GidoGeek

❖ Microsoft shows off Windows Phone Mango

This week Microsoft proudly showed of Windows Phone 7’s new release codenamed ‘Mango’. They even posted this really nice introduction video on youtube.

Go watch it. It’s a blast and includes all the usual Microsoft marketing nonsense including the now traditional “IE is faster then every browser on the planet in our in-house produced benchmark”. They compare a iPhone 4, Blackberry Torch, Motorola Atrix and an unnamed Windows Phone running the new Mango operating system using a Microsoft produced and heavily IE favored benchmark to show off just how awesome IE9 supposedly is. It wouldn’t even surprise me if the iPhone 4 was running an older version of iOS 4 before the inclusion of the Nitro javascript engine.

To be honest I respect what Microsoft is doing with Windows Phone 7, taking a stand and not blindly copying everybody although that Application switcher looked kind of familiar. However I just can’t make sense of the navigation. I’ve actually never seen a device in real life (can you even get them outside of the US ?) so I’m basing my judgement on video’s and reviews alone. I see myself and also anybody else I’d hand the phone completely being lost in the navigation and having no clue “where they are” in the phone.

For Microsofts sake I do hope they are not planning to launch the test device he’s showing off since it seems to go from a full charge (at 1 minute 28)

To near empty (at 6:35)

10% of Microsoft Employees Using iPhones

Some Microsoft workers take pains to hide their iPhones. While rank-and-file workers >tend to use the iPhone openly around peers, some conceal them within sight of more >senior executives. One Microsoft worker said he knows several colleagues who try to >disguise their iPhones with cases that make them look more like generic handsets.

“Maybe once a year I’m in a meeting with Steve Ballmer,” said this employee. “It doesn’t >matter who’s calling, I’m not answering my phone.”

The most funny thing about this is that this guy was actually planning on answering is phone while in his once-a-year-meeting with Steve Ballmer if it wasn’t for the fact that he owns an iPhone.

full article here

Social coding @Codaset

So I’ve been busy. Like I mentioned in an earlier post I’ve been working together with a school friend of mine on a new Rails project.

So since the main goal of these projects I’m doing in my spare time is to learn allot and gain as much experience as possible we decided to use some stuff that was new to both of us. The first new thing being GIT.

Up un-till now I’ve been using SVN for my home and school projects while being stuck with an ancient version of Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe at work. GIT is something entirely different. Git, unlike SVN and MVS is a DVCS which stands for Distributed Version Control System. This means that GIT doesn’t use a centralized repository model like SVN and MVS but instead every user has their own repository stored locally. If you want to find out more about GIT I recommend reading Pragmatic Version Control using GIT. It took me a while to get used to the separation of commit and push but so far I’ve been really impressed with GIT and will start using it for all my new and upcoming projects.

Since I started this project with my school buddy who lives 200 Km’s away we needed a remote repository. Then I remembered I found a site called ‘codaset’ on a lazy afternoon of browsing for webapps. Codaset is a nice webapp created by Joel Moss. It allows you to host private and public git repositories as-well as a hybrid of the two (closed source but open wiki & tickets). It’s still in beta right now but according to Joel not for long. Many of you will think, isn’t that exactly like GitHub ? and yes, it’s allot like GitHub. But it also offers some advantages. Joel asked me to participate in a discussion about his proposed payment plans. After Codaset comes out of beta it will use a “Pay-as-you-go” payment plan. Meaning you’ll only pay for what you use. To me as a small developer that is a big advantage. The biggest advantage for other starters however is that Joel has decided that he will make your first private repository free unlike GitHub where you have to cough up 7$ a month just to start your first private project. I’ve been really pleased with Codaset so far aside from the few bugs that are to be expected when using beta software.

Whether GitHub or Codaset is better doesn’t really matter. It’s always nice to have options. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is better.

Are you going to give Codaset a try ?