Community developer blogs

Tim Anderson

Recent Posts

• No more Amazon income if you are in North Carolina. Who next?

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:43

  The easiest way to make money on the web is by signing up as an affiliate for Amazon.com and/or Google (Disclaimer: I have both). Although most affiliates achieve only small and occasional income, it is possible to earn significant amounts. With Amazon, you can create your own specialist online store and make it a viable business. If there is anyone in North Carolina in that position, they have woken up to a nasty headache.

• Upgrade to Windows 7 in Europe: confusing as expected

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:43

  PC manufacturers are now publicising their upgrade deals for Windows 7. Buy a machine with Vista today, get a free upgrade to Windows 7 later. Except the software is not an upgrade as such – it’s a replacement. Here are the details from Asus, for example, which note: The Windows® 7 Upgrade Option Program requires a clean installation of the Windows 7 upgrade media.

• Eclipse survey shows Windows decline

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:43

  In May 2009 the open source Eclipse project surveyed its users. Visitors to the Eclipse site were asked to complete a survey, and 1365 did so. That’s out of around 1 million visitors, which shows how much we all hate surveys. Anyway, this report [pdf] was the result. A similar survey [pdf] was carried out in 2007, potentially making a valuable comparison, though the earlier survey has different questions making direct comparisons difficult in most cases, which is a shame.

• Mozilla takes aim at Flash and Silverlight with Firefox 3.5

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:43

  I reviewed Firefox 3.5 for The Register. I found the new features unexciting from a user perspective, but not so for developers. The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, improvements to the Canvas element, JavaScript threading and various bits of HTML 5.0 make this a more powerful platform for web applications – provided that you workaround the problem of users with Internet Explorer.

• Clipboard.Clear … oops

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:43

  Bob Warfield is upset because he lost some work. He copied some text in Live Writer, deleted it, then opened Word and tried to paste. No go .. clipboard empty. Frustrating, but is he right to call his post Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural, on the grounds that Word is designed to clear the clipboard every time it opens? Here’s a bit more information. First, Word does not do that here.

• Windows 7: cheap prices but painful upgrade for EU

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 17:25

  Microsoft is offering Windows 7 at bargain prices for customers who pre-order. General availability is set for October 22nd. In the USA, Windows 7 will be on offer at $49.99 for Home Premium or $99.99 for Windows 7 Professional, if you order between 26th June and July 11th. More details here. UK customers get Home Premium for £49.99 or Professional for £99.99 if they pre-order between July 15th and August 14th. That’s more expensive than in the USA but still reasonable.

• EU responds to questions on Microsoft’s plans for Windows 7

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 17:25

  Events in the EU’s case against browser bundling in Windows have taken an odd twist. The case was brought originally by Opera, which complained that it couldn’t sell its browser because IE came free with Windows. Other interested parties such as Google and Mozilla joined in.

• Silverlight 3 coming to Xbox 360

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 17:25

  This announcement concerning advertising on Xbox Live together with these tweets from Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie add up to one thing: Silverlight 3 will run on Xbox 360. Another platform (along with Apple’s iPhone) where Adobe Flash will struggle to find a place, I’d guess. Technorati Tags: silverlight,adobe,microsoft,iphone,xbox

• Outlook HTML is better broken and safe, than rich and dangerous

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 07:57

  The campaign at fixoutlook.org is brilliant. Outlook 2010 will have broken HTML support, it says, because it will use Word to render HTML: Microsoft has confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.

• Search for virus help highlights lack of authority in Google, Wikipedia

  Posted: 24 Jun 2009 at 08:43

  A contact suffered a trojan infection on his Windows XP machine the other day. He was alerted to the infection by Windows Defender, but the Remove or Quarantine actions offered by Defender did not work. If he removed the trojan, it reappeared on the next reboot. The installed AVG security suite sat there unconcerned. I am not sure exactly what path he took, but he did some clicking of links and ended up at a site which offered software that promised to fix the issue.

• Survey ranks developer tools, and reveals what developers care about most

  Posted: 23 Jun 2009 at 14:32

  Evans Data has published its 2009 Software Development Platforms survey, to which around 1200 developers contributed, scoring their chosen development tools in eighteen different categories. The tools covered are Eclipse, Embarcadero’s Delphi, IBM’s Rational Suite, IntelliJ, Microsoft’s Visual Studio, NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper and Sun Studio. I was sorry not to see more products covered.

• Fixing a VirtualBox Windows XP blue screen

  Posted: 23 Jun 2009 at 14:32

  The great think about virtualisation is that virtualised hardware stays the same, so you don’t get problems when you move to new hardware, right? Unfortunately when I ran up an XP image on VirtualBox, newly installed on Vista 64, I got this blue screen, an 0x0000007B stop error:    The problem was that VirtualBox must have changed its default virtual IDE controller since I first set up this VM. Windows hates having the storage controller changed – though there are ways to fix it.

• Does Visual Basic have a future?

  Posted: 23 Jun 2009 at 14:32

  I was interested in this podcast with a member of the Visual Basic team at Microsoft, Lisa Feigenbaum, as I ask myself the same question. Unfortunately the questioning from Joe Stagner (who also works for Microsoft) is tame. Nevertheless, there are a few points of interest. “The things that come out of Microsoft, it is C# biased” admits Feigenbaum, which she says is because so many at Microsoft have a C or Java background.

• What next for Adobe LiveCycle ES?

  Posted: 23 Jun 2009 at 14:32

  Yesterday I met Adobe’s Duane Nickull for a chat about the company’s efforts in SOA. Nickull is a battle-scarred enterprise architect with a deep knowledge of SOA standards, who is now a senior technical evangelist for Adobe. He represents what I think of as the other Adobe: not the company that does things you would not believe in Photoshop, but the one that has created an end-to-end development platform with LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (plus your favourite application server) at one end, and Fl

• Adobe “Committed to bringing Flash Player to the iPhone”

  Posted: 17 Jun 2009 at 11:08

  Adobe CEO commented during yesterday’s earnings call: We are also equally committed to bringing the Flash Player to the iPhone, so now we do have a Flash Player 10 version for smartphones. We continue to work with Apple. We need more APIs and cooperation to bring the capabilities of Flash to the iPhone and we think it’s in both of our best interests to make sure that 85% of the top 100 websites that use Flash, that that experience is available to the Apple customers.

• Google Apps add-on breaks Outlook features

  Posted: 17 Jun 2009 at 06:33

  Google has released an add-on to Outlook that apparently breaks Outlook search. Google Apps Sync synchronizes Outlook email, calendar and contacts with Google Apps. Google recommends it as a transition tool for people migrating from Exchange, or for people who prefer the Outlook UI. A premium version of Google Apps is required. Unfortunately it breaks some Outlook functionality. In particular, Outlook search no longer works correctly.

• Opera Unite: another way to share, another nightmare for digital rights

  Posted: 16 Jun 2009 at 17:02

  I’ve been trying out Opera Unite. This is a web server built into the Opera 10 browser, now in beta. There’s nothing new about running your own web server; one comes free with Windows, and Apache is free for anyone to download and install in a few clicks.

• Embarcadero CEO on cross-platform native code

  Posted: 16 Jun 2009 at 12:16

  I had a long chat with Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams last week. I used a few snippets on the Reg – on cross-platform Delphi and Eclipse - and hope to post more from it shortly. In the meantime, here’s what he said about using native code rather than Java or other types of managed code for cross-platform apps. It felt like 1996 all over again, but he has a point. Technorati Tags: embarcadero,native code,delphi,java

• Adobe’s cloud office takes shape, gets spreadsheet, goes commercial

  Posted: 15 Jun 2009 at 11:23

  Adobe has announced a spreadsheet-like product for its cloud Office suite at Acrobat.com, along with commercial terms for business users of Acrobat.com conferencing and document collaboration. Acrobat.com itself is now out of beta. The new product, called Acrobat.com Tables, is available to try at Adobe Labs, where it joins Acrobat.com Presentations.

• Adobe’s secret plans for Flash on the iPhone

  Posted: 15 Jun 2009 at 11:23

  Last week I spoke to Adobe’s Erik Larson, director of product management for Acrobat.com. Acrobat.com is a conferencing and document collaboration site which is built almost entirely in Flash. Apple does not allow Flash on the iPhone, so my ears pricked up when I heard Larson promise iPhone support for Acrobat.com from the Autumn. We’ll be adding mobile access via smartphones, so the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile.