Apple News: Apple Engineer Recalls the iPhone’s Birth
In February 2005, Apple’s then chief executive, Steve Jobs, gave senior software engineer Greg Christie an ultimatum. Mr. Christie’s team had been struggling for months to lay out the software vision for what would become the iPhone as well as how the parts would work together. Now, Mr. Jobs said the team had two weeks or he would assign the project to another group. “Steve had pretty much had it,” said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple’s user-interface team. “He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts.” Mr. Christie’s team devised many iPhone features, such as swiping to unlock the phone, placing calls from the address book, and a touch-based music player. The iPhone ditched the keyboard then common on advanced phones for a display that covered the device’s entire surface, and it ran software that more closely resembled personal-computer programs.
Read full story => WSJ

Technology News: How Technology Can Save Government
The Obama administration had been preparing for years to launch its signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. With everything riding in the balance, the whole effort very nearly failed—because of a website. Well, not a website exactly, but a dizzying array of servers, protocols and regulations. The technology behind the website needed to manage all of it in order to provide service to the public. On launch day, it fell flat. That was embarrassing, but the problem goes far beyond health care. Virtually everything the government does these days, from drivers’ licenses to voter registration to retirement benefits, requires a robust technological platform that must overcome challenges specific to the public sector. Now, a team of technologists thinks they may have a solution.
Read full story => DigitalTonto

Programming News: Is Java 8 the fastest JVM ever?
Today, I want to continue talking about Java 8 and all kinds of tools that can help you on your quest to a better software. Java 8 was released just a couple of weeks ago, but, according to some early results of RebelLabs’ Java Tools & Technologies survey, which you can complete in just 3 minutes and helps a children’s charity (guilt trip!), 5% of respondents have started to check out Java 8! For the tools part, I’m going to look at the infamous Java Microbenchmark Harness project, which allows you to generate better benchmarks and measure performance of your code in a sane way. This post is also about concurrency updates that landed into the JDK in the latest release. Actually, there were multiple changes to java.util.concurrent, but here the focus will be on the improvements introduced to the Fork-Join framework. We’re doing to discuss Fork-Join a bit and then try to implement a sample benchmark to compare the performance of the FJ in Java 7 vs. 8.
Read full story => ZeroTurnAround

Photography News: 8 Simple Guidelines for Capturing Spectacular Sunrise and Sunset Images
When we are asked to think of popular subjects for landscape photography, images of beautiful sunsets immediately come to mind. What outdoor photographer worth his or her salt doesn’t have at least a couple of images of the sun dipping below the horizon? In most people’s minds, it is an easy thing to capture; the beauty and scale of the event itself should carry the photo, with minimal interaction from the photographer. Unfortunately, it’s not. Unless you’re relying on luck alone, you’ll need to possess a few seeds of knowledge (eight in this case) to get you started in capturing that epic sunrise or sunset. None of these guidelines are difficult to comprehend, and can vastly improve your chances of properly capturing one of mother nature’s most incredible events.
Read full story => DigitalPhotographySchool