Opinion and commentary from the largest mobile developer community in the world.
Hola a todos! Hoy vamos a hablar un poco sobre las pruebas unitarias en Windows Phone 7.5. Es un tema del cual no existe mucha información ni guías sobre como llevarlas a cabo y que, extrañamente, se deja de lado normalmente. Como si no fuesen necesarias al tratarse de aplicaciones móviles. Nada más lejos de la realidad. Creo que una de las frases que he escuchado últimamente que más sentido tiene es: “La calidad no es opcional”. En Plain…(read more)
Okay, I’ve officially had it with this year’s buzzwords. You know which ones.
Ecosystem
Curated.
At first ecosystem was kind of cute. It sounded so green and organized. Who could argue against anything prefixed with eco?
Then the pundits-that-be decided ecosystems alone don’t cut it. After all, a cesspool is an ecosystem. Just not one you would normally want to play in. So we need our ecosystems to be, we’re told, curated. That’s kind of like “managed” only cooler. Dallas manages. San Francisco curates. Got a cesspool? There’s surely someone in Silicon Valley who could curate it into an artichoke farm. In Dallas we would manage to backfill it.
Apparently Apple sets the standard for curated ecosystems. Within their 
ivy-walled garden thrives a microcosm so well-managed that the inmates don’t mind the asylum. Some critique the development of this weedless wonderland, and even point out how it will ultimately work against the interests of the inhabitants, but for now the produce buyers don’t care. They’re basking in the touchscreen glow of curated apps.
I was supposed to talk about open tech ecosystems at AppUp Elements 2011 recently. I say “supposed to” because my thunder was stolen by tales of a bus loaded with sweaty coders making a fun run from San Francisco to Bellevue, Washington. I felt like a disenfranchised anthropologist showing blurry Bigfoot slides at TED Talk. There’s no competing for eyeballs when the choice is between programmed reality and the apparent myth of successful openness.
But I’m really tired of ecosystem because, as I had intended to share in my presentation, I don’t think it’s really so much about the garden or the plants. I think it’s more about elements like earth, air, water and fire. The stuff of services. Deep down, do people actually care about brands? Don’t they care much more about the experience? So if my Philips television (with Samsung guts) could cheerily and seamlessly share with my Nokia phone doesn’t that make product branding irrelevant? Give me Bluetooth, wifi and NFC combined with open data standards like XML and you have the service elements of my ecosystem. Just add seeds.
As long as a customer-antagonistic war is being waged over content supply and demand, I have to sadly admit we’re likely to see more media gerrymandering that supports the walled gardens. I want a completely open media market where I can pick what I want a la carte. What I get is a bunch of bundles served up by various competitors signing mutually-exclusive deals for content libraries that contain some of what I want and a lot of what I can’t imagine anyone desiring. And a subscription television bill that’s higher than my combined water, sewer and garbage service.
Take that, ecosystem!
Fast Company word wizard Farhad Manjoo foresees a 2012 tech ecosystem battle between the current four apocalyptic horsemen: Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. “Curate” won’t come close to describing the likely bloodshed.
We’re gonna need some new buzzwords.
Filed under: Inviting Change, Out There, The Cat Corral, The Process and Product Frontier, The Write Stuff, Views and Reviews, Ways of Rocking Tagged: Amazon, Apple, curate, ecosystem, Facebook, Farhad Manjoo, Fast Company, forumnokia, Google, LinkedIn 
Nokia Beta Labs released the Nokia Suite 3.2.64 Beta:
Alessandro
With more focus moving to Asia, and the recent innnovations with Sina Weibo, Tencent, the rise and fall of groupon China, it is no surprise that Techcrunch is planting it’s feet on the great wall of China with Techcrunch Disrupt. With this month featuring Geeks on a Plane with the 500 startup crew, silicon valley is slanting it’s eyes to the east to get a good view. Critics say that China is the great copy machine, but maybe soon that will swing it’s way around and the west will start to "borrow" some innovative ideas from their Asian tech brothers. It will be an exciting event–directly after Nokia World. Head East and see what cooperations come out into the world.
I have been on the road with the Nokia / Microsoft outreach
program and we have been teaching Windows Phone 7 programming to developers in
Paris, Madrid, Milan, and Berlin. This has been occupying my time and so my
blog has been suffering.
A couple of weeks ago I promised that I would discuss the
process of moving a Qt/QML data driven application to Silverlight. As you may
recall, I did a similar series of blog posts on moving a side scrolling game
from Qt/QML to XNA.
The project of moving a data driven application is somewhat
more complex because you have to worry about mapping pages, page flows, and
page controls from QML into Silverlight. This can be challenging if your
application was developed before the release of Qt Components for Symbian and
you developed your own equivalent of a page stack.
In this series, I will make the assumption that you have a
page stack model for navigating pages my pushing and popping pages on the page
stack. If you have a more hardwired page model, then you will have to make
adjustments to your code to map your method of page navigation into
Silverlight.
Some of the other challenges in moving code from Qt/QML to
Silverlight is the lack of Signals and Slots in C#. There is a comparable
mechanism that allows you to create and connect custom events with custom event
handlers that can be used in place of Signals and Slots. There are some “gotchas” in using events, but we will discuss those
later in this series.
In moving an app from QML to Silverlight I have identified six
steps that can act as a “porting” process. These steps are as follows:
It is important to understand that many of the algorithms and much of the code written in JavaScript
and C++ can easily map into Silverlight code behind the Visual Page Specifications.
To
understand this process, you must first understand how Silverlight works. If
you have used Silverlight or Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) in
another context, then these concepts can be directly applied to Windows Phone 7
programming. If you don’t know anything
about Silverlight, then you are in luck because I will spend my next blog
reviewing the structure of a Silverlight application. This will include an
explanation of the organization or Silverlight applications, XAML, and the concept of C# code behind.
