application developers

Apple has sent a stern warning to developers who try to inflate their App Store rankings.

"Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it," the company announced to developers last night. "However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership."

App Store rankings are … Read more

Apple's battle with developers might be heading toward a truce.

The company plans to allow developers to create applications with just about any tool they want. It will also publish its App Store Review Guidelines.

The changes could also mark a shift in Apple's contentious relationships with both Google and Adobe Systems.

Saying that it has "taken [developer] feedback to heart," Apple has decided to relax "restrictions we put in place earlier this year" on the company's iOS Developer Program license. Going forward, developers can use any development tool they want to build … Read more

Despite booming enterprise server sales, some in the industry continue to grumble that Linux is too hard. Designed by geeks for geeks, the theory goes, Linux will never be mainstream.

Reality hasn't been kind to such arguments.

Consider the fact that Linux-based Google Android saw 350 percent growth in 2009, according to Myxer data. I've yet to hear anyone talking about Android being hard to use. My teenage neighbors bought their Android phones and have had little trouble texting, browsing the Web, and installing applications.

It's Linux. It's not hard.

Where Linux does sometimes fall down … Read more

In Forrester's recent report on the changing face of application development, the research firm rightly proselytized that enterprise developers need to become "passionate about user experience" and inject design practices into application development early on.

It's a strange phenomenon that applications on consumer sites are so much more attractive and usable than those we see in the enterprise. Even popular enterprise online-only applications like Salesforce.com leave a lot to be desired in terms of user interface design. People have become so familiar with Facebook (even with its quirks) and other consumer online services that they … Read more

Application development professionals need to become "lean and mean" to emerge from the current economic recession, according to Forrester Research.

In a report titled The Top Five Changes For Application Development In 2010, Forrester details five key changes with the overall goal of becoming "lean and mean so you'll be ready to move as the Great Recession wanes, thus leaving no doubt of your development team's contribution to improving business efficiency and driving increased revenue."

Embrace cloud as an early-stage platform Cloud offerings will continue to expand and evolve and companies should look at … Read more

For years, Red Hat has happily sold Linux to Unix shops anxious to save money at equivalent or better performance. During this time, the company largely avoided Microsoft, which has tended to compete much higher up the stack. No longer. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that one of Microsoft's biggest opportunities lies in enterprise infrastructure and associated application development.

Red Hat, meet Redmond.

Red Hat wants to own the infrastructure market. The company is nearing its initial $1 billion goal, but has a far more audacious ambition: own half the associated middleware market.

This is a direct challenge to … Read more

Here's an interesting solution for anyone who has a killer idea for an iPhone app but doesn't know the first thing about software development: Moobila turns your idea into an app and markets it on the App Store.

Actually, the company specializes in turning existing corporate software into iPhone apps, thereby eliminating the need to train or hire programmers.

But Moobila also provides an opportunity for budding entrepreneurs to see their ideas turned into potentially money-making software. You pay for the development; you keep whatever revenue it generates.

Want to see a few proofs of concept? Moobila has … Read more

A mobile software development start-up thinks it has found a way to the mobile industry's holy grail: an open-source method for writing an application once and running it anywhere.

Rhomobile is ready to release Rhodes 1.0, a framework designed for application developers who want to reach more than one mobile computing operating system--such as Apple's iPhone OS X, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, or Research In Motion's BlackBerry--without having to spend the time and money required to develop separate applications for each operating system. Rhodes allows developers to code their applications in HTML and Ruby and have … Read more

Apple appears set to turn on over-the-air podcast downloads with the next version of the iPhone software, making it much clearer why it rejected a third-party application that did the same thing.

A German blog called Flo's Weblog has published screenshots purportedly from the next release of Apple's iPhone OS, version 2.2. One of the new features in that software, along with additions like Google Street View, will allow iPhone or iPod Touch users to download podcasts directly to their devices without having to connect the device to their computers and go through iTunes.

Sound familiar? That … Read more