The Insider News

Singularity Hacker[^]:

Several development sandboxes have popped up online in the last year that are well worth your time to check out. Dev sandboxes allow for bug isolation, test driving new libraries, sharing programming problems, and saving solutions for later referral. These are the top four.

Colin Eberhardt's Adventures in .NET[^]:

I think Microsoft developers are feeling a bit burnt right now. Let’s not forget that WP7 was a reboot, dropping Windows Mobile 6.5. To reboot once again in such a short space of time is not good news. And as for Silverlight being dropped in Windows 8, together with other plugins, only for MS to do an about face and announce that the plugin-free IE10 browser would support Flash – that’s not good news either!

Damien Katz[^]:

Sometimes I get so down in the weeds of database technology, I forget why I think databases are so fascinating to me, why I found them so important to begin with. ACID. Latency, bandwidth, durability, performance, scalability, Bits and bytes. Virtual this, cloud that. Blah blah blah. Who cares? I care. Dear lord I care. I care so much it hurts.

Aleksandr Levchuk[^]:

VIM Clutch is a hardware pedal for improved text editing speed for users of the magnificent VIM text editor. When the pedal is pressed down, the pedal types "i" causing VIM to go into Insert Mode. When released, it types <esc> and you are back in Normal Mode.

Daring Fireball[^]:

Skepticism about these things doesn’t require knee-jerk Apple fandom. It simply requires an open set of eyeballs. The message I took away is that Microsoft has concluded that, ready or not, it needed to move now. There is no longer enough profit to be had selling software alone.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

Like nearly everyone else I’m excited by this. It’s the first real non-Apple innovation in the tablet space. Competition is good and this will hopefully spur Apple to fix some of the remaining parts of iOS that are lacking. That said, as many have noted, the devil is in the details. However reviews of Win8 have thus far been pretty mixed – primarily due to the dual nature of it being both Metro and Windows.

TechHive Beta Blog[^]:

Microsoft has a history of abandoning its mobile users. It happened when the Windows Phone 7 transition occurred, with Windows Mobile users. How many times can a company abandon its users and still retain their loyalty? Microsoft may be about to find out.

Hack a Day[^]:

At first this might sound comical, but the ever-increasing power of our handhelds makes it a pretty legitimate option. It’s hard to come up with concrete uses off the top of our head, but we’re sure there’s value in being able to pull the phone out of your pocket and serve some content.

Wooga[^]:

Pocket Island is the result of an ambitious one year project here at Wooga with the original goal being to push HTML5 gaming into new territory and create one of one of the world’s most advanced HTML5 titles. One year later and it’s mission accomplished. Now, Wooga wants to see how the HTML5 community can use the lessons learned from Pocket Island and develop the technology forward to the point where it’s fit for mass market consumption.

Microsoft Surface vs. Apple iPad – a Visual Comparison[^]

Yesterday Microsoft held a surprise press conference in LA when they unveiled the Microsoft Surface Tablet, a product that they have successfully managed to keep under-wraps for a couple of years (I created on online poll, and of the 74 respondents, only 25 guessed correctly).

The new tablet comes in two flavours, both of which run Windows 8. The cheaper model, Surface RT, has an ARM processor and will only run newer Metro-style Windows 8 applications (Win8 has a rather strange split personality, it is almost two separate OSs in one), while the more expensive model, Surface Pro, is a bit bulkier and includes an Intel processor that will allow it to run both Metro and traditional desktop apps. Most significantly, the Surface Pro model will run all of your existing Windows software (Word, Excel, Visual Studio, PhotoShop, …)

So why has Microsoft made this bold move? It doesn’t have much of a reputation as a hardware manufacturer!

5 ways Microsoft's Surface may be better than an iPad[^]

(CNN) -- It's sacrilege to some Apple fanboys. It's also something none of Apple's competitors have been able to claim since that "magical" day in early 2010.

But when Microsoft unveiled the Surface tablet (actually a pair of them) Monday, the software company clearly had one ultimate goal: to make a tablet that's better than the iPad.

By most standards, Apple has crushed its tablet rivals that have tried to compete feature-for-feature. No single tablet running Google's Android system has gotten much traction (save the smaller, cheaper Kindle Fire from Amazon) and BlackBerry maker RIM's Playbook hit the market with a thud.