Apple News: Paid Software is Dead. Or Not.
Adobe and Microsoft — along with Evernote, Wunderlist, and other web app companies — think the future of software is subscriptions. Apple seems to think the future is lower priced pro apps without upgrades on the App Store, and free bundled apps for everything else. Game developers think the future is free apps with in-app purchases. And traditional developers with paid apps and discounted upgrades are being pushed to the side. Is paid indie software doomed, perhaps by the very App Store that pushed so many developers to prominence?
Read full story => AppStorm
Technology News: New battery technology is poised to supercharge wearables
Whatever benchmark wearables market size number you believe, whether we’ll see 14 million or 200 million units shipped by 2016, one thing is clear: Unless we quickly see major innovation in battery technology, most of these units will get about as much use as the much-heralded home breadmaking machines. To succeed, wearables must enhance and simplify daily life, not complicate it. In the words of Hosain Rahman, the CEO of Jawbone, “all this wearable stuff is constrained by battery technology. It’s not a computing problem.” Rahman was speaking at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, discussing the current limitations to the wearable device movement. Consider that some reviewers are only getting 5 hours of battery life when using Google Glass under normal conditions: not nearly enough for a full day away from a charger.
Read full story => CiteWorld
Programming News: Dynamic vs. Var vs. Object
C# by nature is a very strongly typed language which signifies that most of the verifications are executed statically during compile time. If not all, but most of features and structs exposed by C# language adheres to this principle. With the introduction of Dynamic in C# 4.0, I found there is confusion in developer’s community around the difference between Var, Object, and Dynamic. In this blog, I will try to highlight the differences from the CLR and the compiler’s perspective.
Read full story => CodeProject
Photography News: The Key to Better Photos: Raw File Format
The improving quality in smartphone cameras and popularity of social media sites has led to an explosion of photography. In fact, in a reader poll on Digital Photography School consumers reported taking 51–100 photos per week and more than 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook every minute. But despite the increasing photo quality on smartphone devices, digital SLR (or digital single lens reflex) cameras remain popular among professionals and consumers for one primary reason: creative control. DSLR cameras offer several features that give users more creative control: DSLR cameras can accommodate a wide variety of lenses, giving photographers the ability to pair the right lens with the right photo session. DSLR cameras also offer full manual controls that allow a photographer to specify the focal point, aperture, shutter speed, white balance and ISO. But a true defining feature is the option to shoot in a raw file format. Raw file formats contain pixel data straight from the image sensor and allow you absolute control for making edits.
Read full story => HuffingtonPost
