Microsoft released the first beta of the Visual Studio LightSwitch IDE earlier this week. It’s designed to allow non-programmers create business applications and allow programmers of various levels to create applications quickly. It simplifies the process and allows doing many common functions like coding a database interaction to be done from a visual perspective. If you need to code anything, you can choose between Visual Basic .NET or C#. The overall goal seems to be allowing one to focus on the business rules and policies while creating an app, not the syntax.
Digg‘s latest iteration, version 4, went live today to the public. It sports an overhauled look that gives an updated appearance and puts more emphasis on the social side of the site. Digg is a news submission site where all the coolest things on the Internet can be found. They have now made that experience more customizable by following certain profiles and seemingly have made being followed a higher priority. I’m sure there are many changes and improvements I haven’t even found yet with this update.
US users of Gmail will be getting a new feature in their inbox, the ability to make and receive calls right inside of Gmail. This seems like a perfectly predictable expansion of the Google Voice service and chat/video chat already offered within Gmail. Google seems to think it’s a natural evolution of society going by their promo YouTube vid:
The change was announced earlier today and will be rolling out over the next few days. Calls to US and Canada are free for the rest of the year and other countries are charged a low rate.
Another guest posting over at Freewaregenius today. I really enjoyed writing this article because the tool I found just seems like it will be pretty helpful in my day-to-day work. The tool is called MultiBoot USB and it makes the creation of a bootable USB drive with multiple Linux distributions on it a breeze. For me, this means I can carry GParted, Clonezilla, DBaN, Offline NT Password Editor, and a linux distribution on a single USB key.
Twitter has had phenomenal growth and reaches millions of people daily. From the outside looking in, it seems they were able to accomplish this while not following the traditional path of getting everything exactly right. Particularly recently, Twitter has a high rate of downtime and a high response time. Combined with the “Older Tweets are not available…” message, I looked into some of the free Twitter alternative services that you could host on your own server like Status.net and Sharetronix.
There’s a guest post with my name on it over at Freewaregenius. Today’s article is about Gazelle.com, a site that assists recycling your used gadgets. If they’re really old, Gazelle will ship you a box to return the gadget to them for proper disposal. If it has value, they’ll send you a quoted amount of money. It might be a whole lot easier than trying to find a buyer on eBay or Craigslist.
Comments