BlackBerry- Out or Permanently Out ????

                  

                  Senior executives of Research In Motion(RIM) may have seen and touched the future of mobile technology several years ago, perhaps around the time of the Apple iPhone launch in 2007. But they did not acknowledge it then, at least not in public. RIM was at that time the master of the smart-phone universe, seemingly invincible, with a set of dedicated customers sworn to its BlackBerry phones with the signature keyboard. 

                  But, by 2009, they had definitely begun to think about a future different from what the company had created. They may not have known what it looked like or how to reach it, but they knew that the present could not continue for long. The BlackBerry phones had an overloaded software platform, and it would one day simply stop functioning if it kept accepting additional responsibilities. 

                 Four years later, on January 30 this year, the company renamed as BlackBerry showed a glimpse of its version of the future to the world. It is still in the distance, not clearly visible, the path to it filled with risks. But some of its core ways are clear now to the company. Every device in this future has a piece of BlackBerry software, to which the smartphone can easily connect and manoeuvre. 

                 In the past, BlackBerry phones were for communication. In the future, they would be for computing, commanding, controlling...The phone would transform into a device, a computer if you will, that could be used to do business, command your car, or control your health. 

                It would also be the centre of your entertainment, home or away. Most importantly, it would not just be for people, but for machines as well. Tens of billions of them, in fact. BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins hinted at this future on January 30 in New York, when he launched the BlackBerry 10 phones. The company had discarded the old and overheated operating system and developed something that was built to military specifications. To be precise, it had bought one that could do the job: from QNX Software systems, a 30-yearold company it acquired in Ottawa. 

               The QNX operating system had already seeped into cars, industrial control systems, medical equipment, nuclear plants and critical defence systems. It would work as a smart-phone operating system as well. BlackBerry built the rest of the new phone with more acquisitions. "It is unlike anything you have seen before," said Heins at the launch. 

               With this phone, and with help from the pieces of QNX that lie embedded in several devices around the world, BlackBerry hopes to be at the centre of the emerging smart-phone multiverse—and gradually win back a substantial portion of the market share it has lost in the last two years. According to the market-research firm IDC, BlackBerry has a market share of only 4.8%, down from 20% in 2009. 

                Restivo thinks success in this market is no longer dependent on the phone. "All phones look the same and act the same," he says. "So, it is less about the quality of the device and more about the ecosystem." Here, BlackBerry seems to be on a long and hard climb. In spite of the 70,000 applications it put together at launch, it is battling against 775,000 applications for the iPhone and 600,000 for Android.

                BlackBerry is also up against Apple and Samsung, both multi-product vendors who have an edge in this ecosystem play. So, market analysts are near-unanimous that the real competition is for the third place between BlackBerry and Microsoft. BlackBerry executives, however, seem quite confident of a turnaround in the company's fortunes. "I have no interest in the past. I can see that the future is great," says BlackBerry chief marketing officer Frank Boulben, who believes that rapid changes in market share are common in this industry. 

                BlackBerry lost market share quickly as its operating system was not optimised for touch screens, which became the norm. It could have been worse if rivals had connected with CIOs. "RIM had an advantage that the early iterations of the iPhone were not enterprise-ready," says Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst with Gartner India. 

               In the past year, CIOs increasingly left the choice of the device to the employee, who was more impressed by the slick products of Apple and Samsung than the solid yet unfashionable BlackBerry. Boulben gives another reason for the sudden fall in the US and continuing popularity in developing markets. 

               BlackBerry phones were not equipped to deal with 4G, and the transition to this network happened too quickly in the US. BlackBerry phones were better equipped for 2G networks, which was the dominant technology in India and some other markets, as their transition to 3G had not happened quickly enough. 

               QNX has an operating system that is very stable. Software crashes were a problem for the older BlackBerry. BlackBerry 10 comes with a stable Unixlike operating system. It is equipped with a steely processor and software platform that can handle computation-intensive tasks, a feature BlackBerry intends to improve over the next few years. "This is the first step," says Boulben. "We will introduce a variety of solutions leveraging the BlackBerry 10 platform." 

              BlackBerry's strategy of moving the phone from communication to computing becomes clear in this context: the company wants you to use your phone as your computer for all your needs. Connect the phone to peripherals, and then to the cloud, and do all your work using the phone in the office. Dock it to your car on the way back home, and use it to perform other functions needed in the car. At home, dock it to your entertainment system and use the phone to access music and video or other purposes. 

               BlackBerry's ability to get popular applications quickly on the new phone repeatedly would determine if it can win back lost customers. The company will launch more new models over the next 18 months at the mid- and lower-ends. BlackBerry may have help to sell them from service providers in the US, where it badly needs to sell the new phone in large numbers. Operators do not like monopolies, and want to create competition and variety in handsets. They have helped BlackBerry before. Will they again? Wait for mid-March, when sales of the new phone begin in the US. 

Source- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/strategy/Will-BlackBerrys-new-survival-strategy-work/articleshow/18379911.cms

Porn Problem @ Apple

            
                In December Apple booted out an app called 500px from its app store. Now, before you say “good riddance”, let me make it clear that the ‘x’ in the app’s name has nothing to do with x-rated. It is just part of px which is short for pixels.

               This 500px is an app for www.500px.com, a website that allows people to host and share photographs. Similar to what Flickr and Instagram do. But Apple claimed that 500px also had adult pictures, which its users could search for, and kicked out the app from its app store.

Here is Apple’s statement, as told to The Verge:

"The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We've asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app."

            This is not the first time an app has been removed from iOS app store over the content that Apple believes is obscene or pornographic. Steve Jobs, in 2010, categorically said that even though internet is full of pornographic material, such content has no place on Apple’s devices. He said…

"We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy (an) Android phone."

            While Apple can remove or disapprove content on its app store, the right question we should ask is whether the company should be allowed to decide what iPhone and iPad users can see or not see. It may have puritanical standards that are not followed by its users. Consumers should not be at the mercy of Apple – or for that matter any other company – when it comes to content. If it is allowed in law it should be accessible

            It’s not only about porn. In the past, Apple even disapproved apps on political and religious grounds. For example, in its developer guidelines for the app store it says…

"We view apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store."

            Personally, I believe that content creators and companies like Apple or Google should not decide what their users do with their devices. Yes, there are problems with obscene and pornographic material on the web but the device makers or platform owners should advise, AND NOT FORCE, users to accept or not accept something.

           In this matter I like Google’s approach. The company, too, curates Android app store but users also have the option to bypass the store and install apps directly. On iPhone or iPad you can’t install apps without using iOS app store unless you ‘jailbreak’ the device.

          It is high time Apple clarifies its policy on ‘objectionable’ material. This is a question Joshua Topolsky asks at The Verge. If 500px was removed because people could search for nude pictures through app, why has Apple allowed Safari web browser, Tumblr, Google Search or Twitter apps on its store? After all, it is much easier to get hardcore pornographic content with these apps compared to what a user can get through 500px.

Update: 500PX magically reappeared in the iOS app store. Let's hope it stays there.

Software Configuration Management

 

In many ways, software configuration management (SCM) is very similar to a plumbing system. It was probably there when you bought your house, or joined your company. It becomes out-dated and inefficient, and can end up costing a lot more just to maintain than replace. How often do people realistically think about replacing their plumbing, or their SCM tool for that matter? Sure, the transition often requires upfront costs and a temporary lag in progress while a new tool is implemented and teams come up to speed. But what are the potential benefits of reevaluating your toolset, and can those potential benefits outweigh the costs of disturbing the status quo?

 Elimination of Merge Hell

Teams often struggle with merges for a release, and end up in “merge hell” . In some cases, the pain is so bad that software doesn’t even get released, or teams have to spend weeks cleaning up a branch. If this was the plumbing system in your house, it could be the equivalent of having a shower that only has ice cold water. This is a problem that we couldn’t tolerate at home, yet because it is accepted part of our day to day “SCM” lives, we tolerate it. Would you take an ice cold shower every day or would you do something about it?

SCM Performance Improvements

Many SCM systems suffer from performance issues. This could be due to the size of the repository or the performance of the network. A huge benefit of changing to a new system is performance improvements – is there a faster tool out there? The productivity gain alone when going from 15 minute check-ins to 30 seconds saves your development team hours. If this was your house, would you tolerate a sink that dribbled water out when you turned the faucet?
SCM tools are highly engrained in day-to-day software development activities. As a result, many processes, regardless of their inefficiency or difficulty, become routine.  When these processes become routine, it is often difficult to realize how impeding they are, or how much these processes can be improved. Many teams are starting to investigate the benefits of “ripping out the plumbing,” by looking for tools that will help them improve software development processes.
Processes such as branching and merging, and even accelerating development as a whole are increasingly important to dev teams, but are proven difficult to establish without the proper tools. So, while replacing your software configuration management tool may seem like an overwhelming task, the potential value that teams can gain from evaluating their tools for can have a dramatic effect on productivity. With the speed and capability of today’s tools, it seems worthwhile to take a step back and see how these new solutions might fit in with your development process and help you optimize the efficiency of your development team.

 

The Changing Landscape of SCM

 http://accurev.com/blog/tag/software-configuration-management/It’s 1998. I’m just starting my job at Rational Software, supporting ClearCase. During my training and through my first few months handling customer issues, I developed a deep understanding of the complexities of SCM and the heavy-handed centralized control that ClearCase provided its customer base. Wrappers, triggers and script automation were the key to a tightly controlled, centralized development environment.  In the developers’ eyes, dealing with the version control tool was just a part of doing their job.

Developers like to code, not “waste time” with tools or infrastructure. They are creators and want to create their masterpiece. Check-in, Check-out, Merge, etc. are not ways developers want to spend their time, especially if they are forced to deal with poor performance from an SCM tool, whether it’s by the tool itself, or the myriad of wrappers that were forced on top of the SCM tool their company chose. In a developers eyes, any time spent NOT writing code is wasted time.
However, despite the negative ramifications of SCM centralization and control to the developer’s productivity, there are absolute benefits to the enterprise that cannot be lost. Security, traceability, visibility and control are paramount to running a development organization.
My decision to come work at AccuRev in 2001 was based on the software’s unique ability to provide all the features the enterprise needs, while minimizing the negative impact SCM has on developer productivity. The ease at which AccuRev provides visualization and control over the entire development process was truly a game changer.  And while still a centralized SCM tool, AccuRev was designed to minimize the pain developers felt during their day to day operations.
It’s now 2012 and the SCM landscape has changed dramatically for developers. De-centralized / Distributed development is all the rage now. Version control tools such as Git and Mercurial are providing developers with the experience they demand. Local copies of repositories give unparalleled performance. Strong branching models provide near painless branching and merging. Tools like Git are designed with the developer in mind. Performance, merging strength and extremely in-depth control of all operations are the focus of product features.
All that said, while distributed SCM tools are great for developers and fine for open source development, Enterprises are experiencing chaotic development and losing control in their engineering organizations. So which way do you go? Centralized appeases the Enterprise, De-Centralized appeases the developers.
The answer is both. Now that AccuRev has introduced Kando, Enterprises can maintain all the security, traceability, audit-ability, visibility and process control their business depends on, while giving their developers exactly what they want – to use Git for their day to day development.

General Availability for Industry’s First Seamless Integration of Enterprise-Level Security and Visualization into Git

AccuRev released for general availability today the first Git integration that seamlessly bridges the world of commercial tools and open source software configuration management.

AccuRev’s Kando, an enterprise security and compliance platform for Git, which was released in beta in January, complements the open source SCM tool with additional functionality, allowing organizations using Git to simultaneously leverage enterprise-level security and requirements traceability.
Kando is the first software development solution that enables Git development shops to add workflow, issue tracking, security, change requirements and other capabilities to the software development process, all while maintaining the flexibility and familiarity of Git environments.
Kando’s ground-breaking enterprise-level security and compliance capabilities allow its users to:

• Comply with enterprise-level regulations, by providing full audit and traceability
• Secure Git with access control capabilities, and support for enterprise authentication via LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory
• Visualize and manage development processes that use Git in AccuRev’s StreamBrowser™ environment
• Support Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) through change-based development with AccuRev Change Packages

“Our Kando Beta announcement in January had an overwhelmingly positive response, and it is clear that Git adoption has expanded well beyond the Linux community, into product development and IT,” said Lorne Cooper, AccuRev’s CEO. “Kando can solve many security and requirements traceability problems that enterprise organizations face when adopting Git, and really allows Git an opportunity to scale the development process across enterprise software development teams.”

During the development of Kando, AccuRev established the Kando Technical Advisory Board, comprised of representatives from several enterprise organizations with Git environments.

 

 

Features expected from Windows 8

Introduction             

           After the successful launch of Windows 7 in 2009, the company continues to rule the desktop, but has faltered in the emerging tablet space. The next version of its popular operating system, codenamed Windows 8, is designed to bridge the gap between PCs and slates, but will it be enough to help the world’s leading software company catch up to its competitors in the mobile space when it launches sometime in 2012?

         Just as important, will Windows 8 have the kind of compelling features that made Windows 7 a must-have upgrade for consumers and businesses alike? We’ve gathered together the top 8 announced or rumored features of Microsoft’s upcoming OS so you can decide for yourself.

Top Expected Features Of Windows 8 

1)Touch-friendly user interface 

         Say goodbye to the Start Menu, at least when it comes to the main desktop. Microsoft has demoed a flashy new user interface filled with touch-friendly live tiles that show everything from the news to your social media updates. Windows 8 also supports full-screen HTML 5 applications on the desktop and the ability to switch between apps with a single swipe to the left or right.

         “Tiles are better than icons,” Jensen Harris, director of PM: Windows User Experience, said in a demo video. “They have a little more space for the app to show its personality. Like the weather app can just show you the temperature without you having to open it.”
          
          Despite the slickness of the new OS, Microsoft may have a hard time convincing users that an interface that looks more like Windows Phone 7 than Windows 7 will work well on non-touch devices.

          "On a PC where you are still using a keyboard and mouse, or a laptop, where you don’t necessarily want to touch your screen, or only rely on a touch pad, I think it’s a harder sell,” said ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. “I just can’t see myself — the way I work, and the way that I know a lot of other people work — having to click through those tiled boxes on the screen in order to find a program."

           Fortunately, a traditional-style Windows desktop will be available for apps that require it. However, it's not clear whether users will be able to disable tile mode entirely.

2)Snap for multi-tasking

          By default, Windows 8 won't even have traditional windows as native apps will run full screen without title bars or minimize/maximize widgets. To see more than one program at a time, you'll be able to "snap" one app to the left while another sits on the right. You can then adjust the dividing line between the programs to show more or less of each. Microsoft's Harris demoed Snap in this Microsoft video. 

3)Improved file copy feature

        Windows' obtuse file copying function has been a minor annoyance for years. Every copy operation has its own dialog box that shows you a single progress bar which may or may not provide an accurate estimate of how long the operation will take to complete.

        With Windows 8, Microsoft puts all current copy operations into a single dialog box where you can check their progress and pause/resume them. You'll also have access to a more detailed report that shows the filetransfer rate of each file copy and a more transparent warning when you try to copy one version of a file over another.

        Unfortunately, the estimates won't be more precise. In a blog post, Microsoft says that "estimating the time remaining to complete a copy is nearly impossible to do with any precision because there are many unpredictable and uncontrollable variables involved."

4)ARM processor support

        Windows 8 will be the first Microsoft operatingsystem to run on ARM-based processors in addition to traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD. ARM processors such as Nvidia’s Tegra, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and TI’s OMAP have dominated the smartphone and tablet space because they’re great at low-power, connected computing.

        Windows 8 for ARM will support a new mode called “always on, always connected” that allows any device to act like a phone, remaining in standby mode for hours without disconnecting from the Internet, then waking instantly the minute you need them to.

        At Computex Taipei, Microsoft VP of Windows Planning Mike Angiulo showed that both an ARM device and a standard x86 PCcould run the same piano playing application. He also demoed a notebook based Nvidia’s quad core Kal El CPU that could run Microsoft Office and print documents to a standard printer

5)Web apps on the desktop

        Like HP with its WebOS and RIM with BlackBerry Tablet OS, Microsoft plans to support a new class of programs called “Tailored Apps” that will use standard web languages such as HTML 5 and JavaScript, but be able to interact with the hardware and file system. By supporting these well-known languages, Microsoft can attract an army of additional developers and, since these they run through a browser engine, compatibility across both ARM and x86 hardware platforms is assured.

       However, we don’t know exactly how developers using Microsoft’s .NET framework and other popular programming languages will be able to build apps that work on both the ARM and x86 flavors of Windows 8. Will they be able to code once, run everywhere?
“At the highest level, people hear, oh it’s just the same code and it can run in both places, but we don’t really know that that is true,” ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley said. “And in fact, some of the things Microsoft said about having to rework office so that it works on Windows on ARM make me think it isn’t true.”

6)Windows 8 app store

        With Apple adding a Mac App Store for to OS X and everyone from Amazon to Lenovo getting into the app store game on mobile, a Windows 8 app store seems like a no-brainer. We don't know much about the look, feel, pricing or selection of the store because Microsoft's only official word on it comes in a blog post from Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky where he simple lists "App Store" as one of the many teams working on Windows 8.

        However, in April, Chinese site CnBeta posted the picture above, claiming that it came from a leaked build of Windows 8. Given the windowed appearance of this picture, we can only guess that this is either a fake, an early version or a version designed for Windows 7 users. We suspect that the final Windows 8 app store will have the same kind of tiled interface as other native Win 8 apps.

7)Native USB 3.0 support

        With speeds up to 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 and the ability to carry more voltage for charging, USB 3.0 offers a whole new world of speed and convenience. Though USB 3.0 controllers and devices will work under Windows 7 with third-party drivers, Microsoft is building native drivers into Windows 8 and developing an efficient new USB software stack. Your blazing fast external SSD should work better than ever! 

8)Kinect gesture control and other input methods

         Microsoft hasn't announced support for Kinect-style gesture control, but long-time observers feel confident that when Windows 8 launches in 2012, it will be there. Given Kinect's popularity on Xbox, we tend to agree.

        Windows Supersite's Paul Thurott told us he expects Microsoft to not only support gestures but all kinds of new input methods, including voice control and facial recognition.
"This doesn’t get a lot of press, but one of the big advantages, one of the big deals about kinect, even now in this early version is the voice-control stuff," he said. "People stand there and they wave their arms around in the air, and it’s interesting and it makes for a good demo, but the truth is, when you’re watching TV, it’s actually kind of nice to control the playback and the navigation with your voice."


*Source GADGETBOX -http://www.gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com.