A comprehensive look at the evolution of Windows over the years, starting way back with Windows 1.0 back in 1985. Ars Technica already is my “go to” place for extremely in depth hardware and software features, but they’ve really outdone themselves here. Reporter Peter Bright deserves major props for his research and organization.
Casey Muratori writing for Gamasutra:
Experimentation on open platforms is one of the primary sources of innovation in the computer industry. There are no two ways about that. Open software ecosystems are what gave us most of what we use today, whether it’s business software like the spreadsheet, entertainment software like the first-person shooter, or world-changing revolutionary paradigms like the World Wide Web…
…With Windows 8, Microsoft is in a pivotal position to help make this future a reality…Or, Microsoft can ship Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows 8 Pro with their current policies in place, and be just another player in the touch device space, with their own set of ridiculous hurdles that severely constrain software possibilities and waste developer time with ill-conceived certification processes.
Many fair points made here, but I wonder if the author is confusing the far more restrictive Windows RT – which is very akin to the closed iOS model – with Windows 8 as a whole.
Lauren Brichter:
The first thing will be an app and that app will be a game. Can’t wait to share it with you.
Lauren created the popular iPhone Twitter client Tweetie, one of the most influential, slickest made apps I’ve ever used. His company Atebits was acquired by Twitter in 2010, but eventually they parted ways.
Now he’s back, but with a game? Bit of a surprise choice, but I can’t wait to see what it looks like.
Excellent long read over at Fast Company on the rise and fall of the iPhone photo filter app Hipstamatic. It’s focused almost entirely on the startup’s work culture and changing focus over time. There’s a lot of issues noted here that I’ve seen or heard about at other companies, most notably:
But despite the external success of the product, internally, tension had reached a boiling point, and demonstrated Buick’s growing disconnect with Hipstamatic’s developers, in terms of both product development and company direction. The tension spoke to a larger divide between the company’s designers and engineers, an obstacle that most startups face at some point. As [Hipstamatic CEO] Buick tells me, his founding team, which was composed mostly of designers, “never operated [Hipstamatic] as a software company. As we started building that type of company, we ended up with really talented engineers who were not used to our creative process. There was tension. There was separation on the teams.”
Tech companies are increasingly defined by their designer/developer relations. A lack of solid, tight collaboration between the two groups can easily kill company momentum.
A common scenario for me is having a bunch of Safari tabs open and then closing them rapidly before I shut down. Safari saves your previous browser state, but often there’s a lot of good tab nuggets that I’ve closed individually but get lost in the shuffle.
Alternatively I open a lot of tabs from my RSS reader, but because I’m looking to save memory or focus in on work, I want a quick way to save my tab state and get rid of them.
Chrome has had this slickly built in for a while, but no dice on Safari. Enter this simple plugin from Pinboard. You’ve got to be a user, but with one click you can quickly save your tab state and reopen later. Works great.
Developer Myles Recny:
My workflow is something like this.
write some code
run the code
get an error message
find the error and back to step 1
Hour by hour, day after day, I do this. Always searching for what’s wrong with what I’m creating, rarely thinking about what’s good about it. It’s a negative reinforcement feedback loop.
Insightful.
I’ve written off most tech opinions on the new iPhone 5 camera because they aren’t written by photography professionals. Granted, it’s clearly better than the 4S, but how does it realistically stack up against a dedicated point and shoot? That’s exactly why DP Review’s recent look at the phone’s camera matters: you get their usual rigorous studio tests and the attention to detail you rarely find elsewhere. (There’s a reason that when it comes to new DSLR releases DP Review is pretty much the review benchmark.)
It’s The Evening Edition, just with technology instead of world news. Works for me.
We’re going to see a big change in a certain type of iOS app—the one designed for the device….In a sense, this could be a good thing—freeing up iOS from the constraints of specific screen shapes opens up developers to whatever Apple throws at them next and should also make apps simpler to port to competing platforms. But it also impacts heavily on those tightly crafted experiences that were designed just for your iPad or just for your iPhone.
With web having been down this road for a while, it will be interesting to see native apps designed in a more responsive direction.
Developer Thomas Reynolds:
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nobody would give a shit. They would move on, like they moved on from Myspace. They would find another instant messaging app. They would find a different calendar. They’d use email. And they’d do it overnight because they’re simply a pile of communication technologies for which we have plenty of replacements already. There’s nothing special about Facebook to miss and for a giant, wealthy company with a billion users… that’s pretty sad.
Hey Thomas, tell us how you really feel, ok?
A bit too heavy handed for my tastes, but his point about Facebook’s walled garden and its obsession for keeping you inside that garden has merit.