In what I would personally say was a good move, Steve Ballmer is to step down as the CEO of Microsoft in the next 12 months, announced earlier today. Steve Ballmer has been running the company as CEO since 2000 and has been a key part of the company.I'm not fond of Ballmer and some of his work with Microsoft, but lately some of the companies failings have been pointed at Ballmer.
Ballmer leaving this role has made share prices rise, put confidence back into those of us who follow Microsoft and allows for new marketing strategies to be applied in relation to the company.
We shall see how this pans out in the future.
It has been long known as the business oriented phone company but today RIM (Research-In-Motion) and latterly, BlackBerry Ltd. went up for sale. BlackBerry has dropped to as low 2.9% of the phone market this year, whilst Google's Android phones take around 80% of the market, you would imagine figures like this make the company directors at BlackBerry Ltd. slightly concerned.
In the same way we lost Palm, a company who pretty much got the touch devices out on the market in the first place, BlackBerry were one of the first smartphone manufacturers for business users. It's a sad fate, but Android and iOS are in control of the smartphone market with the others trailing behind.
http://media.theage.com.au/business/businessday/blackberry-market-share-under-3-4657199.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/blackberry/10237847/BlackBerry-timeline-from-RIM-to-RIP.html
Nokia's new advert suggests that "every day, more photos are taken on the iPhone, than any other phone". Nokia's Lumia camera may be better, but does that mean more people will change to Nokia's phones? Well, clearly not as Windows Phone only has around 2-3% of the market share. I'm not criticizing Windows Phones themselves, but the operating system they run on.
For now, my point is that if Microsoft doesn't do something with Windows Phone 8 and indeed Windows 8, then they will see the market slip out of their hands to both Google and Apple as BlackBerry did.
I'd like to mention my new software which is under development:
Hyper WEB
Hyper WEB (Hyper Wonderword-Extends-BlackRabbit) is a web editor. It is based on the same distinct feature set of the BlackRabbit Editor in that it uses a function machine editor where inputs are given and the editor produces the output based on those inputs. The editor uses the Internet Explorer's Trident engine with full support for Internet Explorer 10. Future plans are to bring WebKit to it. Pictures will be posted soon as progress begins to show. Currently the browser engine provided is based on Cobweb version 2.0, and it features the same page blocking technologies integrated into it. There are some very clever features being produced for it that will make creating sites easier.
BlackRabbit 2.0
Although I did announce this in the blog for BlackRabbit, version 2.0 is a total redesign on the scripting language. Integration in Cobweb will be much deeper, Hyper WEB will include ways to include sandboxed scripts into websites and Painter Pro and Wonderword will have better support. The current version of Elements will support version 2.0.
Cobweb
Recently, I stopped working on Cobweb because of a limitation of Windows preventing the use of the rendering engine of Internet Explorer 8 and above as part of any application apart from Internet Explorer itself. Due to a new feature brought to Cobweb, it is now possible to ensure that all versions of Trident can be used in Cobweb Internet Browser, and so version 2.0.1.319 has this feature. I will soon put the latest version up on the web. As Cobweb is my currently only finished product, feedback would be much appreciated.
Wonderword
The future for Wonderword stopped back in October 2012 because it was taking the place of nothing more than a web editor, script editor and more other things. Due to the fact that Hyper WEB and BlackRabbit do both of these, I have decided to revamp Wonderword. There is now the possibility of a full WYSIWYG word processing package, but this will need some investment. It cannot happen without support.
Painter Pro
Current betas on Painter Pro have expired. To obtain another beta, please contact me. Painter Pro 1.2.1.6000 was the latest release and the next release will be 1.2.2.0, currently known as it's codename Aberdeen.
VUEBB
Work on VUEBB has also been slowed, but it will resume as soon as the next file extension library is complete.
As if Instagram could get any more controversial, the Facebook owned photo sharing service is now deleting any photos that are uploaded by apps on Windows Phone 8 such as Instance.
Instagram is an app that does not feature on Windows Phone and it apparently is now deleting the user's photos uploaded from any Windows Phone device. This is apparently a security issue more than anything. I've never ever used Instagram because I know the ins and outs of photo sharing through these services and realised that it's not a good idea. Instagram at one point could even sell your photos according to this source, although since then have backed down.
Apple is supposedly testing a new size for the iPad - although this time it is said to be larger rather than smaller. The iPhone with a larger screen size is not new information, in fact, I posted about it a month back.
The rumour suggests a 13" iPad, which is the size of the smallest MacBook Pro (the one I use by the way) and slightly larger than my current Windows laptop. To me this seems too big, I prefer small tablets and small laptops. When I come home, I dock my devices to my monitor (23? display) and enjoy the big screen of that.
One of the most upsetting things that can happen with any technology is that it starts to die, or die prematurely. This is exactly what has happened with my Nexus 7.
Many others have complained as well. Here is a list of issues:
- When I rotate it from vertical to horizontal it takes about 7 seconds to flip.
- Music can't play in the background most of the time because it can't cope. It pauses the music and I have to resume it.
- Chrome takes about 15 seconds to create a tab, even if there are no other tabs
- Occasionally, going home makes the system crash and it takes me back to the login screen.
- Changing users takes about 10-15 seconds to change between two users on the login screen. I even decided to remove every other user on the tablet in the hope that it would make it faster.
- The battery life is subsequently wasted by all of this, and system restarts are frequently required. It also heats up considerably.
- Scrolling is never fluid - it just jumps.
This is a Nexus 7 32GB with 15GB of data. By the way, I have an iPad 16GB as well and have it almost full (11GB of data on it) and it still runs fine.
Here's the proof it happens to others.
The 2012 Nexus 7 is a cheap tablet that seems to have problems
Just two searches that I decided to do on both Bing and Google and look at the results!
Google users search more for why "the Xbox One is bad" and Bing users search for why "the Xbox One is amazing".
You can share this on Facebook if you like.
I have to agree with Google here!
It saddens me to know that AltaVista, which Yahoo acquired back in 2003, which was one of the first search engines I used (because yea, I'm that bit old enough to remember the days before Google was even around) is now being shut down. We got our first Internet connection with Freeserve just before Google came out in 1997 and by that time I would have been eight years old so I had owned a computer for one year and of course all of our searches were done with AltaVista or Yahoo. Although I also remember using MSN as well. But anyway, it's very saddening that Yahoo is closing down AltaVista after 18 years running on July 8th.
Here's the source.
http://allthingsd.com/20130628/happy-friday-yahoo-kills-a-dozen-products/
A recent survey of 150,000 PCs shows that Apple computers are the best at running Windows. Not surprisingly I have Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro. Unlike any of my other three current computers which are a custom PC, Fujitsu Lifebook T4410 tablet and an Asus Eee PC 1020, the MacBook Pro has never met any errors - despite the fact that it is used more than the latter two. After one and a half years running smoothly on Windows 7, it still outperforms my desktop getting to the Windows Desktop even after a reformat. My MacBook Pro has an i5 2.3GHz whereas my desktop has an i7 3.4GHz and double the RAM.
Anyway, here is the link for the information:
