News Items

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.

Zen Koan of Doom: The ultimate API is no API.

Brew some coffee, don't change the requirements and get out of the way...

Recommend your favorite Kanban tools.

Keeping tabs on how we're viewing the web.

Don't rely on someone else's library when you can build your own.

How can people who have no phones, or old feature phones, get access to a smartphone for a really low cost?

Rest in Peace Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse.

The good, the bad and the whatever of Build 2013.

For mobile devices, bigger batteries may be more important than more processing power.

Is Silicon Valley still a center of innovation, or just where the VC money lives?

AOL, Facebook and the rise of the walled gardens.

Which are your favorite JavaScript libraries?

It's a problem of time... specifically, time.Duration.

Hipster coding logic: NoSQL is always smaller, because we leave out the SQL.

What other ways can you swap items using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript?

Do we really need new ways to interact with computers?

Guess the browser (like you don't have enough to do already...)

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released preview versions of "Visual Studio 2013 and Blend that brings forward significant advances for authoring XAML-based Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1." Read on to find out more.

A huge amount of information for Windows Phone developers was provided at Build 2013. Whether you missed a session or want a refresher, Larry Lieberman has collected links to all of the WP sessions on Channel 9 in one convenient blog post. Grab some popcorn and Visual Studio and start watching.

"Making money with in-app purchases boils down to one question – why do we buy things?" In-app purchases are potentially even more revenue producing than app store purchases, but you have to know how to do it right. Riccardo D'Antoni offers tips from successful game in-app purchase strategies that may provide inspiration for your app.

John-Michael Bond parses through the latest Distimo app analytics and cuts right to the chase: "to reach the top 10 paid apps on the iOS store, an app needs 4,000 downloads per day, while earning a spot on the top grossing charts needs $47,000 per day." That's the dollars-and-cents potential of the app store. Start coding.

"Android Studio lets you easily add a cloud backend to your application, right from your IDE." Creating the service under Android Studio keeps your App Engine and application project code together. Sachin Kotwani walks you through the basic setup tasks.

ActionBarSherlock simplifies the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android through a single API. It uses the native ActionBar implementation on Android 4.0 or later and provides a custom implementation for previous versions which do not include ActionBar.