Monthly Archive:: April 2010

John Gruber has found out that cross-compilers are no longer allowed in iPhone OS 4.0. "My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe's upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch - a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It's unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, which let developers write JavaScript code that runs in WebKit inside a native iPhone app wrapper. They might be OK."

"While Adobe has been getting most of the press recently for their Flash 10.1 RC, Microsoft has quietly announced their plans to release the final version of Silverlight 4.0 as early as next week. This major update will provide more fundamental changes than prior iterations, including Google Chrome support, better performance (up to 200% over Silverlight 3), improved security with digital signing and sandboxing, and greater control for developers."

Today, Apple held a special press event at its campus in Cupertino during which it revealed and demonstrated the new features that are going into the fourth version of the iPhone operating system. The company focussed on 7 'tentpole' features, the most prominent of which is... Multitasking.

Yes, this is turning into a series - welcome to episode 3 (1, 2). Apple has been granted a patent on Cover Flow. This is a design patent, not a utility one; in other words, not the implementation is patented, but the look. "Think of it as covering the distinctive shape of a Coke bottle and not how it works and you'll get it," Engadget explains. This means that anyone implementing something that looks even remotely similar is in danger of getting sued by Apple. Compiz, Songbird, you're boned.

Alex Brown, the convener of ISO's OOXML subcommittee (SC34), criticized Microsoft last week for failing to properly support the standard in Office 2010. Brown declared that Microsoft's office format was "heading for failure" due to the growing number of unresolved technical deficiencies and Microsoft's own apparent lack of interest in implementing ISO's revised version of the standard. Microsoft technical evangelist Doug Mahugh responded on Wednesday in an effort to clarify Microsoft's intentions for OOXML support. He said that Microsoft is strongly committed to the standard and plans to achieve full compliance with the ISO-approved specification. He explained that Microsoft was unable to support strict OOXML compliance in Office 2010 due to various logistical issues and time constraints.

"Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other."

Websites for over a decade have been transitioning to the Model-View-Controller paradigm, separating data from formatting and user interaction in their code bases. Unfortunately, this has meant not only the end of ugly early 90's vintage Geocities pages, but also of the era of digital, or more specifically computeral craftsmanship. The future of computers will depend on those artists, scholars, and programmers who can reunify content with format and remake programming as an art.

Haiku, everybody's favourite open source BeOS recreation, is currently undertaking a push towards a second alpha release, a beta, and even R1. Thanks to funds raised, Haiku has been able to hire several contractors to code full-time for the project, leading to serious progress.

"Last Friday HTC unveiled its entry-level Smartphone, aptly named the Smart. However, what we'd like to tell you about is not the new handset, but instead what happened during the press event inside the Taipei 101. This news story hasn't made it outside of Taiwan so far and we felt it was worth reporting on, despite the event taking place a few days ago. As the press conference was drawing to a close and the group photos were about to be taken, the event was gate crashed by representatives for one of HTC's suppliers. A woman came in shouting with several other people following her and there was a general confusion among the media at the event. The HTC PR representatives were doing their best to drag her away from the stage, while she was trying to hand over some kind of a list to Peter Chou, the president and CEO of HTC."

DragonFly BSD 2.6.1 has been released. "There are numerous big-ticket features in this release as found in the release notes, plus a ton of stability and performance work."

And thus our true colours reveal. IBM made a patent pledge in 2005, promising not to sue open source projects over a list of 500 patents the computer giant holds. Today, however, IBM has threatened to sue TurboHercules, a French open source software house which provides support for the Hercules open source s390 mainframe emulator. Some of the patents in question are on the 500 list.

It's tablet week on the internet, and now it's time for the Joo Joo to take centre stage again (after the iPad and HP's upcoming Slate). Engadget received its review unit last week, and yesterday, they published their review of the device. In what will surely not come as a total surprise to anyone, their conclusion is that while the hardware is decent and slick, the software is not.

Ah, Intel's IA-64 architecture. More commonly known as Itanium, it can probably be seen as a market failure by now. Intel consistently failed to deliver promised updates, and clock speeds have lagged behind. Regular x86-64 processors have already overtaken Itanium, and now Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 is the last version of Windows to support the architecture.

The iPad's barely out the door, and Apple has already announced an upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 event - for April 8, which is coming Thursday - to be held at Apple's Cupertino campus. Similarly, Microsoft sent out mystery invitations today for an event held in San Francisco April 12.