I got the opportunity to play with a WP7.5 phone a few days ago, and was pretty amazed by its progress.

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!

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Apparently Microsoft and “social networks” is a honest mistake

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Adobe has just posted on their official blog about their backing out of flash plugin on mobile. Here’s basically what they’re saying:

This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video.

Adobe has been trying really hard with Flash for mobile since almost 10 years… unsuccessfully. Since the first version on Symbian to the latest plugin on Android phones it’s become clear that the market fragmentation, the cost to port and maintain the plugin on all those platforms and the fact that the adaptation of content is not really as good as it should lead to a really small market share… definitely not wort the investment apparently ! (Especially since the iPhone will remove out of reach for Adobe).

Recently they acquired  Nitobi the editors of Phonegap. Phonegap is in my opinion the absolute best solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications nowadays – and that’s what we are using for Diveboard. It provides deep device integration while relying on the power of html5/css (and the render engine of the built-in web browsers) to ensure and easy development and port of the applications. This is definitely good enough for many applications, although it will never be as good as native, the TCO of a Phonegap mobile app is way lower than that of a native cocoa app – plus it relies on skill that web developers already have.

Kudos to Adobe for their clear-sight analysis of the situation – must have been an complicated decision internally!

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This post has been on my mind for a long while, and even as I start writing it I know that this post won’t even allow me to dump a tenth of what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.

I’ve been doing or managing software projects for year now. Saw the rise of AGILE programming, saw people getting crazy about Test-Driven-Development… and yet I’ve rarely seen so much crappy software and such long development cycles in companies. Why ? Because Agile has become a method for hiding your responsibilities as a developer over a roadmap, a new way of crumpling  the whole development process where developers are empowered with everything while not given any responsibilities over the deliveries, a new way to fail project without consequencies.

AGILE is actually the less agile method I’ve ever experienced, where sprints are blind development tunnels where outside of the developers nobody can really evaluate how the project is progressing. With sprints lasting up to 2 months (I’ve seen it), and with no real ability o get anything delivered in-between, this is definitely the worst approach of all should you be a small-to-medium size company willing to deliver fast and iterate fast.

What are the real objectives for software ? In my opinion those points are a must and should always be granted

• The master branch has the current production code, and can be updated fast (after testing) should a bug be found. This is critical in my opinion : when a bug is found by a user in production : you must be able to correct it immediately ! And most of the time current methodologies just disable that from ever happening…
• No software goes to production before having been tested. An NO-UNITESTS ! Unitests are only good for testing complicated algorithms. You should focus on designing usage-based tests with scenarios following the most common user action suites. On the web, selenium is the way to go. And this is only going to enable you to limit regressions by highlighting potential side-effects of a latest code update that as a developer you may have missed.
• Deploy often. Why wait the end of a sprint to see a service update ? Some stories are fast to deliver and have limited impact on the codebase and can de done in a few hours… some require weeks of headaches… why choose your deployment speed to match the longest task development time ? Put each feature in a dedicated branch, merge them into testing when completed (for testing) and then into master for a final test run.

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rsync -vrP –append filename user@server:path

and with resume that works of course….

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https://gist.github.com/634750

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Sounds like a classic but it’s rare enough to make me happy when it happens

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Digi just announced a new line of WiFi/Xbee modules :“XBee modules offer developers tremendous flexibility and are extremely easy to use,” said Larry Kraft, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, Digi International. “By adding a low-power Wi-Fi module to the XBee product family we give customers the fastest and most flexible way to get Wi-Fi up and running on their systems.”
Xbee are the preferred choice for the DIY community since they are easy to set-up, fairly robust and easy to use with their simple COM interface. They will be priced around 149USD

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Check out my dives in Ko Samui/Ko Tao, Thailand here : http://www.diveboard.com/ksso and a more in-depth review on Diveboard’s blog.

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I was lucky enough to get to meet (along with a few other bloggers) with the founders of the Solar Impulse project : Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg. This wasn’t the first time I met the “savanturier” Bertrand Piccard (firstly at a conference by the Swiss embassy in Paris, then at LeWeb’10) and I must say his background and lifestyle amaze me.
After achieving the first non-stop balloon flight around the globe, he came up in 2003 along with André Borschbeg with the Solar Impulse project as a way to promote the use of technologies and renewable energies to make the world a better place.

With Solar Impulse, Piccard and Borschberg build an incredible communication and marketing tool to convey their message. As he explained during the interview, they chose a “plane” (while they could have used a ship or a car or whichever transportation device) to make sure they reach every human being and deeply mark them with their being, leveraging on the human being’s oldest dream : flying.

Of course, this demonstration is not suppose to mean that commercial flights will be able to fly fuel-less any time soon. The design of Solar Impulse is very specific, re-engineered from the ground up to be as light as possible (1.6tons) and the size of the cabin is ridiculously small, which makes it a real physical achievement for André who had to fly in that tiny space for 26hrs without closing an eye (no autopilot!). A second version is under work with a larger cabin (and an autopilot + automatic autopilot controller) enabling longer flights in reasonable conditions.
Nevertheless the message is fairly clearly demonstrated : technologies enabled to reduce energy needs of the plane to a level where renewable energies – here the sun – could provide them.

Since the project launch in 2003, they raised money from partners and “fans”, and 75M€, 80 engineers and technicians and 7 years later they were ready to do the first 26 hours non-stop flight of Solar Impulse – day AND night.
Funny enough Bertrand Piccard confessed he expected he’d have to make a full non-stop flight around the globe to raise some attention, but it seems he got every eye on him faster than he had anticipated.

Can’t wait to see more records broken by the Solar Impulse team and hopefully this initiative along with all that going on in the green space with companies such as Betterplace will help us lower our dependency on fossil energies and help us become more aware and regarding on how much we consume and how we could reduce our energy footprint.

I embedded below a video from LeWeb’10 featuring lots of images from the conception phase and building of the first prototype as well as the interview of Bertrand Piccard by @Loic.

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