The Insider News

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Microsoft wishes it could counter the absolute numbers of Android and iOS apps by having the right apps, but it doesn’t, and that is the company's real marketing problem. But amazingly, the critical missing Windows Phone apps are from the very organizations that Microsoft has the most financial leverage with.

raganwald's posterous[^]:

When you're hiring programmers, you don’t really have a how-to-organize-your-time problem, you have a finding a needle in a haystack problem. There are way fewer qualified people applying for programming jobs. Here's a story about learning to find the right programmer for the job.

Daring Fireball[^]:

Gestures are to iOS what keyboard shortcuts are to Mac OS — an alternative way to do something as a convenience for advanced users. The default, true way to do things should be visual.

O'Reilly[^]:

The animals on the covers of O'Reilly books are a hallmark of the brand, making them instantly recognizable on bookshelves throughout the world. Here's how the animals ended up on the books and how O'Reilly staff create them.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

The app world is becoming like one giant forest, millions and millions of trees. So, if one of those trees falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This case study will cover some of app marketing tactics and offer some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Ars Technica[^]:

Most Web browser reviews focus on one thing: speed. Speed is all well and good, but browser benchmark scores fail to answer a fundamental question: which browser is best for business? In an enterprise environment, speed is simply one concern among many.

Sebastien Lambla[^]:

Over the years, the various component organizations within Microsoft have had various levels of involvement with Open Source, with different philosophies, and from what I have gathered over the years from post-conference drinks, internal conflicts that can be quite a challenge.

Within Windows[^]:

Last week, a reader tipped me off to an article indicating how to customize the new WinX menu in Windows 8. (You know, the menu that appears when you right-click the lower-left Start tip.) Not happy with hacking core system files and peeling back file system security, I dug a little deeper to understand what’s going on and came up with a simpler solution.

Miguel de Icaza[^]:

Designers of managed languages have chosen the path of safety over performance for their designs. But can state of the art JIT compilers ever provide the performance we've come to expect from native code?

Wired[^]:

At the height of Bell Labs’ influence, from the 1920s to the 1980s, the corporate research powerhouse seemed unstoppable. The transistor, UNIX, the C programming language, the modern photovoltaic cell, the CCD chip, the field of information theory and the first global communications satellites all bear Bell Labs DNA, for starters.

The Next Web[^]:

Last week we discovered that the owner of SEOnix.org hacked in to our backend and threw himself a sweet SEO party. We can look back at this now and have a laugh, but we honestly felt very stupid when we discovered this. Here's what happened, and what we did to fix it.

Macstories[^]:

When it comes to this fabled smaller iPad, I don’t think the question we should be asking is “really?”. Of course Apple has a smaller iPad in their labs. I’m sure there are all kinds of neat product prototypes at Cupertino. But why would Apple want to release a smaller iPad?

The Globe and Mail[^]:

Despite the fact that so much of life is now lived digitally, the springtime urge to tidy things up and get our affairs in order often stops at our computers.

MIT[^]:

Why don’t more women enter the male-dominated profession of engineering? Contrary to the stereotype, a study finds, women are no more hesitant than men when it comes to mixing family and work. Instead, the study finds, women feel less comfortable in engineering than men, and lack the “professional role confidence” that male engineers seem to acquire easily.

ZDNet[^]:

While Windows 8 already supports development using a number of programming languages, Microsoft wants developers to bring even more to the new Windows runtime (WinRT) at the heart of the next version of Windows.