Welcome to the inaugural edition of Developer Week in Review, a look at some of the interesting, important or quirky news that transpired in the world of software development over the last seven days. Every Wednesday we’ll offer up a variety of items, carefully selected using our Perl-powered dartboard and Erlang-enabled Magic 8 Ball.
Is it already too late for Windows Phone 7?
Microsoft is making another try at a big kickoff for Windows Phone 7, after Windows Mobile 7 suffered an early demise. But with Android already the belle of the ball, as far as increasing market share, and the Blackberry and iPhone established market leaders, it’s unclear if there’s room in the market for another smartphone OS. On the other hand, there’s an awful lot of C# programmers out there that Microsoft can leverage. Microsoft is the only other player, apart from Apple, that has a good story for transferring skills between desktop development and mobile. Sorry Google, Android may run Java, but developing for Android is totally unlike developing any other kind of Java.
Don’t mess with patents in Texas
Score another victory for the Eastern Texas District Court, the most troll-happy district in the US. This time, it was Apple’s turn to pay the piper, laying out $625 million for patents related to their Cover Flow UI technology, among others. Will the last person to sue please turn off the courthouse?
Re-emerging language
Not what you normally think of when you talk about emerging languages, but Google added another language to their Google Translate stable this week … Latin. Now developers across the globe can class up their code with comments like Odi MEUM.
UDID angst
Are you an iPhone developer? Are you using the UDID (Unique Device ID) of the phone as a convenient way to register the user in your database? Well, some folks are getting a bit paranoid about how a UDID could be used to track someone in real time, and the number of apps that upload the UDID to servers. There’s probably a bit of mountain building going on about this molehill, since, among other things, applications wanting to use Apple’s Push Notification Service (the thing that makes your application display a badge) have to send the UDID to a third-party server to be processed.
That’s it for this week. Suggestions are always welcome, so please send tips or news here.