developers

Mobile developer platform gets $12 million boost in funding

Xamarin, a company that provides developer tools to hundreds of thousands of mobile app developers, has received $12 million in first-round funding, the company announced today.

The financing comes from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Floodgate, and will be used to expand the company's software and build a sales and marketing team, according to a press release.

The desire to build mobile apps can often be hindered by a lack of mobile developers, but Xamarin's software makes it easier for traditional programmers to make the transition to mobile, according to an analyst quoted in Xamarin's release. … Read more

Mobile subscriptions poised to outnumber the world's population

Mobile devices are making the world go round. A study by the World Bank and infoDev titled "Information and Communications for Development 2012" found that an estimated three-quarters of the world's people have access to a mobile device. The number of worldwide mobile subscriptions grew from less than 1 billion in 2000 to over 6 billion today, the study said. Close to 5 billion of the subscriptions are in developing countries, and mobile subscriptions in low- and middle-income countries increased by more than 1,500 percent between 2000 and 2010, from 4 to 72 per 100 inhabitants.… Read more

Android Romeo proposes with adorkable custom wallpaper

When the time is right to propose to your significant other and you decide the way to do it is to create a custom boot animation for their Android phone (and you think they'll say yes and not "what the hell is wrong with my phone?"), who you gonna call? XDA Developers forum, that's who. … Read more

Developers are apparently fleeing BlackBerry

Things never seem to look up for Research In Motion these days. So perhaps it's no surprise that a new report from All Things D's John Paczkowski has found that RIM is "bleeding developers."

Citing a recent survey of 200 developers (from a sample set of 4,300) by Baird Equity Research, Paczkowski wrote that developer interest in working on BlackBerry OS versions 7 and 10 are at a n all time low.

Baird researchers polled developer sentiment towards all major mobile platforms based on a 10-point scale with 10 marked as "excellent" and … Read more

Facebook launches developers' center, new iOS SDK update

Facebook launched improved tools and a new center for developers today, with hopes that it will make it easier and faster for developers to create Facebook-integrated iOS apps.

The social network said this is the biggest upgrade to its iOS software developers kit, or SDK, but it is fully compatible with other versions.

"The new features make the SDK a natural extension of Apple's iOS environment and make your development cycle more efficient by eliminating the need to develop and manage common tasks," Facebook's Jason Clark wrote in the developers blog today.

Improvements include better user … Read more

How RIM's new marketing chief sees its developer prospects

Frank Boulben, the new chief marketing officer at Research In Motion, did his homework before joining the company.

Boulben, who jumped off the sinking ship that was wireless startup LightSquared, tapped his Rolodex of contacts and friends within the carrier and developer communities to see if the RIM position was a job worth taking. To his surprise, he found there was still a lot of support behind RIM and BlackBerry. In particular, his friends were high on BlackBerry 10.

"The feedback was positive," Boulben told me in an interview. "From a technical standpoint, they like the platform … Read more

AT&T inducts Watson speech recognition for app development

AT&T is looking for help in making its speech recognition software ultra-consumer oriented. The mobile carrier announced today that its Watson Speech application programming interfaces, or API, is now open to developers.

AT&T's Watson, not to be confused with IBM's Watson, is software that the company aims to program to learn different accents, speaker variations, background environments, platform variations, dialects, and speech patterns, according to a company blog post today.

"It's a technology that's been a long time in development and more than 600 patents in the making, and we're … Read more

Apple targets sites selling access to iOS 6 beta, report says

Is Apple taking aim at sites that sell access to its iOS 6 beta to non-developers?

Apple-tracking blog MacStories reported yesterday that a host of Web sites known for selling access to Apple's iOS beta are no longer online. After trying to contact many of the site's owners, the publication's e-mails bounced back. Finally, the publication was able to connect with one site owner who said that his hosting provider took his site down after Apple filed a copyright-infringement claim.

That followed a claim made by David, CEO of Web hosting provider Fused who goes by his … Read more

Twitter developers dismayed by promise of stricter API rules

Twitter's announcement that it will tighten the rules governing its APIs sent a shock wave through the developer community, leaving many feeling jilted by the microblogging service and worried about the direction the company is heading.

Ending a policy that had been in effect for the past two-and-a-half-years, Twitter announced Friday it planned to institute stricter rules for its application programming interface to ensure that "the core Twitter consumption experience" includes "a consistent set of products and tools."

In a company blog post announcing the forthcoming policy, consumer product manager Michael Sippey discussed broadening its &… Read more