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Dipartimento Di Fisica

Dipartimento Di Fisica

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Dipartimento di Matematica "Federigo Enriques"

Dipartimento di Matematica "Federigo Enriques"

AppMobi Creates XDK Framework for PhoneGap Development

HTML5 development studio appMobi is releasing a new tool today for developers to create, emulate and test PhoneGap projects. The appMobi PhoneGap Mobile App XDK is an integrated developer environment (IDE) that offers a full suite of developer tools for creating HTML5 and PhoneGap applications. The new appMobi XDK is the first of its kind for PhoneGap development and is an intuitive tool for developers working on PhoneGap projects.

Sponsor

PhoneGap is not actually called PhoneGap anymore. It will soon be going by the name Apache CallBack as part of its entrance into the Apache Software Foundation and Nitobi acquisition by Adobe. AppMobi is known for pushing the bounds of HTML5 development and this new framework fits well within its vision for free tools to help developers create apps for the mobile Web. With PhoneGap integration, those apps can now easily be made native.

The appMobi PhoneGap XDK is a full development environment that also works with other programming editors such as DreamWeave 5.5 or NotePad++. Hence, developers do not really need to learn a whole new editor to be able to use the framework The goal is to reduce the coding and debugging cycles for developers. The PhoneGap XDK allows for testing and emulating of PhoneGap code to see how it will function on either iOS or Android devices with features.

Some may think that appMobi's PhoneGap XDK is a curious move for the company. After all, appMobi is one of the biggest proponents of going away from native frameworks and using HTML5 to build mobile Web apps. The answer is a simple business proposition - if you are building in PhoneGap, you are building in the mobile Web. PhoneGap just wraps it in a native format. Though appMobi's frameworks are free, it offers paid cloud services (in the same way as Kinvey, Parse, StackMob and Urban Airship, to a varying degrees) that can offer in-app purchases, push notifications, analytics and live updating. Business 101: get them in the door and they are more likely to buy a product.

It is not that appMobi has created a honey pot to lure developers into using their cloud services. There really is a need in the ecosystem for a dedicated PhoneGap IDE that works outside of the native frameworks. In a way, appMobi wants to turn PhoneGap around and instead of publishing PhoneGap projects to native frameworks, actually publish them to the mobile Web. It is a clever strategy as appMobi works on evangelizing HTML5 and the company's tools that developer for it.

Check out the video below that reviews the PhoneGap Mobile App XDK from appMobi and let us know in the comments if this is the type of tool that would work in your development environment.

WPTavern: Video Featuring Matt Of WordPress With Dries Of Drupal

Here is the recorded video featuring the presentation of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress with Dries Buytaert of Drupal discussing open source. Kudos goes out to the Schipulcon group for getting these two together for an awesome presentation. The audio is terrible until you hit the 4 minute mark. If you want to see a transcript for some of the questions you can read them on the Schipul Blog. Definitely watch from 32 minutes onward as that is when the audience starts asking some pretty good questions.

Related posts:

1. The Crossing Paths Of Drupal And WordPress
2. Drupal And WordPress Founders Share The Same Stage
3. Saying Goodbye To Drupal And Hello To WordPress

Desktop remoto su Chrome e Chrome OS

Chrome Remote Desktop è una nuova estensione per Chrome OS e Chrome (browser) capace di abilitare il controllo remoto tra pc. Non è nulla di nuovo nello scenario software attuale, perché esistono altre soluzioni simili, ma indubbiamente abbiamo a che fare con qualcosa di integrato nel browser, uno dei pochi programmi di cui non si può fare a meno. In più, questa estensione è del tutto gratuita, compatibile con PC, Mac e Linux, e con il Chrome OS pre-installato nei [...]

GAMELOFT – Promozione Gamers Fest: download gratuiti di giochi Android HD e tutto il catalogo a 1 euro

Gameloft presenta la nuova promozione “Gamers Fest: tutti per 1€ – 1 GRATIS per tutti”: tutti i giochi Android HD costano solo 1 euro e alcuni saranno GRATIS! Si può accedere alla promozione SOLO dal seguente link http://gloft.co/09809557, dal codice QR in allegato, dal Gameloft Bookmark HD (100% Giochi HD) e dai link comunicati sui canali Facebook e Twitter di Gameloft.

Durante la promozione Gamers Fest tutti i titoli Gameloft Android HD saranno proposti al prezzo speciale di 1 euro. Inoltre, per due ore ogni giorno dal 7 ottobre al 9 ottobre, un gioco Gameloft per dispositivi Android HD sarà disponibile gratuitamente solo per 2 ore. I download saranno illimitati durante le due ore di promozione. Tre diversi giochi saranno distribuiti gratuitamente durante la Gamers Fest.

Attraverso il canale Twitter di Gameloft Italia (http://www.twitter.com/gameloft_italy) e quello Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/gameloft) sarà annunciato l’orario di partenza del download gratuito che sarà accessibile SOLO dal seguente link http://gloft.co/09809557, dal codice QR in allegato, dal Gameloft Bookmark HD (100% Giochi HD) e dai link comunicati sui canali Facebook e Twitter di Gameloft.

Le comunicazioni giornaliere relative ai giochi gratis avverranno ad orari diversi che cambieranno randomicamente: i partecipanti sono così incoraggiati a seguire Gameloft Italia su Twitter  e Facebook per essere i primi ad essere aggiornati sulla promozione in tempo reale.

In allegato il codice QR per accedere direttamente alla promozione Gamers Fest

carlomazza: Boing Boing » Blog Archive » Animated video about the placebo effect http://t.co/KQjopQiA via @BoingBoing

carlomazza: RT @ginatrapani: This is the post I always hoped to read on @Gizmodo re: iPhone 4 http://t.co/og0RA4JM cc:@nicknotned @blam

What Steve Meant Back Then

I promise I didn't write this in advance, waiting for the appropriate moment to unleash it from the vault of pre-conceived, pre-digested stories about the deceased the way one fills in the Free Space in the middle of "N" on the Bingo card. When people would ask me, what will you write when Steve Jobs dies, I declined to answer because I didn't want to think about it. I sincerely believed if anyone could beat pancreatic cancer, it would be him.

Sponsor

I hear the three words, "He gave us..." as a jump-starter, or what Steve Wozniak would call a "bootstrap," for sentences that precede a recitation of all the technology milestones presented to the world by Steve Jobs. Right off the bat, those three words are wrong. Steve Jobs did not give us anything. To presume that he did is an insult to what the man genuinely believed, and to the ethics and goals he personally championed from the beginning of his career.

Kids in garages

Apple was an empowering company. It empowered people to build the personal computer - to build it for themselves, to make it individual and adaptable. The Apple II, I wrote in 1985, is a box of promises. What had sustained its popularity and its magnitude to that point in time was its users' belief in those promises. The fire that fueled that belief was sparked, kindled, and spread by Steve Jobs.

I blatantly leveraged his image to jump-start my career. The only way a kid as young as I was, as removed from the technology centers of the world as I was, and as flat broke as I was could ever hope to get in on the ground floor of the only revolution that America would see in the latter quarter of the 20th century, was to dress, look, and talk like one of those garage inventors. What amazed businesspeople back then - the type who would become my first clients - was that these wunderkinds, these Bill Gates and Steve Jobs-types, were so young, sure of themselves, arrogant, and could assimilate everything they touched.

Steve had a moustache, so I grew one too. I was 14, pretending to be 19. I looked like I was caught red-handed eating a Ding-Dong. But I looked enough like these smart, garage-inventor types to pull it off, wearing a tailored suit with a tweed jacket and the leather elbow patches. At the first computer conferences in the nation, I struck deals with the companies representing Apple. This was back before Apple had a national sales team big enough to cover the nation. Put me next to your computer, I bargained with them, and I'll demonstrate to people how to use it. I'll sell your Apple II, and you refer them to me as clients.

It was 1979. I lived and breathed Microsoft BASIC, and could diagram its statements and functions in every dialect, including Apple. I had developed a stump speech - what I'd say to people who looked at this thing and asked me, "What does it do?"

"Well, let me tell you, the two men who created this thing," my speech began, "are named Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak." ("Steven" was his name back then; it was "corrected" later.) "Jobs is this guy who came from Hewlett-Packard, which is the company over there in the center aisle that makes those huge pen plotters. Wozniak is this designer from Atari. You've seen that home video game called 'Video Pinball?' He designed it." That qualification impressed folks right away - a guy who could put a pinball machine on a TV.

"Anyway, they'd gone to some of these conferences a few years ago, and they'd seen the first home computers - the ugly ones in the blue boxes with the switches and wires - and they asked, 'What does it do?' And they'd get all kinds of responses, but nothing that had anything to do with what someone like you or me would want to do with it. So they built the first Apple I prototype in their garage, that's why this one is called 'Apple II.' And what they decided was this: Let's make a mass-production machine using HP standards and Atari construction. But let's make it really, really programmable. So if you try something, even off the top of your head, you might be able to find a way to make it work. Here, let me show you an example."

Then I'd do something mind-boggling for them, like write a Microsoft BASIC program right there on the command line, that calculated the distance between two points on a map. (It's the Pythagorean Theorem, and I wish I'd patented it because I'd be a rich man today.) Then I'd plot a little graph for them in their choice of 16 fabulous colors. Ten minutes later, they were plunking down twelve hundred bucks for something they weren't sure what it was, and I was handing out business cards.

A television ad produced by the store I consulted for in the late 1970s.

Containers for ideas

The things which the cable news anchors are saying Steve Jobs "gave" us (as if they were old enough to remember) are actually containers. They're beautiful containers, but they're open. They're made for us to fill them - with information, with functionality, with the pictures and songs and dreams that remind us of who we are, or believe we can be.

To my knowledge, Steve Jobs invented nothing. As I've said here before, he was a brilliant businessman who could look into your eyes (and make you look deeply into his), and sell you on an idea. That idea, from the very beginning of Apple, was this:

You can make it work. It doesn't have to be a multi-function gizmo box. You're already smart enough and capable enough to make the box do what you need it to do. The box changed shape over Apple's history - Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, iMac, Power Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad - and it was certainly exciting when the box got small enough to fit into the spare-change pocket of Steve's Levis. But it was always small and big at the same time. And Steve's idea of "scale" was that making it smaller made it bigger.

Icons and ideals

Fewer Americans than ever before in this country's history are iconic symbols of something great and powerful. Folks today stare with sadness at the "HOPE" poster, and wonder what it was they had conjured in their minds that made it seem so real. Icons (not the desktop kind, but the ones that take human form) are often full of other people's hopes, but they usually don't keep there for very long.

There are many falsehoods being attributed to Steve Jobs - that he "invented the personal computer," that he "dreamed of the mouse," that he "created graphical computing," that he "made the first tablet PC," I've heard all these things just tonight. Clear away all the false attributions, erase the whiteboard of all the things "he gave us." Let there be, for one moment, just the man, devoid of the stuff. What did he do?

Well, let me tell you. For an entire generation of young Americans who had every reason to believe what they were being told by their teachers, their friends, their bosses, even their family - that their dreams and ambitions were unattainable and that we were just cogs in a great machine we could never understand - Steve Jobs was living, breathing, human proof that it was all wrong. We were all vessels for something greater, we had it within ourselves to put on a game face and stand up to everything and everyone. He was the personification of "Hell, no!"

The gauntlet

On a cheap plastic TV in the middle of an Oklahoma art studio, my friends and I watched the 1984 Super Bowl. We weren't interested in the football; I don't even remember who played. We had known in advance about that ad, because the firm I consulted for gave me a heads-up. We watched that gorgeous blonde girl (great choice there, Ridley Scott) hurl that gauntlet. But we knew it was Steve who guided it right up Big Brother's nose. We cheered louder than for any touchdown that had ever been scored. Three weeks later, I was a nationally published computing writer.

Steve Jobs did not give us anything. He challenged us, and his charisma and doggedness and determination not to let failure define him, made us respond. We know him mainly because of the things his company built, and mainly for his charismatic demos, which in the larger scheme of things is actually not all that much.

Take away those products and their demos as though they never existed, and what remains is the single best creation of his life, more valuable than anything Apple has ever produced. And right now, this moment, despite all that Apple has enabled me to do in my life, I would give it all for an eraser that could wipe out every Apple device ever made, in exchange for the one technology that matters this moment, in the here and now - or, better yet, 24 hours ago: the cure for his pancreatic cancer.

There are bigger problems to solve than can fit in an iPad. In his memory, we should revolutionize our approach to conquering death the way Steve Jobs revolutionized our approach to living life.

Discuss

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has passed away at 56

Continue reading Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has passed away at 56

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has passed away at 56 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

carlomazza: RT @sketchcrawl: So, who’s coming to ViewFest in Torino in a couple of weeks? http://t.co/Fwr8ZrD9

carlomazza: RT @AaronGustafson: is turning localStorage into a simple DB to tide him over until the WebSQL/IndexedDB dust settles. Interested? http: …

carlomazza: RT @LucaSalvini: Slides from my Responsive Design workshop are up on speakerdeck (http://t.co/Xa6x4ThG) and on slideshare (http://t.co/S …

The mathematical internet is a great opportunity to promote yourself, but be polite!

I just posted this over on a discussion thread at meta.MO, and I thought it might deserve more visibility.

We’ve had some questions on meta.MO about how undergraduates applying to graduate school should view a presence on Mathoverflow, math.SE or in the math blogosphere. I was on the graduate admissions committee for the University of Michigan last year so, for what it is worth, here is my take:

I did not make a routine practice of googling applicants, because I didn’t have time. I read every file I was given but, if that gave me enough data, I didn’t go looking for more.

However, when I felt I needed more data, I would often google the applicant’s name, and I often found Mathoverflow or blog activity. This might be because the candidate’s file was borderline, but it more often meant that I felt there was a part of the picture missing. Perhaps the applicant was in 2 REU’s and claimed to have produced research papers, but the file didn’t give me a place to read about the research. Or recommendations talked about the applicant’s strong involvement with his undergraduate math club, but the applicant’s own statement said nothing about it. Or, of course, if recommendations said “the candidate has given several interesting answers on MO”, as happened more than once.

There was much more opportunity to impress me than to disappoint me. My default assumption, and one which was born out by the majority of the files, was that the applicant was a standard undergraduate with little knowledge of advanced math. If what I found confirmed that, I moved on and didn’t note it. In order to get into a top grad school like UMich, you need to stand out from that assumption, so anything which showed more mathematical knowledge or interest than that struck me as positive. Even MO questions which were below the level of the site struck me as a sign that the applicant was seeking out professional fora, and had mathematical interests outside his or her classes.

By the way, evidence of a social life was neither a positive nor a negative. I went to parties in college; if my applicants did likewise, I didn’t hold that against them.

However, there is one thing that could be a negative. Our committee chair, Sergey Fomin, clearly told us to flag any file that indicated a student who would be socially difficult. I don’t mean loners or odd people — our department has plenty. But if there were signs of an applicant who was regularly in fights with others, if there was someone whom we wouldn’t be able to trust with the responsibility of teaching an undergraduate class, if we had someone with a record of blowing off assignments and deadlines, that was a problem, and we would have to look at the issue seriously no matter how skilled their mathematical level.

Now, this issue didn’t particularly come up in my google searches. But I could easily imagine it; there have been people who have made a bad impression through rudeness on MO, and it could be relevant when they apply to schools or for jobs. (Please don’t mention specific examples in the comments. I will delete any comments that do so.)

In short, being mathematically active online is a good thing, and you don’t have to look smarter than an interested undergraduate. But being rude online is a bad thing, and it can turn up in google. I would imagine this might be good advice for people other than grad school applicants.

How to Create a Responsive Portfolio Site with WordPress and Semantic.gs

FLOWCHART: Navigating NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

Over the summer, NPR solicited the input of its listeners to rank the top science fiction and fantasy books of all time. Over 60,000 people voted for the top picks which were then compiled into a list by their panel of experts. The result? This list of 100 books with a wide range of styles, little context, and absolutely no pithy commentary to help readers actually choose something to read from it.

We at SF Signal have, once again, come to the rescue. This flowchart is designed to help you follow your tastes, provide context, and fulfill (indeed exceed!) any need for pithy commentary you might harbor.

Designer's Note: This is the mightiest flowchart I have ever encountered let alone tried to develop. There are (obviously) 100 end points and over 325 decision points. A chart of this size presents a number of readability challenges. For people with lower resolution monitors, netbooks, or tablets, this 3800 x 2300 image is going to a scroll-fest. But it's totally worth it.

Update: Those looking for a printable version of this flowchart will find happiness here. This is a 300 DPI bitmap version that should print nicely on 11x17 tabloid paper. Warning! The file is 26MB compressed and a whopping 173MB when unzipped.