ReadWriteHack

Why Every New Android or iOs Feature Is an Opportunity for Facebook

Fredric Paul — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 07:00:00 -0700

From Google Events to the Nexus Q home entertainment device, Google announced some really cool new social-oriented mobile features and services on Wednesday at its Google I/O developers conference. Apple did much the same earlier this month at WWDC, its World Wide Developers Conference. Ironically, though, the more impressive the proprietary features they debut, the more both companies open new opportunities for their competitors.

The problem - the elephant in the room, really - is that the vast majority of these new features and services work only on one company’s operating system. Folks on competing platforms are effectively locked out.

For Google and Apple, that’s competitive differentiation, intended to get people to choose their platform over the competitors. And there’s little doubt that these features will do just that - at least to a point.

Social Features That Separate People

But for users, though, these mobile-social features create a big, unexpected problem. Instead of connecting people and groups, they can do the exact opposite - separate groups according to what device they use.

If anything, these proprietary social features create a huge opportunity for third-party alternatives - can you say Facebook? or Zynga? - that really do work cross-platform.

No matter how successful these efforts, it’s simply unrealistic to expect that one company’s set of features will be so amazing that everyone will instantly switch over. It’s not likely that any feature will be so powerful that it will overwhelm the competition.

Take the Nexus Q, for example. Forget the issue of the chaos that ensues with a bunch of drunk partiers all trying to use their phones to grab control of the music playing on the Q (AirPlay wars are already legendary as iPhone and iPad users fight over what music or video to stream onto an Apple TV). The big problem is what about folks who don't have that capability? Are they going to buy an Android device just to work with your Nexus Q and an iPhone to so they can play their music with their other best friend’s Apple TV?

Or are you supposed to restrict your parties and other events to people that use the same platform you do? After all, if they don’t have Android, will they still be able to fully access or contribute photos to Google+ Events? It seems like many of these features will be available over the Web (or eventually in some dumbed-down version for other devices), but that’s an increasingly secondary access medium. (Google revealed that more Google+ sessions already occur on mobile devices than on the desktop.)

A Business Problem, Too

You might think this would be less of an issue in a business setting - because companies can go much farther in controlling which platforms its employees use. But even corporate IT departments can’t enforce those same kinds of rules on customers, suppliers and partners.

When it comes to networked apps that derive their power from connecting with other people, no one vendor can win the feature wars, no matter how good their arsenal. If Google and Apple really want people to use their social apps, they can’t exclude people who won’t spend the big bucks on their devices. Unless and until Google - and Apple, and Microsoft, and BlackBerry, and everyone else - make a real effort to make their social innovations available across all the major platforms, these services will ultimately be self limited.

Can You Say Facebook?

If anything, these proprietary social features create a huge opportunity for third-party alternatives - can you say Facebook? or Zynga? - that really do work cross-platform. Even if these third-party services are not as powerful as the native versions from Google and Apple (heck, even if they’re crippled in some way), the fact that they work on all devices gives them a significant advantage.

Facebook’s push for HTML 5 and the mobile Web is all about trying to leverage this opening. The more that Google and Apple concentrate on delivering awesome features that work only their own platforms, the more users may be forced to exclude some of their friends. And it doesn't seem likely that the social trendsetters will be in a hurry to do that.

It’s wonderful that Google is coming up with all this great new stuff - and much of it is great. But when you get to social, it’s got to be cross platform or it’s doomed in the long run.

Google Play: Developers Make More From In-App Purchases Than App Sales

Mark Hachman — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 -0700

In 2012, developers using Google Play have pulled in more revenue from in-app purchases than from the sales of the apps themselves, a validation of the "freemium" model and digital purchases.

Google Play engineering director Brad Yerga disclosed the news in an afternoon session here at Google I/O, where Google announced it had surpassed 20 billion app downloads in total at its morning keynote. All told, there are more than 600,000 apps on the Play Store, with more than 1.5 billion downloads per month. Those figures still lag Apple, which claims that of the 650,000 separate apps included in its own app store, users have downloaded 30 billion.

But the real moneymaker, Yerga said, has been the "almost magic combination of carrier billing and in-app billing," Yerga said, that has appealed on an international level and revolutionized the way app developers make money.

"This has been a huge breakout for Google Play, for developers, but users have embraced it as well," Yerga said of the in-app purchase option.

Google announced the Google Play brand last year, which encompasses its app store, e-books, music and movies. Google's Android platform is also the world's largest in terms of smartphone market share, giving Play a proportionally large share of the world's consumers.

Although the United States still represents the largest market for Google Play app downloads, more and more overseas customers are downloading apps as Android aggressively expands overseas. About 67% of Google Play revenue comes from overseas markets, Yerga said; besides the United States, the largest Play markets are Japan, Korea, Germany and then France, he said.

From April 2011 through April 2012, app revenue from Japan and Korea increased fourteen-fold, he said. To drive this further, Google announced a new version of its app development console, which taps into Google Translate to automatically translate the description and name of an app into a foreign language, such as Korean.

Part of the reason for Google Play's international success has been embracing foreign purchasing customs. For example, customers in Japan and Korea virtually demand the ability to purchase real-world items from their phones, Yerga said.

Simply adding in-app purchases to the API has allowed developers to develop creative ways of monetizing their games, Yerga said, allowing so-called "freemium" and "paymium" models to succeed. For example, developer TinyCo., developer of "Tiny Village," said that Android delivered the most revenue per user of any app store, as users downloaded the free app, then purchased virtual items.

Another developer has begun offering a one-time, discounted upgrade to the full version of the app after the user plays a demonstration version for 30 minutes or so. And developers such as FarSight Studios have released "DLC packs" of new pinball tables for their app, Pinball Arcade.

The next chapter of Google Play's app monetization story will be subscriptions, allowing users to automatically charge their credit card for additional or supplemental content. "No matter what the game, you can still get the benefits of a subscription," Yerga said.

Apple has offered in-app subscriptions since February 2011.

Noteworthy Upcoming Big Data Conferences

David Strom — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:03:00 -0700

Big Data has had its marquee conferences with Strata and Structure, but there are several newer venues that you might want to consider, including two conferences coming up in St. Louis. If you are just getting started, or even if you are an old hand, these are great places to learn more about this fast-growing technology.

Strata is put on by O'Reilly twice a year and is held concurrently with Hadoop World in New York starting October 23. The basic pass is $900, but there are lots of add-ons and specialized tutorials. One of the keynotes is by Nora Denzel, who is Intuit's senior vice president for big data, social design and marketing. As in past events, there is a long list of vendors who will be participating.

StampedeCon claims its focus is "on the role of Big Data, its business value, potential cost savings, and Big Data use cases at Facebook, Nokia, Kraft Foods, Monsanto and more." It has more presentations from actual end users than vendors, unlike some of the other conferences. For example, Frank Cotignola, the consumer insights manager of Kraft Foods, will demonstrate how to use social media to research important brand topics and provide in-depth insights to new product development, segment analysis and broader topics that companies might not previously have had the funds to research. It is a single-day event on August 1 that is the least expensive of the conferences we've seen: A pass will run $250. (I'll also be speaking there.)

St. Louis will see another conference that isn't exclusive to Big Data but certainly will cover some of its technical underpinnings this fall with Strange Loop, starting on September 23. It is already sold out, but its previous sessions are well worth taking a look. We wrote about one session on NoSQL at last year's conference here.

Another Big Data conference worth checking out is mainly for government workers. It begins September 18 in Washington, D.C., and will cost at least $1,290 for a pass. Scheduled speakers include CIOs and CTOs from numerous three-lettered federal agencies, along with key vendor representatives.

And TDWI will be held starting July 29 in San Diego. It starts at $2,430 for a three-day pass and is run by computer publisher 1105 Media. There are numerous add-on tutorials and other pre- and post-conference sessions that can extend your Big Data learning experience to nearly a week and is co-located with a business intelligence conference, which seems like a natural combination.

Action Aims to Be the Heroku of Development Environments (Invitation Link Within)

Klint Finley — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:45:00 -0700

Local development environments can be a pain to set up by hand, despite ready-made deployment environments offered by platform-as-a-service providers. Meanwhile, programmers still need to keep project dependencies consistent between development systems. Installing a private PaaS like Cloud Foundry or OpenShift locally is an option even if you're not planning to deploy to those particular systems, but a new startup called Action wants to make it even easier.

Founders AJ Solimine, Arun Thampi and Peter Jihoon Kim founded the company to scratch their own itch. Solimine and Thampi worked together at Anideo, the mobile application company backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. There, they had a hard time keeping development environments consistent. "We kept running into situations where something would work on one machine but not the other," Solimine says. So they started a project to solve the problem. The result is Action, a fully hosted development environment. The team calls it a Heroku for development environments.

Action is more than just a cloud-hosted IDE like Cloud9 IDE. Action includes a full Unix-like environment for app development, complete with an in-browser shell. Action has its own IDE, or you can use VIM or eMacs in the shell. Eventually, Kim says, you'll be able to use your native desktop IDE or text editor and sync your project with Action. That means Action will be able to accommodate Visual Studio, Eclipse, Sublime text or whatever tools with which you feel comfortable.

Some other features in the pipeline include a one-click deploy option for cloud providers like Heroku and Engine Yard, and an add-on system that will allow developers to integrate services like Heroku PostGres or MongoHQ.

Pricing will be based on usage, typical of cloud services. The service is launching today in private beta. ReadWriteWeb readers who want an invitation to take an early look can sign up here. Invitations will roll out over the next few days.

Tell Your Children to Learn Hadoop

David Strom — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:02:00 -0700

It is time for your kids to start learning about Hadoop, the formless data repository that is the current favorite of many dot-coms and the darling of the data nerds. Indeed, the younger the better. The Hadoop ecosystem is a big tent and getting bigger.

To grok it, you have to cast aside several long-held tech assumptions. First, that you know what you are looking for when you build your databases: Hadoop encourages pack rats to store every log entry, every Tweet, every Web transaction, and other Internet flotsam and jetsam. The hope is that one day some user will come with a question that can't be answered in any way other than to comb through this morass. Who needs to spend months on requirements documents and data dictionaries when we can just shovel our data into a hard drive somewhere? Turns out, a lot of folks.

Think of Hadoop as the ultimate in agile software development: we don't even know what we are developing at the start of the project, just that we are going to find that proverbial needle in all those zettabytes.

Hadoop also casts aside the notion that we in IT have even the slightest smidgen of control over our "mission critical" infrastructure. It also casts aside that we turn to open-source code when we have reached a commodity product class that can support a rich collection of developers. That we need solid n.1 versions after the n.0 release has been debugged and straightened out. Versions that are offered by largish vendors that have inked deals with thousands of customers.

No, no, no and no. The IT crowd isn't necessarily leading the Hadooping of our networks. Departmental analysts can get their own datasets up and running, although you really need skilled folks who have a handle on the dozen or so helper technologies to make Hadoop truly useful. And Hadoop is anything but a commodity: There are at least eight different distributions with varying degrees of support and add-ons, including ones from its originators at Yahoo. And the current version? Try something like 0.2. Maybe this is an artifact of the open-source movement that loves those decimal points in their release versions. Another company released its 1.0 version last week, and they have been at it for several years.

And customers? Some of the major Hadoop purveyors have dozens, in some cases close to triple digits. Not exactly impressive, until you run down the list. Yahoo (which began the whole shebang as a way to help its now forlorn search engine) has the largest Hadoop cluster at more than 42,000 nodes. And I met someone else who has a mere 30-node cluster: He was confident by this time next year he would be storing a petabyte on several hundred nodes. That's a thousand terabytes, for those that aren't used to thinking of that part of the metric system. Netflix already has a petabyte of data on their Hadoop cluster, which they run on Amazon's Web Services. And Twitter, Facebook, eBay and other titans and dot-com darlings have similarly large Hadoop installations.

Three years ago I would have told you to teach your kids Wordpress, but that seems passé, even quaint now. Now even grade-school kids can set up their own blogs and websites without knowing much code at all, and those who are sufficiently motivated can learn Perl and PHP online. But Hadoop clearly has captured the zeitgeist, or at least a lot of our data, and it poised to gather more of it as time goes on. Lots of firms are hiring, too, and the demand is only growing.

Cloudera has some great resources to get you started from knowing nothing about it: they claim 12,000 people have watched or participated in their training sessions. You can start your engines here with a good video tutorial (registration required). And James Kobielus, now with IBM, goes into more detail in his blog post here about BigData skills that will be required in the near future.

Linus Torvalds' Obscene Rant Highlights Linux’s Hardware Woes

Brian Proffitt — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:17:00 -0700

In an expletive-laced video, Linux creator Linus Torvalds blasts hardware vendor Nvidia as “the single worst company we have ever dealt with,” in response to a question on Nvidia driver support in the Linux operating system.

The statement, posted to YouTube and making the rounds over the weekend, was made during an interview and audience Q&A session at Finland’s Aalto University, where Torvalds visited last week after co-receiving the prestigious Millennium Technology Award.

Responding to an audience member’s laments about Nvidia’s lack of support for Linux, Torvalds enthusiastically agreed with her concerns.

“I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I’m very happy to say that it’s the exception rather than the rule. And I’m also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we’ve had with hardware manufacturers. And that is really sad because Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android market, and Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with.

“So Nvidia? Fuck you!” Torvalds concluded, extending the middle-finger gesture right at the camera recording the event. To laughter and applause.

Nvidia’s reputation within the Linux community has never been well-regarded. Although the graphics processing company started providing Linux support for its devices as early as 1999, that support has often been haphazard in execution and never open, as the Linux development community would prefer.

In order for any particular hardware device to run on an operating system like Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, a hardware manufacturer must provide driver software that will enable developers to make their code communicate with the device. Because of its huge market share, Microsoft has very rarely had issues with hardware vendors not supplying drivers. Apple doesn’t have the problem because it controls the core hardware that runs OS X.

Linux's Longstanding Driver Issues

But Linux has always had problems with getting hardware vendors to provide proper - or sometimes any - driver support for their hardware, which Torvalds went on to detail after dinging Nvidia:

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that other companies are perfect, either. We have had companies that just don’t care. We’ve had companies that felt that Linux wasn’t a big enough market. We’ve had situations like that,” Torvalds told the crowded university classroom.

And those situations are plentiful. Gigabyte, for instance, once publicly responded that users running Linux on one of its motherboards and having problems with a certain power regression features should just quit Linux and install Windows instead.

That same forum on the Phoronix website recently posed the open question “Where Are the Biggest Problems With Linux?” and many of the responses still cite hardware driver difficulties as serious concerns.

In the case of Nvidia, the company does provide Linux drivers, but they are often maligned as broken. Emphasizing intellectual property and contractual concerns, Nvidia has released only the binary executable versions of these drivers, which makes it much harder to solve compatibility issues between driver and operating system.

This rankles Linux developers, who would prefer the actual driver source code in order to design better interfaces between OS and hardware.

It is not clear if the gap between Nvidia and Linux will be closed anytime soon. There are indications that the desktop market may be shrinking, and Linux’s market share on the desktop has always been very small. Given Torvalds' public treatment of Nvidia, it would not be terribly surprising to see the vendor simply wash its hands of Linux.

Servers to the Rescue?

What may prevent that is Nvidia’s line of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) for accelerated servers. Linux is still very large in the server market, and Nvidia might not want to cut itself off from that revenue stream just because of Torvalds' incendiary remarks.

Indeed, it is Linux’s strong presence in the server and cloud space that keeps hardware vendors interested in the operating system. Makers of desktop-specific hardware, on the other hand, may hear Torvalds' remarks and start to rethink their own commitments to Linux on the desktop. If that happens, we might see a lot more angry rants from Mr. Torvalds.

Retailer's Tax on IE 7 Users Opens New Front in Browser Wars

Brian Proffitt — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:45:00 -0700

When Australian retailer Kogan.com enacted a “tax” on customers using Internet Explorer 7 last week, it may not have been trying to become the poster child for worldwide Web-developer frustration with Microsoft browsers. But the stunt seems to have tapped into a seething undercurrent of animosity for Internet Explorer that could bring new combatants to the ongoing browser wars.

What Is an IE Tax?

Russell Kogan, owner of the Kogan.com site, announced the 6.8% surcharge Wednesday for any goods purchased on Kogan.com by users still surfing with IE 7. Kogan’s admonishment was tongue-in-cheek, but his motivation was based on serious economic considerations.

“The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined. One of the things stopping that is our Web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7,” Kogan wrote.

Kogan’s post, and the message dialog that pops up for users who arrive at the site using IE 7, make it very clear that all that’s needed to avoid the “tax” is a simple upgrade to a newer version of IE - or another browser altogether. But his call for even lighthearted punitive action is underpinned by a very real issue that seems to be gaining traction within Web development circles: a deep and abiding loathing for any version of Internet Explorer.

Why Developers Won’t Support IE Anymore

This hatred of IE is starting to manifest in wholesale rejection of the browser, as many developers begin to refuse to support IE features on their websites. In most cases, the reason is the time and effort that has to be invested to properly deal with IE’s nonstandard ways of rendering Web pages.

Greek Web developer Lea Verou eloquently described the magnitude of the problem last Fall:

“If we choose to make a website pixel-perfect in Internet Explorer 6 to 8, then we are doing up to 100% more work. No matter how many frameworks, polyfills and other scripts we use to ease our pain, we will always be doing at least 30% more work for those browsers,” Verou wrote. “How many of us actually charge 30-100% extra for this work?”

Verou’s solution to the problem of dealing with IE Web development is to actually tack on a surcharge of her own.

IE 7 Costs Developers Money

“I don’t do much client work these days, but every time I’ve taken on a client project in my career, I’ve always presented options for browser support to my client. They want pixel perfection in IE 7? It will cost them more. They want IE 6 support? It will cost double,” she wrote.

Some Web developers have gone even further. Toronto-based startup 4ormat outright refuses to let any IE user sign in to their site. Co-founder Tyler Rooney outlined the online portfolio service provider’s 2008 decision to block IE this past April, citing Verou’s earlier estimates of the effort needed for IE Web development:

“Within a week it was painfully obvious that for every great idea we came up with we had to create equally terrible hacks to support IE7 or even IE8. Supporting variants of IE can easily increase design work by 30% to 100%, but complex features can easily double (or even triple) development time. It doesn’t take many developer salaries before this ‘IE tax’ can cost you well over $100,000,” Rooney wrote this spring.

Not unexpectedly, Rooney was generally positive about Kogan.com’s IE “tax.”

“I think Kogan’s decision is definitely a novel way to educate their customers about the perils of using an out-of-date Web browser,” Rooney commented in an email today.

“When we decided to not support any version of Internet Explorer back in 2008 it was a simple business decision. Not supporting browsers which our target market weren’t even using enabled us to ship a better product in a shorter period of time,” Rooney added. “Kogan mentioned that he doesn’t expect anyone to pay the tax so I’d suspect that their decision won’t have much of an effect on revenue. Kogan probably also came to the same conclusion that we did about all the other benefits that come with not supporting out-of-date browsers: huge productivity gains, shorter release cycles and happier employees.”

Good News for Chrome and Firefox?

If this sentiment against IE continues to gain traction, Microsoft could be facing a sharper migration away from one of its flagship products to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

It’s clear that the browser wars of old are taking a very new turn: Web developers are no longer rolling over and letting a single vendor dictate how websites are put together. Real standards, not just ones for which Microsoft lobbies, seem to be the order of the day.

And if developers aren’t satisfied with a browser, they are now unafraid to fight back.

The 6 Best Ways to Run Microsoft's .NET in the Cloud

Klint Finley — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:30:00 -0700

In programming circles, there’s been a steady emphasis on platforms that support Ruby, Python and Node.js - and not as much attention paid to Microsoft .NET platform providers. That’s a real oversight given the enduring popularity of Microsoft languages.

For example, since Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010, it has become the poster child of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers. Whenever a new PaaS launches, it gets called “the Heroku of X.” Before that, the comparison of choice was Google App Engine. Those honors are somewhat deserved, since those two services did practically invent the PaaS category as we know it.

But the .NET platform remains important, so let’s take a look at the options for running .NET applications in the cloud.

Windows Azure

Microsoft Windows Azure has been getting more attention lately for its efforts in open source than for its roots as a .NET PaaS. Microsoft has made PHP a first-class citizen on Azure, and has been porting Node.js to Windows specifically so it can run in the Azure environment. And last week’s announcement of Linux support on Azure infrastructure-as-a-service makes the fact that it can still run .NET applications almost an afterthought. Still, with "tens of thousands" of users and the legacy of being the service from the company that invented .NET, Azure remains the most obvious choice for a public .NET PaaS. But there are, of course, other options.

Tier 3

Tier 3, which launched in 2006, was originally an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, but it added a PaaS service called Web Fabric last month. Tier 3 also develops a fork of VMware’s PaaS Cloud Foundry called Iron Foundry, which adds support for .NET to the existing open source platform and can be used for private clouds. Web Fabric is still relatively new, but it’s based on an open source platform. By building on Cloud Foundry, Tier 3 has created a polyglot platform that supports all the languages the original projects support, including Java, Ruby and Node.js. You can find the source code on Github.

AppHarbor

AppHarbor, which launched last year, is a slightly more established public .NET PaaS running on Amazon Web Services infrastructure with support for Git, (including Github for Windows) and Mercurial. One big differentiator for the company is the built-in support for unit tests. Developers just upload their code, and any unit tests included are automatically run.

“Generally most of the PaaS environments run in a way that you could add that capability, but it is a lot of work,” Tier 3 developer and PaaS enthusiast Adron Hall told ReadWriteWeb via email. “With AppHarbor a developer doesn’t even need to click a button to turn it on. I’m personally a HUGE fan of the fact that they do this.”

Uhuru

Uhuru is another newcomer, founded by former Microsoft executives. Like Tier 3, the company is running its own Cloud Foundry-based .NET PaaS called Uhuru.NET Services for Cloud Foundry. The source is on Github.

Apprenda

Apprenda was probably the first private .NET PaaS and sells a proprietary enterprise version along with a free-as-in-beer “express” version. In addition to running as a private PaaS, Apprenda can sync with Azure to enable a hybrid cloud environment.

Moncai

As of this writing Moncai hasn’t launched yet, but it does have a beta invite sign-up. The company bills itself as a .Net/Mono PaaS with support for both Git and Mercurial. It’s the only PaaS we’re aware of with Mono support.

Disclosure: Apprenda, Heroku, Tier 3 and VMware Cloud Foundry are among the sponsors of DeployCon, which paid Klint Finley’s travel expenses to moderate a panel.

Ladies Learning Code Team Aims to Fix Programmer Education - One City at a Time

Klint Finley — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 05:12:00 -0700

Heather Payne wanted to learn to code. She worked in marketing for a large company and wanted to learn to make websites on her own, but she didn’t have any support network: No developer friends to give her advice on what language to use. No one to recommend specific books or tutorials. No one to ask for help along the way. So she gave up.

Then during a business trip to Los Angeles in 2011, she stumbled onto a PyLadies workshop on the Python programming language. “It was such a supportive atmosphere,” Payne says. “I always felt dumb asking questions at other places, but at PyLadies, you can ask any question you want and no one makes you feel stupid.”

When Payne returned home to Toronto, she tweeted about her experience at PyLadies and suggested that Toronto needed a similar workshop series. The idea had legs: She received a flood of retweets, and more than 80 people showed up at the first planning meeting - including several developers willing to teach classes. Thus Ladies Learning Code was born.

The project was immensely successful: The monthly workshops filled up so fast, the organizers had to start offering classes twice monthly. Almost 2,000 women have completed Ladies Learn Code workshops, and more than 400 developers have signed up for the volunteer mailing list. Payne says there’s never been a shortage of volunteer teachers. “There’s not that many ways for developers to give back to the community that take advantage of their skills but aren’t just unpaid freelance work,” Payne explains. “A lot of people jump at the chance to do something like this.”

Enroll in HackerYou

Now Payne, along with Breanna Hughes, Laura Plant and Melissa Crnic - the other three women behind the nonprofit Ladies Learning Code - are starting HackerYou, a for-profit company that will teach classes on design and development. Payne says that although Ladies Learn Code has been self-funding, it’s not enough to turn the project into a full-time job for any of HackerYou’s founders. In order to take the project to a the next level, and keep paying the rent, they had to start a for-profit company.

HackerYou will bring the same model used by Ladies Learning Code to its students, and all of its teachers have experience as volunteers for the nonprofit. HackerYou is guaranteeing a 10:1 student to teacher ratio, and is making project-based learning the core of its curriculum. But instead of single-day workshops, which Ladies Learning Code will continue to offer, HackerYou will offer ongoing courses. And while Ladies Learning Code has always allowed men to participate, the new company is expressly open to men. The first course will focus on Web development and will convene in Toronto, but Payne says the team plans to offer courses in other cities, both in Canada and the United States.

A university alternative

As to the need of a private alternative to the university system, Payne points to a survey finding high demand for software developers from startups. A paper presented at the European Conference on Information Systems in 2009 confirms the need for information technology workers, even in a down economy.

Still, a 2008 study found that enrollment in university computer science programs in all but one Canadian region was actually down between 36% and 64% from its peak in 2002.

Computer science education has its issues in the U.S., as well. The University of Florida planned to cut its computer science department, and though the most drastic version of that plan has since been withdrawn, students and faculty are still fight to save the department.

Regardless of what you think of the merits of universal code literacy, HackerYou and similar programs in other cities - such as Code Academy in Chicago, General Assembly in New York City and Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco - have an opportunity to help close the talent gap.

A talent gap - and a gender gap

But Payne thinks HackerYou also has an advantage in being able to close the gender gap. The European Conference on Information Systems paper notes that women are tremendously under represented in the IT industry, and as ReadWriteWeb has pointed out, this gap starts in education. Payne thinks the fact that the company’s founders are women, along with the collective experience they bring to the table from Ladies Learning Code, will help HackerYou reach a 50/50 gender split - a ratio unheard of in male-dominated university computer science programs.

(If you want to learn code and don’t live near of the cities mentioned above, you can check out services such as Codecademy, as well as the wealth of free e-books on programming available on the Web.)

5 Ways to Tell Which Programming Languages are Most Popular

Klint Finley — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:02:00 -0700

Are older programming languages like Java and Perl giving way to newer languages like Python and Ruby? Is HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript overtaking Flash and/or native mobile application development? Do Microsoft’s languages still have a large developer following, even as Microsoft promotes other languages as first-class citizens on platforms such as Windows 8 and Azure? Finding the answer to these questions can be harder than you think.

In many cases, of course, the popularity of a given programming language may not matter. Many programmers try to use the best tool for the job, or when in doubt, use what they know best. But sometimes language popularity does matter:

Companies deciding what language to use for greenfield projects. Attracting skilled developers can be difficult, so using languages that developers like and that lots of developers know can be helpful.
Although learning a language for the sheer joy of it is great, many developers want to focus on learning marketable skills. Knowing what employers are looking for is helpful.
Educators may want to avoid focusing on languages with shrinking usage, both to boost the employability of their students and to gain the largest pool of support from other developers.

There’s no definitive source of information on programming language usage and popularity, but looking at a cross-section of data sources can offer some ideas about overall trends, in terms of popularity with developers and popularity with employers.

1. StackExchange and Github

In 2010, Drew Conway and John Myles White had the idea of ranking programming languages by the number of projects in Github and the number of questions in StackOverflow and found that the results of the two sources were highly correlated. The developer-centric IT analyst firm RedMonk latched on to the idea and has continued collecting data from Github and StackOverflow to track language popularity. The most recent results, from February, are shown above.

Pros: This method draws on two different data sources, and reflects what developers choose to use on their own projects.

Cons: Because Github houses so many personal projects, these results don’t necessarily reflect what developers are actually being paid to use. Github may also favor newer languages, since many of the older projects using tried-and-true languages such as Java and Perl are still hosted at Sourceforge, Apache and elsewhere. Also, a high number of StackOverflow questions may be more of a reflection of the complexity of a language rather than its popularity. It may also skew toward newer languages that developers may have more questions about. And yes, perhaps RedMonk could have integrated Bitbucket projects into these rankings, as well.

2. Hacker News Survey

In April, a Hacker News user posted a reader poll asking “What’s your favorite programming language?” The results actually map pretty well to the RedMonk findings, though it’s surprising just how far ahead Python was in relation to everything else. Here are the top 20 as of June 4:

Python (3,054)
Ruby (1,723)
JavaScript (1,415)
C (970)
C# (829)
PHP (666)
Java (551)
C++ (529)
Haskell (519)
Clojure (459)
CoffeeScript (362)
Objective C (326)
Lisp (322)
Perl (311)
Scala (233)
Scheme (190)
Other (188)
Erlang (162)
Lua (145)
SQL (101)

Lisp, Scheme and Clojure have a combined 971 votes, which together would put Lisp just ahead of C. And combining CoffeeScript with JavaScript would put the two languages together just ahead of Ruby, though still far behind Python.

Pros: The poll explicitly asks about favorite programming languages, making this one of the best sources of information developers' preferences. It’s also a pretty big sample.

Cons: Hacker News may not be representative of developers in general, and the sample wasn’t controlled. And its primary strength is also a weakness: It obviously doesn’t reflect what’s actually being used in production, just favorites.

3. Dice.com Job Listings

The above metrics don’t necessarily reflect real-world usage, though many corporations do use Github and many professionals ask questions on StackOverflow. To get a better reflection of where the paid programming jobs are, looking at job postings may be your best bet. Last year, Dennis B. Moore shared stats he collected from Dice.com on the number of job listings for various tech skills, including programming and markup languages and frameworks. Moore hasn’t posted an update, but here’s a current look at the search terms that Moore used previously, with the percentage change over last year:

Java 17,599 (+8.96%)
XML 10,780 (+11.70%)
JavaScript 10,738 (+11.64%)
HTML 9,587 (-1.53%)
C# 9,293 (+17.04%)
C++ 6,439 (+7.55%)
AJAX 5,142 (+15.81%)
Perl 5,107 (+3.21%)
PHP 3,717 (+23%)
Python 3,456 (+32.87%)
Ruby 2,141 (+39.03%)
HTML5 2,035 (+276.85%)
Flash 1,261 (+95.2%)
Silverlight 865 (-11.91%)
COBOL 656 (-10.75%)
Assembler 209 (-1.42%)
PowerBuilder 126 (-18.71%)
FORTRAN 45 (-33.82%)

PHP has impressive growth, but not as impressive as Python (which is now nearly as popular on Dice.com) and Ruby. Flash had a huge comeback, but HTML5 has surpassed both Flash and Objective C in demand. Legacy languages including COBOL and FORTRAN look like they’re finally starting to be replaced.

Since I’m not sure how Moore made his selections, and he included several keywords that aren’t programming languages, here are the top 18 from the Hacker News poll (minus C, which is hard to search for, and “other”) ranked by Dice.com search results:

SQL (26,221)
Java (17,599)
JavaScript (10,738)
C# (9,293)
C++ (6,439)
Perl (5,107)
PHP (3,717)
Python (3,456)
Ruby (2,141)
Objective C (824)
Scala (151)
Scheme (226)
CoffeeScript (63)
Erlang (48)
Lua (48)
Lisp (27)
Clojure (25)
Haskell (16)

SQL is over-represented here because of listings for system and database administrators. Scheme is also over represented, since many of the references to the word “scheme” don’t actually refer to the language.

Pros: These results are more indicative of what’s actually being used in “the real world” than other metrics.

Cons: As such, it doesn’t reflect programmers' preference. Also, these search results are not direct representation of what’s actually being used. Further, Dice.com may not be reflective of the overall market.

4. Programming Book Sales

One interesting metric that intersects with both personal interest and corporate use is the sale of books on programming languages. As ReadWriteWeb’s Joe Brockmeier reported in April, Mike Hendrickson from O'Reilly posted data from the company’s book sales a few months ago, and the results are intriguing. As with the RedMonk rankings, the O'Reilly rankings break down into distinct tiers. The 11 most popular languages form the top tier, which Hendrickson calls “Large” programming languages:

Java
JavaScript
C#
Objective C
C++
PHP
VBA
Python
SQL
ActionScript

Ruby and Perl fall into the second tier, referred to as “major” languages.

Pros: Developers buy books for both pleasure and work, so these numbers could reflect a sweet spot between business and pleasure.

Cons: May skew against older languages like Perl, about which fewer new books may be published. This ranking also doesn’t factor in other publishers that may sell more books on particular languages.

5. Google Search Queries

TIOBE’s index is based on Google search trends on specific language names, plus the keyword “programming” (ex, “ruby programming,” “java programming”). ReadWriteWeb readers have said what they think of these ratings before (note: Your fellow readers are not impressed at with TIOBE.), so they’re included here only for the sake of completion. The May rankings don’t fit well with any of the data looked at here, with both Python and Ruby dropping in popularity.

Pros: ?

Cons: These results don’t reflect what developers like or use, just what terms people are searching for. Can be skewed by developers searching for more specific information (such as jQuery or Node.js instead of “JavaScript”).

Conclusions

Java is still top dog, and developers don’t seem to completely hate it, though it’s sure not their favorite. C and C++ remain popular, both with developers and employers. Python and C# also provide a good trade-off in terms of popularity with developers and employer demand.

Developers may love Lua and Lisp-y languages, but they don’t appear to have much mainstream use. Scala may be a better bet among functional/multiparadigm languages, at least in terms of employment opportunities.

Meanwhile, JavaScript remains wildly popular both in actual use and developer enthusiasm.

New Pipl API Pulls in a Staggering - and Creepy - Amount of People Data Into Your Apps

Klint Finley — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 -0700

People search engine Pipl's people search API is now out of beta and open to all developers. The API can be used to bring a variety of information about an individual, from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to government resources like the United States Patent and Trademark Office and county clerk offices, into any application.

Customer ID, Social Context and CRM

Pipl’s Chief Revenue Officer Jonathan N. Schreiber says the API could be used for customer identification or verification, or to add social context to applications, such as customer relation management (CRM) systems. In this way, Pipl will compete with people-data providers like Rapleaf, which powers services like Rapportive. But it’s a flexible API and could be used in a number of unforeseen ways.

The API, built using Mashery’s platform, is designed to let developers use the GET command to retrieve Pipl’s search results in JSON on XML format, says Schreiber. Developers can specify a specific type of info they want, such as a mailing address, or just the full search results. The results are time-stamped and include a score that reflects how confident the Pipl service is that it has the right person.

Much of the data that Pipl finds is not normally accessible through Web searches but is still publicly available. According to Schreiber, Pipl uses only publicly available, non-logged-in information and respects robots.txt instructions to avoid the collection of information that’s not meant to be crawlable.

Schreiber describes Pipl as a “real search engine,” not a metasearch engine. It doesn’t query each source for each search - it has already crawled and indexed all of this information. Pipl also performs recursive searches: Once it finds an email address associated with a person, it goes back and uses it to find more profiles and information associated with that email address.

Creepy or Not, Here It Comes

This may sound a bit creepy, but Schreiber also says that although Pipl will try to determine an individual’s email addresses, the search engine will never return email address results to users. In fact, Pipl may actually prove useful in cleaning up online profiles by exposing old profiles and information.

Nevertheless, services like Pipl and other people data search engines like Spokeo have proven controversial. See ReadWriteWeb’s recent post: Here Are 20 Companies Who Sell Your Data (& How To Stop Them). While there are plenty of innocent uses for an API like this, it’s not hard to imagine developers using this API to do some unsettling things.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

MIT Brain Who Beat the Casinos Launches Service to Quantify Developer Performance

Klint Finley — Thu, 31 May 2012 11:30:00 -0700

Jeff Ma, the MIT blackjack team member who served as the inspiration for Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House and the film 21, gave developers at the Atlassian Summit a glimpse of his new stealth startup: TenXer.

TenXer is a tool for measuring employee performance, and is now available as a plugin for Atlassian’s bug-tracking tool JIRA via the relaunched Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian makes a variety of tracking, collaboration and software development products.

Using the JIRA plugin, development teams can track their metrics and see a performance dashboard. This appears to be the first public release of TenXer, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible outside of JIRA yet.

Ma and his fellow MIT students earned big bucks with their card counting system in the 1990s, but were eventually banned from just about every blackjack table in the country. Since then, Ma has occupied his time founding companies like PROTRADE and Citizen Sports, which sold to Yahoo in 2010. He’s also been giving talks on teamwork at various conferences.

In his keynote at Atlassian Summit, Ma explained that he noticed that successful individuals and teams, from athletes to businesses, quantify their performance and measure progress toward specific goals. That led him to found TenXer to create a system tracking employee performance. To this end, the TenXer plugin for JIRA measures metrics - such as bugs closed, bugs fixed and work logged - to help quantify developer performance. The name TenXer comes from the idea that “great employees are 10x better than the average.”

According to Business Insider, Niel Robertson, co-founder of Trada, is also a co-founder of TenXer. AngelList cites David Jeske as an investor.

The Atlassian Marketplace is an app-store style service for purchasing and installing plugins and integrations for Atlassian products. It was formerly known as Atlassian Plugin Exchange and was relaunched today at the summit.

Sign o' the Times: IBM, SAP Now Support Microsoft's Standardization Move

Scott M. Fulton — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:51:00 -0700

It's perhaps the one way that database interaction can work reliably using any format, any server and any client on the Web today. It happens to be a protocol created by Microsoft. But in a symbol of how Microsoft is now perceived today as just another major player instead of a dominant force, the leading platform makers are joining Microsoft in a formal move to standardize OData, the Open Data Protocol. The reason Microsoft and IBM are no longer fighting over this? The real competition is no longer just amongst these old-line technology companies, but largely between them and a new breed of competitors often based around new mobile devices and consumer platforms.

Nearly six years ago one of the most bitter standards battles in all of computing was fought between OASIS, caretaker of the OpenDocument format, and Microsoft. The issue was whether, by making the document formats for Microsoft Office available as open standards, the company was unfairly leveraging Office's broad base of installation to unseat its only real competitor, the storage format behind OpenOffice.

That year, 2006, marked the turning point in Microsoft's public stance towards openness and interoperability. This despite bitter opposition led by IBM, which was working to resurrect the Symphony brand it had acquired through Lotus. IBM argued that Microsoft was undermining the standards process to suit its purposes. Just how much the computing environment has changed since then was made evident today as IBM (whose heart grew three sizes this day) joined with SAP and Citrix in backing a move by Microsoft to declare the OData HTTP-based database interaction prototol - also known as Open Data Protocol - an OASIS standard.

"OData is an application-level protocol for interacting with data via RESTful Web services," reads a white paper on an OData extension for XML published by OASIS (PDF available here). "An OData Service’s contract is defined by simple, well-defined conventions and semantics applied to the data model exposed by the service, providing a high level of semantic interoperability between loosely coupled clients and services."

Phrasing data in XML, ATOM or JSON format does allow it to be visible to many different database engines. They can see data in these formats, so that's not the problem. Essentially, how does a Web client (any browser on any device) request data from any server (any database engine or framework), and then initiate a dialog with that server so it can update or change one or more records? Remember, HTTP is a stateless protocol: Clients make GET requests and the occasional POST statement, and servers acknowledge and, when they can, comply.

So OData enables communication using any of these three formats for data expression, setting up the mechanism for clients to authenticate themselves and enter into a secure dialog. It already works. And as IBM discovered two years ago, OData was pretty much the only way of creating a single Web client for WebSphere data that worked with .NET, AJAX and PHP clients.

While an XML document contains the body of data, expressed explicitly within the markup, OData expresses the schema - the arrangement and relations between data in a database. It also allows for vendor-specific properties that enable features that one vendors database might utilize while another's does not, though these properties are typically flagged within the metadata using obvious vendor-specific tags; for example, sap:filterable.

Writing on behalf of the OData organization today, Microsoft's senior program manager for OData Alex James said today, "With interoperability front and center in OData we saw more and more technology stacks that started to work with it. Now there are a number of companies that use OData in their products to ensure the data they manage is easily accessible beyond the boundaries of their applications. Many of these companies regularly collaborate on the ongoing design effort for OData. While so far we’ve run the OData design process as transparently as we could (sharing designs, taking feedback through the odata.org blog and distribution list, etc.), we are at a point where the level of adoption and the scale at which organizations are betting on OData require a more formal commitment to shared ownership of the design of this protocol."

It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that Microsoft and IBM are “joining forces,” in coalition against a common enemy. The facts are more economic than melodramatic: Waging platform wars, especially over something that should be as ubiquitous as data exchange, costs way too much money. While the Open Office XML/OpenDocument fracas generated plenty of headlines and even sparked a few campaign rallies, it was a drain on both sides’ resources at a time when the platforms supporting both standards – client-side applications – were starting to become obsolete anyway. The fact of the matter is, OData works, and creating a competing format just to rally the troops and produce headlines is a waste of time and money. It’s best that companies pick their battles more wisely. What’s more, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP alike have come to the realization – perhaps a mutual one – that the best platforms are never islands unto themselves.

IBM sign by Simon Greig.

A Utility That Makes You Master of the Twitterverse

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 23 May 2012 07:32:00 -0700

You can do a lot more with Twitter than the official Web, mobile and desktop clients allow. To do it, though, you'll need to access Twitter's API — or use a tool that digs deeper into the API than the usual clients. If you're comfortable with a command line interface, or willing to learn how to use one, t gives you simple, fine-grained control over your Twitter stream.

The one-letter Ruby gem, t, is written by Erik Michaels-Ober. The source is available on GitHub, or you can just grab it using Ruby's gem install command. Ruby is on most *nix type systems by default (Linux distributions, Mac OS X) but Windows users will need to download the installer to get started.

After you've installed the t gem, you'll need to authorize it. You can use it without getting API access, but then you're limited to 150 requests per hour, and you can't use t to post a Twitter message or make changes to your account.

Using t

To see all of the commands available via t, just run t help. You'll find that t supports more than 40 commands, or tasks as its documentation calls them. The syntax is simple: t followed by the task name, and any options and arguments.

For example, you can use t to get all of the followers for an account by running t followers username. Note that you don't need to include the @ in front of a username.

Many of the commands are mundane operations that you can do with any Twitter client. For example, posting a status update or following another user. Running t update "message goes here" will post an update, running t follow username will follow the user that you specify, and so on.

If you're a command-line diehard, then you might prefer using t for those operations. But its real value is in doing things you can't do with most Twitter clients. Want to see a list of users who follow you but whom you don't follow? Run t groupies. You can also use that command to check on other users, t groupies username.

The most interesting thing about t is that it works well with other *nix commands. For example, you can create a list (t list create listname) and add all users who are followed by another user (t followings user | xargs t list add listname. That's just a small sample. You can use any of the standard *nix utilities with t, like uniq, which might be useful in generating lists of users to follow by examining users that other people follow (and much more).

You may bump up against arbitrary limits when adding people to lists and such. According to the Twitter API docs, you can only add 100 users at a time to a list, and a list can only have 500 users. When I tested the limit, though, I was able to add 195 users to a list with one shot. The operation failed (sort of) when I tried to add another large chunk of users (more than 400), leaving my list with 582 members. To put it another way, trial and error is called for.

Some of the t commands also support a --csv option, which you can use to dump output to a comma-separated value file and then import it into a spreadsheet.

The Bad

While t has a lot to offer, it also has a few problems. First and foremost, a few commands don't quite work. For instance, the t stream timeline command is supposed to provide an on-going stream of your timeline. It provides the first 20, and then errors out. The "matrix" command, likewise, returns an error. The "trends_locations" task doesn't seem to be implemented at all, as it returns a "could not find task 'trends_locations'" error.

The error messages, in general, are pretty minimal. You may be notified "too many terms specified in query" for instance - but no information on what part(s) of a command succeeded or failed. I've seen a few operations that appeared to mostly succeed, like adding users to a list, but received an error notice. When that happens, it's not trivial to figure out what worked.

Sparse documentation is another problem. Many of the commands have options that are not well-explained. You may need to go spelunking through the code to see what options are available.

Finally, it's pretty easy to hit Twitter's rate limit. Twitter has an hourly limit of 350 requests per hour with an authenticated client. You can bump up against the limit if, for example, you try to request a list of all users for an account with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Note: If you wish to check on your current rate limit, use t rate_limit. You'll see the current limit (should be 350) and how many remaining hits you have, and the time your limit will be reset.

For the most part, though, t works quite well and provides a great way to do more with Twitter than the usual clients allow. If you're doing more than idle chit-chat on Twitter, take a look at t.

Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy

Dan Rowinski — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:30:00 -0700

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.

What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they've never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM's Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.

Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don't know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn't read or write 200 years ago.

300 years ago, Bishay said, "you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane." Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.

The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled "Please Learn to Code," came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise.

“I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they're computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.”

Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they'd have vastly more successful careers.”

Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.

Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat - I'd learn the local language posthaste.

At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There's little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.

Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

Google Easy Dashboard Library Makes Using Analytics API Easier

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:30:00 -0700

Google has long provided an API for automating Google Analytics, but it required developers to jump through a few more hoops than many would like. Yesterday, the company announced its Easy Dashboard Library, which should let developers speed up custom-tailored dashboards and reports.

Prior to the library, getting things out of the Google Analytics API wasn't a trivial process. According to the post announcing the feature, developers had to learn the API, then figure out how to handle authorization, and then meld the data with another visualization library. Fun for some developers, but definitely not speedy. And when has management ever said "we'd really like a better dashboard for our Web traffic, but take as long as you like to come up with it"? Right, so something better was obviously needed.

The Easy Dashboard Library

Google worked with students at the University of California, Irvine to come up with something better. The Easy Dashboard Library has three basic steps: Set up API access with an OAuth 2.0 client ID; copy and paste some code; and configure the code to query data and select your chart type.

The post from Google demonstrates how to create a quick-and-dirty chart for pageviews, visits and visitors over the last 30 days. You can test out a demo on Google Code, where the library lives.

Developers have the option of using line, bar, pie, table or column charts. The demo shows a pretty simple query, but developers can set queries using all kinds of dimensions and metrics supported by the Core Reporting API. It looks like developers can also use the data with another chart API if they prefer.

If you still don't think it's quite easy enough to use or would like to see additional features, you may be in luck. Google is planning to work with another group of students at the university for the next three quarters. The main goal is simplifying the library, but Google is also encouraging feedback via the Google Group for the Easy Dashboard Library.

Given the prevalence of Google Analytics, this should be good news for a lot of developers. It should also make custom dashboards more accessible even to more casual users, who might not have been eager to spend the time needed to get up to speed with the Analytics API but can ramp up pretty quickly with the Easy Dashboard Library. If you've taken a stab at using it, or have any recommendations for working with Analytics data, let us know in the comments.

Why Is Microsoft Trying to Hobble Firefox on Windows 8 Tablets - and Why Does It Matter?

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:00 -0700

As Windows 8 approaches, Mozilla developers have been working hard on a Metro version. If you're using Windows 8 on the desktop, no problem. Tablet users, however, are going to be denied a fully functional Firefox - and will face restrictions on many other third-party applications. In the name of security, Microsoft is forcing them into a "sandbox" on ARM devices. The lockdown renegs on the company's prior promises, and it's going to have some far-reaching effects on many applications.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler touched on this issue yesterday, saying that Microsoft "is trying to lock out competing browsers when it comes to Windows running on ARM chips." But it actually goes farther than that.

Microsoft is restricting access to some APIs on ARM-architecture devices that are, as Dotzler says, "absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won't give to other browsers so there's no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance."

Dotzler is focused on the implications of Microsoft's win32 API restrictions on ARM because they affect Firefox. This makes sense because Dotzler works for Mozilla and focuses on Firefox in general, not to mention Microsoft's long history of anticompetitive behavior towards third-party browsers. Make no mistake, though: Limiting access to the win32 APIs is likely to impact many other applications as well. How can LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice compete with Microsoft Office if they're shut out of the win32 APIs?

In the Name of Malware

Microsoft is getting cut a lot of slack for its anticompetitive stance, because it is casting the anti-features for developers in the name of "protecting users from malware." It's OK if Microsoft cuts off competing applications at the knees, because it's trying to prevent malware.

Leaving aside Microsoft's intentions - perhaps it truly is motivated only by the best interests of users - this argument fails on a number of levels. First, it assumes that Microsoft's own applications won't be exploitable. Given Microsoft's history with security, this isn't likely. Why does Microsoft get the assumption of secure applications, while third parties do not?

And let's not forget who got us to this juncture in the first place. Microsoft users have been worn down by more than a decade of security issues that trace back to Microsoft itself. Microsoft is essentially using its own failings to excuse its blocking of third-party apps that may well have better security than its own applications.

Sandboxing third-party apps into limited parts of the machine does nothing to ensure that Microsoft's own browser won't be ownable by malware. Since Internet Explorer code isn't open source, security researchers can't audit the code directly. Firefox, which can be independently audited, won't be available on the new ARM tablets.

Why Not Complain About Apple?

Some folks have tried to dismiss complaints about Microsoft's ARM policies by pointing at Apple. Since Apple also discriminates against developers on iOS, why shouldn't Microsoft?

Yes, Apple's iOS developer policies suck, but they've sucked since the operating system's inception. What's more, there's little chance that Apple is going to change its policies unless users start abandoning iOS, or there's some sort of legal interference. Given that it'd be hard to make a case that Apple has a monopoly, legal interference seems unlikely.

That doesn't mean that third parties should just shrug their shoulders and accept the same treatment from Microsoft. If Microsoft is successful in the tablet market, ceding the Windows 8 ARM tablets is going to be a big loss for third parties. Loss of one platform is difficult, but being shut out of two tablet platforms in a three-horse race is going to spell major problems for Mozilla.

Dotzler distinquishes between a tablet OS and a general-purpose OS, though. Right now, at least, iOS is just for phones and tablets. Firefox can still compete with Safari on Mac OS X. Whether the distinction really makes sense, I'm not sure, given iOS' dominance on tablets so far.

But Windows 8 is not tablet-only. As Dotzler points out, tablets may be a "tiny sliver" of the PC universe now, but if you're looking ahead, that's not going to be the case in a few years. "ARM will be migrating to laptop PCs and all-in-one PCs very quickly," he says. "If you read Microsoft's blog posts about Windows on ARM, you'll see that they expect ARM PCs to cover the whole spectrum. ARM chips are already being used in servers. This is not a tablet-only concern."

Tablets and Tightening

If trends continue, users will do much more computing on their tablets and phones in the future. Even if this was a tablet-only issue, it'd be worth standing against. The amount of lockdown being exhibited on tablets is troubling, to say the least.

Giving Microsoft (or Apple) so much control over what applications run on their platforms is not good for developers or users. It should be assumed that users have control over their computing devices, and that means having the option to choose their own applications for Web browsing and everything else.

It's not at all puzzling that Mozilla is complaining about being shut out of Windows 8 tablets. What's puzzling is how many developers and industry pundits are willing to give Microsoft a pass.

US Government Has More "Big Data" Than It Knows What to Do With

Scott M. Fulton — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:29:00 -0700

It's a valid question: "Why has all the data the government has been collecting turned out to be too big to handle?" The results of a U.S. and state government IT survey released this week by the public sector IT community MeriTalk sheds a bright, halogen spotlight on the answer: It's because it's being collected in an unfiltered format and is waiting for someone - anyone - to claim it and write viable applications for it.

If you've followed along with RWW's expanding coverage of technology trends in the public sector, you'll recall we take an occasional look at the MeriTalk survey, which is an ongoing dialogue with IT professionals in the U.S. federal government. In a report released Monday summarizing the views of 151 respondents, only 60% say they capture "big data" to any degree. All respondents in that segment said they then analyze the data, but when asked to qualify what that meant, fewer than half (49%, or about 44 respondents) said they extrapolate any meaningful trends from it. Some 28% of respondents collecting big data say they don't do any collaboration with other agencies whatsoever to discover what it all means.

But that may not be the whole picture, as 31% of the IT professionals polled whose agencies are affiliated with the Department of Defense or with intelligence (about 23 in all) say they cannot even discuss the subject of big data. Among all agencies polled, approximately 52% say they are in the learning stage about what they can actually do with all this data. But when asked how long this phase should be expected to last, the average response was three years!

What will happen to government big data during that time? MeriTalk's calculations conclude that the agencies it polled currently store some 1.61 petabytes (quadrillion bytes) of total data, both structured and unstructured. (MeriTalk estimates that 31% of the data collected by agencies polled is actually unstructured.) In an astounding conclusion based on its respondents' estimates, MeriTalk predicts that the rate of expansion of public-sector data stores is about 0.51 petabytes per year. So by the time these agencies have completed their assessment of what to do with all the data they have collected throughout their history, the size of those data stores will have nearly doubled.

[Source: MeriTalk Government IT Network]

Based on the rough conversion table provided by WhatsAByte.com, we calculated that if each individual agency polled was to store all the data it's currently collecting on paper, the (very) old-fashioned way, it would need to requisition at least 20 four-drawer filing cabinets every minute of every day simply to contain it all. When asked to select the top three challenges to being able to manage all this data from a long list, 40% of respondents checked storage capacity, 36% being able to distribute and share it, 35% being able to query the data in any form and 34% said having enough time to actually process the results.

Of those who could accurately estimate their current big data storage capacities, some 57% said it was already too late: The infrastructure is not in place for them to be able to work with what they have, and that includes cloud capacity.

What appears to have happened is this: During the past few years, once it became feasible for government agencies to begin amassing data from Internet-based sources rather than through direct collection or communication, they deployed the first generation of big-data tools immediately, with the idea that they'd plan for how to use it later. The result was like the plan for how to pay for the first wave of tax credits in 2001: We'll do it now, and figure out how to pay for it when the time comes. The trick, of course, is to know when that time comes, but now more than half of federal IT workers speaking with MeriTalk say that time has already passed.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Bye, Bye Waterfall: 5 Steps to Implement Responsive Web Design

Travis Sheppard — Thu, 10 May 2012 06:05:00 -0700

Congratulations, you’ve finally convinced the powers that be that your next Web-design project needs to be responsive. It was tough work convincing them, but you can’t rest on your laurels now. The most critical decision of the project remains: how is your team going to build it?

Guest author Travis Sheppard is VP of Technology at BGT Partners, a 2010, 2011 and 2012 Ad Age Top 15 Best Place to Work in the U.S. BGT creates interactive marketing and technology solutions for global corporations that strengthen brands, develop more engaging relationships and transform businesses. For more information on BGT, please visit www.bgtpartners.com, www.facebook.com/bgtpartners and www.twitter.com/bgtpartners.

Responsive Roundup

You're probably familiar with the typical "waterfall" process: start with strategy, then onto design, followed by front- and back-end development and finally analytics implementation. The main attribute of the waterfall process is its linear nature: once a stage ends, the next one begins with a near-perfect dovetail. The progression through the stages only goes in a single direction, and unfortunately as problems accumulate, they inevitably flow downhill and changes are not handled very gracefully.

Waterfall process:

If you’re unfamiliar with the term "responsive Web design", it describes a website-building process that utilizes the same set of code to display properly on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers. Gone are the days of creating entirely separate websites in parallel desktop and mobile versions. Now you can construct an extremely flexible website to handle all environments.

Responsive approach:

So why implement responsive design over the waterfall process? One of the biggest disadvantages of the waterfall is that little thought is given to design and development for environments beyond the standard desktop browser. An agile approach with responsive design considers these issues from the start, but will require more upfront wireframing, design and testing that are omitted in the waterfall process. Once implemented, your site will render properly on desktops, mobile devices and tablets.

Responsive approach:

So how can you implement responsive Web design in your organization? Below we’ll review the steps of the typical waterfall process and explain how they can become responsive.

How to Implement Responsive Web Design

Step 1: The Plan

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, wireframes are built and consist primarily of layouts and widgets. They’re set to a specific size (usually pixel-based), and have little room for flexibility. These wires promote very specific grid/layout sizes, but when the layout changes due to different screen resolutions, things will shift in transit. The results are that navigation menus become unusable, forms become inaccessible and your interface is rendered inadequate.

Responsive Web Design

The fix for this problem isn't so difficult. You’ll need to design widgets for different views, and not think of a page as a "page." Pages are not atomic units - instead, the sliders, content, forms and other components are atomic pieces making up the whole. Wireframes must represent different screen sizes, and therefore layouts must be fluid. They can go from three columns to two, and perhaps scale down into a single column for the smallest displays (mobile smartphones).

You’ll need to change the user experience as well - a slider cannot only be controlled by a mouse, but might require a user’s finger for interaction on smaller screen sizes. Wireframes need to become prototyping tools rather than blueprints, and some development and testing is needed to ensure they’re fully functional across the display spectrum. If design commences prior to this initial testing, then unknown development issues may arise at a later point. Regardless, the ultimate vision for the project must be sustained, so keeping lines of communication open between departments is essential.

Step 2: Design Time

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, the next step would be handing off the wireframes to design, and breathing life into them via fonts, colors, spacing and other tools of the craft. Oftentimes, there is some back and forth on design direction, with updates to the design comps made as more knowledge about the brand and its design guidelines surface.

Responsive Web Design

To make better use of allotted project time and resources, design should include a few layouts and widgets at different sizes. Responsive Web design means letting go of pixel-perfect designs. Making those designs work on desktop browsers is challenging enough, but when we think in terms of flexible widgets on a flowing grid, the number of designs needed becomes manageable.

Let the medium of HTML enhance the qualities of the design using a fluid layout in all environments. Creating the states for each browser width is a huge waste of time - instead focus on the totality of the user experience. For example, ensure that the atomic components of a rotating banner are touch-sensitive on smaller mobile devices, and use an industry-recommended minimum size of 44 pixels to allot for the typical human fingertip size. The design of the experience is just as important as the look of the site on all screen sizes.

Step 3: Build It

Waterfall Process

With the waterfall approach, once the designs are approved by the client, front-end development ensues where issues regarding rendering on smaller screens could arise. Unfortunately, due to the linear nature of the waterfall, these unforeseen problems appear well into the project progression.

Responsive Web Design

In our agile and responsive process, the design must live on a flexible grid. The widgets need to be planned out and prototyped by the developers, and they need to be tested along the way. The code also needs to be optimized to ensure that the widgets are the smallest possible unit. The widgets can be easily inserted and removed from layouts that were not originally planned for, and testing these options grants peace of mind. Constant collaboration between the developer, designer and strategist circumvents issues with the inevitable changes. With the different members of the team on the same page, problems are identified and resolved earlier in the process.

Step 4: Testing Your Patience

Waterfall Process

The final stage in a standard waterfall process is to evaluate the site via unit and functional testing methods. Issues discovered at this stage may require the original vision to be tempered, and sometimes a new device that’s just hit the market can throw a wrench in the works. The strategy and design team members, who may have begun work on new projects, must be brought back in the loop to accommodate these changes, and more time must be spent on updates.

Responsive Web Design

In the responsive process, you need to test along the way on multiple browsers and screen sizes so any problems are revealed early on. Issues with the mobile environment, which don’t coincide with the wireframes, can be recognized, as well as the capabilities of the design on a number of different platforms. A working project prototype will be ready early on allowing clients to review sooner, making it a win-win for all parties.

Step 5: Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Waterfall Process

The traditional waterfall process doesn’t have a step where you iterate through the designs and the interface. Passing over minor details at certain stages of the project construction permits issues to arise and client-expectation conflicts. Despite consistent and timely communication with the client, until a presented working model is shown, the full gravity of these accumulated poor decisions is not known.

Responsive Web Design

With the responsive approach, the same amount of progress is attained and, as a bonus, there is live code for client presentation every step of the way. The discoveries made at these earlier stages will help drive subsequent stages and anticipate critical changes ahead of any deadlines.

In Summary

Adopting an agile responsive approach will free you from the constraints of the waterfall process. Your design and development will be streamlined, you’ll be more productive and efficient and your online brand presence will be maximized on all possible platforms and screens. The real challenge is breaking out of the waterfall mold and becoming a responsive organization. Follow these five steps and you might just say "bye, bye" to the waterfall and "hello" to responsive Web design.

Waterfall photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Improvements in New York Times' Fech Makes It Easier to Follow the Money

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:15:47 -0700

Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.

Here's the NY Times' description of Fech from its first release last year:

Journalists who work with these filings need to extract their data from complex text files that can reach hundreds of megabytes. Turning a new set into usable data involves using the F.E.C.'s data dictionaries to match all the fields to their positions in the data. But the available fields have changed over time, and subsequent versions don't always match up. For example, finding a committee's total operating expenses in version 7 means knowing to look in column 52 of the “F3P” line. It used to be found at column 50 in version 6, and at column 44 in version 5. To make this process faster, my co-intern Evan Carmi and I created a library to do that matching automatically.

Fech (think “F.E.C.h,” say “fetch”), is a Ruby gem that abstracts away any need to map data points to their meanings by hand. When you give Fech a filing, it checks to see which version of the F.E.C.'s software generated it. Then, when you ask for a field like “total operating expenses,” Fech knows how to retrieve the proper value, no matter where in the filing that particular software version stores it.

Derek Willis of the NY Times announced the 1.0 release of Fech last month. This release covers "all of the current form types that candidates and committees submit." Perhaps most importantly, this release allows comparing two filings against one another.

Why Fech Matters

Fech is already being used by the NYT for its reporting and interactive visualizations of campaign spending. But that's just one editorial team. Putting this tool in the hands of any developer or reporter that wants to work with the data opens a lot more possibilities.

For example, there's ProPublica, which is using Fech and the NY Times' APIs for its reporting and interactive graphics. ProPublica is able to show not just what campaigns are spending, but how much and with whom. (So far the biggest winner is Mentzer Media Services, an ad agency that specializes in GOP campaigns - including the Swift Boaters. Fech doesn't automatically point that out, of course, but it helps journalists uncover it.

Data without context is useless. By helping developers and journalists work with the filings in a more structured way, Fech helps newsrooms (or any other group) put the data in context to find the story behind the data. It's a long way from being simple to use, but it represents a significant improvement over the raw data. It's Apache-licensed, so it might find its way into all kinds of data analysis tools over time.

With Fech maturing well before the elections this fall, it could help all kinds of organizations follow the money trails much more efficiently. Here's hoping that happens.