"Today at TechEd, I announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. I will not, in this post, be talking about many of the new VS 2013 features that are unrelated to the Application Lifecycle workflows. Stay tuned for more about the rest of the VS 2013 capabilities at the Build conference."

Microsoft has detailed some of the business and enterprise features coming to Windows 8.1. "We built Windows 8 to bring the most powerful and modern computing experience to businesses and to help professionals stay connected to their colleagues and clients from anywhere, anytime. Windows 8.1 advances this vision and introduces new manageability, mobility, security, user experience and networking capabilities that will be available later this year."

A rare piece of probably unknown (to most) Apple history: the first portable Mac - which wasn't the Mac Portable and wasn't built by Apple. "I'd never heard of the Walkmac, which wasn't built by Apple but by electronics pioneer Chuck Colby, who founded Colby Systems in 1982. The Apple-sanctioned model you see here was 'modded' around a stock Mac SE motherboard and hit the market in 1987, two years before Apple put out its Macintosh Portable in 1989 for $7,300. Subsequent Colby models were built around the SE-30 motherboard and had an integrated keyboard (that black mat in the picture above is a mouse pad)."

Google is changing its disclosure policy for zero-day exploits - both in their own software as in that of others - from 60 days do 7 days. "Seven days is an aggressive timeline and may be too short for some vendors to update their products, but it should be enough time to publish advice about possible mitigations, such as temporarily disabling a service, restricting access, or contacting the vendor for more information. As a result, after 7 days have elapsed without a patch or advisory, we will support researchers making details available so that users can take steps to protect themselves. By holding ourselves to the same standard, we hope to improve both the state of web security and the coordination of vulnerability management." I support this 100%. It will force notoriously slow-responding companies - let's not mention any names - to be quicker about helping their customers. Google often uncovers vulnerabilities in other people's software (e.g. half of patches fixed on some Microsoft 'patch Tuesdays' are uncovered by Google), so this could have a big impact.

"Asus has just announced the cure for the common 20-something-inch 1080p display: a small TV-sized 31.5-inch monitor with a massive resolution of 3840x2160. Engadget reports that the Asus PQ321 display, which uses IGZO technology to reduce energy usage and thickness, includes DisplayPort and dual-HDMI input, integrated speakers, and an adjustable stand." The dread of 1366 and 1080p is being removed. Finally.

With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.

"The ReactOS project is proud to announce the release of version 0.3.15. A culmination of over a year of development, 0.3.15 incorporates several architectural enhancements to create a more compatible and conformant implementation of the NT architecture. Perhaps the most user visible enhancement is initial support for USB devices, both storage and input. Infrastructure wise, this is the first release of ReactOS using CMake instead of rbuild. The conversion to CMake has allowed developers to generate Visual Studio solutions for working on the code, though several C++ components still need work before support for Microsoft's toolchain is complete."

Earlier today, Motorola has announced that it is indeed working on an 'X' phone - the first true Google-led Motorola phone. It'll focus on breakability and battery life, and will be designed and manufactured in the United States - in a former Nokia factory, no less. It'll be released in the summer.

"Finland is Nokia. Nokia is Finland. I've traveled to quite a few number of countries this year, and the only place where I see Lumia phones is this chunk of ice that I call home. According to the Finnish business publication Taloussanomat, who references data from IDC, Q1 2013 was the first quarter where mobile phones from the South Korean handset maker Samsung outsold those designed in Espoo. If that's not alarming, I don't know what is." Ouch.

At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.

"Countless hours of hard work, hectoliters of coffee, tons of improvements, two version numbers skipped, and here it is: the all-new Opera for desktop is now out as an Opera Next version, Opera's channel for what used to be called beta. Made from scratch, this version is available for Windows and Mac and brings a new, elegant design and a bunch of new features that will make your browsing experience sleeker and easier than ever." The first version using something called 'Chromium's engine' - I guess they can't call it WebKit anymore, but they can't call it Blink yet either. It's looking great, but the bookmark functionality seems to not have been implemented yet in this preview

"At the Tizen conference this week in San Francisco, Intel showed off an Intel Ultrabook running their next-generation Tizen 3.0 platform that's using a shell/desktop derived from GNOME 3.x."

"Today I pushed out a new ISO of my Wayland Live CD project, which is named for my favorite celebrity. For this new Wayland CD, I wrote a new login manager with Bash and Zenity and Expect (and Script) that fully runs on a Wayland server (weston). Now X is no longer involved in the boot process, and X does not start, (unless you use an X application with xwayland), because I replaced LightDM with the new loginmanager."

"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.