and simple) as the equivalent in Smalltalk.

Is there any concise typescript reference around? The playground doesn't showcase that much features. The language specification while extensive is not that great as a cheatsheet.

F# already runs on Mono and is open source. Seems like it's not the case. Very interesting. There's a mention of "independent".

I registered as a student (via DreamSpark) for a WP7 developer account back in december 2011. My account is about to expire in a month. In the meantime I received an email (january 2012) about a DreamSpark account migration. (Which is said to make my DreamSpark account active for another 12 months) - I haven't done the migration process yet. I am curious will this let my WP7 developer account be active for another year? Or should I just create a new account taking advantage of the 8$ fee?

I've been using passenger's wsgi support for close to two years. (I transitioned from ruby to python for web dev so it's no surprise that I stayed with what I knew best). I would love to see Mono support as it is in desperate need of a good webserver - especially now since the ASP.NET stack was open sourced.

To me, the biggest deal breaker is that having a Windows Phone developer account doesn't let you release applications for Windows 8.

It's a shame because many people including me could at least port some of their apps. An additional 99$/year for the Windows 8 store simply isn't worth it. If there's one major reason why the interest is so low then it's probably it.

I am definately going to stick with Windows Phone for the time being since it's been a great experience and the release of WP8 will bring some needed attention.

Can anyone recommend a good setup for Mono? In my tests, mono-fascgi + nginx has been extremely slow at handling requests. Wanted to give this a spin some time ago, as well as ASP.NET MVC, but I couldn't get decent performance on linux.

Why? There is a Manifest file where you specify the features your application is using. I would imagine that if you leave out the new, hardware dependent stuff it should run just fine? You can do something similar already by opting out from supporting phones with constrained RAM. Those applications are then made unavailable to certain devices in the marketplace. I admit that there has been no mention of this how it's supposed to look like with regards to WP 7.8/8 so it needs some clarification.

I agree. I was exposed to C#/XAML a few months ago by building a WP7 Application. It takes some getting used to, but when you get the basics it's great. I'd kill to have something similar instead of HTML/CSS (which is just awful in comparison) for the web.

Complex? For some certain tasks perhaps it's verbose, but I do like that the API is structured in a Java-like way. With wrappers like these I need to constantly consult the docs to find out what arguments to pass to the constructors.

With the google maps api I just create a new object and can use the various setters and getters to set and retrieve values. Everything is mostly self-descriptive as well.

You can place an extern file so that you can get additional help via intellisense in an IDE as well.