The Insider News

stratēchery by Ben Thompson[^]:

I love apps, especially productivity apps. If games are all about user input, with minimal app output, and consumption apps about app output, with minimal user input, productivity apps are about both. You put something into an app, and the app returns something back to you, better. Think about Photoshop, or Excel: you put in data, and the data is returned to you, transformed. Same thing with a text-editing app, or a calculator, or a mileage tracker. Productivity apps add value, and the more you use them, the more valuable they become. Unfortunately, productivity apps are a terrible match for app store economics.

Webdesigner Depot[^]:

With... an ever increasing proportion of browsing taking place on smartphones and tablets, websites must decide how they will adapt to people accessing their content without a mouse and keyboard. Whilst the default response to this has often been ‘just make a separate mobile interface!’, a solution that has worked well in the past on smaller mobile devices such as phones, there is very little scope for the middle group occupied by larger phone and tablet displays. This article will take a look at a number of sites that have gone down both unconventional and standard site designs to become more touch-friendly.

NCZOnline[^]:

This past week, Microsoft officially unveiled the first preview of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 8.1[1]. Doing so put to rest a whirlwind of rumors based on leaked versions of the much-maligned web browser. We now know some very important details about Internet Explorer 11, including its support for WebGL, prefetch, prerender, flexbox, mutation observers, and other web standards. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is what is not in Internet Explorer 11.

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings[^]:

Unicode on Python 2 is a fairly simple thing. There are two types of string literals: bytestrings (look like this on 2.x: 'foo') and unicode strings (which have a leading u prefix like this: u'foo'). Since 2.6 you can also be explicit about bytestrings and write them with a leading b prefix like this: b'foo'. Python 2's biggest problem with unicode was that some APIs did not support it.... On Python 3 two things happened that make unicode a whole lot more complicated. The biggest one is that the bytestring was removed. It was replaced with an object called bytes which is created by the Python 3 bytes syntax: b'foo'. It might look like a string at first, but it's not. Unfortunately it does not share much of the API with strings.

Ars Technica[^]:

Windows 8 passed a milestone of sorts in June, passing Windows Vista's market share to become the third-most used version of Windows on the Internet. Internet Explorer 10 continued to show strong growth too, fueled this time by automatic updating. Google Chrome put in a strong performance, offsetting losses made earlier in the year. Its growth was to the detriment of Mozilla's Firefox, which fell significantly.

TechHive[^]:

Now that the 3D printing industrial complex is humming away nicely, it’s time—precisely the time—to dive headfirst into making your own 3D-printed objects at home. Not only are consumer-grade 3D printers proving to be useful, increasingly affordable, and easy to find, but they’re the vanguard of an emerging technology that will eventually become as ubiquitous as inkjet printers are today. So you might as well get in at the ground floor. In short order, you can be printing out your own kooky objects, or creating replacement parts for missing household essentials.

Opera Developer News[^]:

As Opera 15 has a brand new rendering engine, we thought we'd explain what the product is made of. Web content is handled by Chromium/Blink, combined with the V8 JavaScript engine. On top of that, we have implemented our own UI features from scratch.... Our engineers have also been busy committing features and fixes to Blink, and upstreaming various changes to Chromium.

Windows IT Pro[^]:

If you were to condense Microsoft’s messaging at Build 2013 in San Francisco last week down to its most salient point, it would be this: Speed to market is now a feature. Whether you’re talking about Windows 8 (and RT), Windows Server, Office 365, Windows Azure, or virtually any of its other most important platforms, Microsoft has pegged the throttle and is moving forward with a strategy of continuous improvements. I applaud this sea change. But it’s only going to work if Microsoft’s slower-moving customers jump on board as well.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

Like it or not, email is a necessary evil. But that doesn’t mean it needs to rule us. We can tame the beast, and it all starts by doing less. Like any beast, the more you feed email, the bigger it becomes. It’s time to put email on a diet. We can achieve this in a simple way: by using email less. Believe it or not, doing considerably less with email while still effectively communicating with our clients and colleagues is perfectly possible.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

My question maybe due to the filtered perception I have from the types of questions being asked in the C/C++ forum where beginning programming students are dealing with arrays, pointers, and linked lists. Perhaps there is hope that C++ is being taught in a much better format now rather than just translating the K&R C book into C++ and then tacking on how to use classes afterwards.

Davedev's Blog[^]:

I recently took the World of Warcraft Starter Kit I did for Windows, which was written in WinJS (Windows Library for JavaScript), and ported it to Windows Phone. Since there is currently no WinJS available for Windows Phone I chose to write a XAML/C# native Windows Phone app and then make my network calls using the Web Browser Control. This is the same common approach that is used in the Windows Phone HTML5 App template and other popular tools such as Intel’s XDK.

GruffCode[^]:

Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application!