Now available: No-Cost, No-Touch App Lifecycle Management for Lean Teams

It's available now. It's Team Foundation Service, a new way for teams who care about rapid software delivery to plan and manage projects. And for teams up to 5 developers, it's free.

Writing code is fun, but managing development can be complicated. Do you keep your code under version control? Where do you keep track of bugs and new features? How do you keep your team on the same page? Now you can utilize Team Foundation Service to do all these things today, with zero additional infrastructure.

Stop standing up servers. Stop installing and configuring multiple pieces of software to support your development process. With Team Foundation Service, you get an easy-to-use and easy-to-administer cloud-based solution that handles the critical elements of application lifecycle management, such as version control, agile planning and automated builds. Now available for development teams worldwide, Team Foundation Service benefits include:

	Accessible from anywhere, using existing and familiar tools.
	Plan projects, collaborate with your team, and manage your code online from anywhere using any modern web browser. Works with all editions of Visual Studio 2012 (even Express!), as well as Eclipse and other tools (by using our command line client).
	Get started quickly, with no infrastructure to manage.
	Go from "sign up" to your first project in minutes, and set up a Continuous Integration (CI) build in a few easy steps. Your source code and work items are stored in the cloud, making server configuration a thing of the past.
	All languages and platforms welcome.
	From C# to Python, from Windows to Android, you can use a variety of languages and target a variety of platforms. Our services are designed to help you focus on what you do best—building great apps.

Get started today by signing up for your free account!

Team Foundation Service is being made available to teams of up to five developers for FREE. Sign up today, invite up to four team members and start collaborating for no cost. To get started, visit: http://tfs.visualstudio.com.

Bump Photos to your Computer!

One of the reasons people love Bump is that it's the fastest and simplest way to share photos with friends and family.  Bumping photos has been the most popular way to use Bump -- tens of millions of people have already bumped more than 600 million photos in the last two years.

When we talk to people who use Bump, they often tell us how they love that Bump just makes sense to them.  If they want to share a photo with a friend or family member, they don't have to understand complicated technology -- they can just bump their phones together.  But one of their biggest complaints is that it is hard to get photos off their phone and onto their computer.  Syncing is complicated and often requires a cable you just can't find, and people are fed up with emailing their own photos to themselves.  Users would often jokingly tell us, "Bump is great; if only my computer could Bump too!"

So we built it.

Starting today, everyone who uses Bump can go to http://bu.mp on their computer web browser to bump photos from their phone directly to their computer.  There's no software to install -- it all runs in your browser.  You simply select the photos in the Bump app on your phone and then gently bump the spacebar on your keyboard... and voila!  Your photos will instantly appear on your computer.  It's how technology should work.

From there, you can save them to your hard drive or get a short link to share with friends on Facebook, Twitter, email, or IM (we host the photos for free, no limits).  Bump works with modern versions of most of the popular web browsers, including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Watch the quick demo video, or better yet, go try it yourself at http://bu.mp.  

We hope you enjoy it!

-dave and the Bump Team

Tributes To Steve Jobs, Record Tweets & Cool Cartoons

The world remembers and mourns Steve Jobs, in a huge waves, and it would probably hit some smashing records with leaders around the world expressed their condolences and gratitude over Facebook, Twitter and media. It was simply mind-boggling judging by the massive outpouring of tributes. Traffic was so jam that Twitter dispatched its famous “fail whale”. Social media sites were crazily filled with Steve Jobs, Think Different, Stay Hungry, Legacy and whatnot.

The Life and Times of Steve Jobs [INFOGRAPHIC]

Steve Jobs packed a lot of living into his 56 years. If his career had ended 30 years ago, he still would have made history for helping popularize the personal computer. But he did so much more than that.

As we all know, Jobs defied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Jobs’s final years at Apple were as notable as his early ones. Even his 11-year hiatus from the company should provide inspiration for businesspeople who think their careers are over.

The below infographic, from Infographic World, lays out Jobs’s life and accomplishments.

From Brick to Slick: 38 Years of Cellphone Evolution [INFOGRAPHIC]

Ah, the good old days, when cellphones were the size of bricks. Some were so big you had to carry a separate bag containing their electronic innards, and if you weren’t careful, you might end up with a dislocated shoulder by the end of the day.

They generally weren’t called cellphones at all — most of us codgers called them “car phones” back then, because that was the size of conveyance you needed to lug around all of their electronic parts.

Fast forward to today, where cellphones have gotten plenty smart. One factor caught our eyes: Notice how different all the phones start looking around 2007. Wonder what happened then (cough! iPhone cough!)?

This infographic from Wilson Electronics (maker of cellular signal boosters for buildings and cars, so they know about these things) takes you from Dr. Martin Cooper’s laughable handset (that looked more like a cream-colored shoe than a phone) up to today’s darling of the moment, the Apple iPhone 4S.

Tell us in the comments how many of these cellphones you’ve used, which one was your favorite, and how you would compare your previous model to today’s latest

Infographic courtesy Wilson Electronics

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/10/13/cellphone-evolution-infographic/

Android App Downloads Now Top 4.5 Billion

The Android Market took a little bit of time to get heated up, garnering its first 1 billion downloads only after two years on the market. Would you believe that the same amount of downloads happened in the last 60 days? Those are the facts, according to Google’s mobile advertising sales director for Europe Ian Carrington, who announced that since its inception Android has seen 4.5 billion downloads from its apps storefront. If the number of downloads are growing at any rate similar to the number of device activations per day, the figure is likely to blow through the roof by the end of the year.

Reference: http://phandroid.com/2011/06/29/android-app-downloads-now-top-4-5-billion/

Video Coverage: Clouds Take Shape at Tech·Ed 2011

Top 10 Firefox Add-Ons for Web Designers

There are plenty of Firefox add-ons at your disposal that can extend the browser’s core functionality. The types of add-ons you’ll encounter have a wide range of utility, from productivity tools that monitor the amount of time you spend on the Internet, to social media tools that conveniently give you in-browser capabilities for using popular services such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Firefox browser is a popular choice for web designers, and there are plenty of add-ons that can make the day-to-day work of web design significantly more efficient and fruitful. Here are 10 highly recommended, top-notch Firefox add-ons for web designers. Let us know what other Firefox add-ons you use in the comments.

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1. Web Developer

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The Web Developer Firefox add-on is a huge suite of web design tools packed with massively useful functions that will help web designers perform tasks more efficiently. By default, it displays as a toolbar towards the top of the browser, presenting you with various menus such as CSS, Resize and Cookies.

Whether you need to inspect the CSS of page, discover information about a webpage (such as seeing all the alt attributes of images on the page), quickly validate a web design for W3C compliance or measure design elements, Web Developer will likely have a convenient tool for you.

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2. Firebug

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Firebug is such a popular web design/front-end web development Firefox add-on that there are actually add-ons for it (see no. 5). And if you were to ask any web designer or web developer what Firefox add-on they can’t live without, chances are he’ll say Firebug.

Firebug is an open source add-on that gives web designers powerful tools for inspecting and debugging a web design. It can help you figure out what CSS styles affect certain elements (in case you’re having trouble with a style rule that doesn’t seem to render properly), inspect the document object model (DOM) to learn about the structure of the web page, determine attributes such as color, width, height of HTML elements and much more.

The extension can take a while to learn (trust me, it’s worth the time), but the creators have some helpful documentation to get you started.

Mono for Android

Mono for Android enables developers to use Microsoft™

Visual Studio™ to create C# and .NET based applications

that run on Android phones and tablets. Developers can

use their existing skills and reuse code and libraries

that have been built with .NET, while taking advantage

of native Android APIs.

Visit : http://mono-android.net/

Java founder James Gosling joins Google

James Gosling, the notable programmer who founded Java at Sun Microsystems, has joined Google, a company locked in a lawsuit over how the technology is used in Android.

Gosling announced his new Google employment today on his blog. "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon," he said.

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, Gosling decided not to join.

Oracle's ways evidently didn't agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison "Larry, Prince of Darkness." And, he said, "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle."

Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement concerning how Android uses software called Dalvik that's very similar to Java. A prime benefit to using Java is that it shields programs from the differences of underlying hardware, such as different processors, letting a single program run on a variety of computing devices.

Google has some of the bubbling, research-intensive ethos that characterized Sun, but it's vastly more commercially successful. And unlike Sun, it's managed to become a household name.

Gosling was on his own for about a year. "One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities," he said on his blog.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20047787-264.html#ixzz1IbzDzqjr

Acer to launch first Chrome OS netbook, Android-based Aspire One sales disappoint

Acer loves it some Google. And unless Google's trying to stamp out your revenue stream, who doesn't? Now Acer chairman, JT Wang, says that he expects to be first to market with an official Chrome OS netbook -- sometime in the second half of 2010 according to DigiTimes' sources. In fact, JT says that Acer's been working on a Chrome OS device since mid-2009. This despite admittedly weaker than expected demand for its dual-boot Android netbook, the Aspire One AOD250. Guess even the Google halo isn't enough to shoehorn its smartphone OS into a market dominating position on cheap ultra-portables. It's worth pointing out that DigiTimes' moles aren't saying anything new with the launch time-frame since Google's target for its gold Chrome OS build has been 2H of 2010 ever since the lightweight OS was announced. Not that the timing matters too much since we'll likely be seeing plenty of Chromium OS netbooks flooding the grey market long before the second half of 2010. 


Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/acer-to-launch-first-chrome-os-netbook-android-based-aspire-one