We have been using Jira at our office for 5-6 years or so. During this time I was a member of the development team and was just an end user of Jira. After the recent change in my position I'm expected to use Jira as a management tool. Default installation of Jira comes with some defaults which will definitely help you but if you want to effectively manage your team and the job you have to fine tune your Jira setup.

Jira 4 Essentials by Patrick Li (Packt Publishing)  is a must read book if you need to fine tune and customize your Jira installation to meet your very own needs. The book walks through each customizable bit of Jira and with the Help Desk Project section at the end of each chapter customizations are applied to a practical sample implementation. I highly recommend team managers and Jira admins to read Jira 4 Essentials. 

Competition in the wild is really stressful and as a result people make hard to believe mistakes, especially when they are #2 not #1, such as claiming that the only real iOS app is theirs but not the one developed by the competitors. This kind of approach is technically wrong and has some ethical problems. Pricing, differentiation, offering more functionality, advertising your product, special offers, sponsorships, using social media and all other regular tools can be used in competition but blaming the competitors with sentences like "Do not get cheated by fake apps!!" (oh no!!! too many exclamations, this must be important) is not ethical.

Sentences like "My app is the only real iOS app" just reflects your technical inability and ignorance. Let me tell you the truth; the end user is not interested in what is real or fake (fake=browser  according to you). The end user just wants to get the advertised functionality. 

Anyway. Let me explain you,this is really simple, what makes an app a real iOS app

1. Being approved by Apple and being available on the Apple AppStore
2. Being able to run on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), which means your app executes real iOS machine code
3. Following the iOS User Interface Design Guidelines
4. Being able to use the official iOS APIs and Frameworks such as DocumentInteractionController found in UIKit Framework    

See? This is really simple just 4 rules not much or less. Including irrelevant app specific features and wrong performance indicators in a comparison table can make your conclusion seem convincing. But trust me users do not care much about these tables and conclusions especially if it is very clear that you have benefits from this comparisions.

NOTE-1: Browser apps are also real apps since they meet all the 4 criterias I mentioned

NOTE-2: mTouch and mTouch+ are not browser apps but they do have generic browser views to support displaying of unsupported Moodle content/mod/activity

NOTE-3: I'm aware of that the release of moodlEZ caused some uncontrolled stress on you. Take it easy and keep improving your apps and business

Yesterday Yalla Apps contacted with me and asked for an interview. The interview  was conducted to get more insight on the WP7 developer community and thier opinions about different platforms.

Below are my answers to the questions of Yalla Apps

Yalla Apps: Are you a Developer or Designer or both? What is your experience level?

Ali Özgür : I'm a software developer. I currently work for Istanbul Bilgi University, one of the largest privately held university in Turkey, as the Platforms and Services Team Manager. I got BS degree in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University and also hold an MBA degree from Istanbul Bilgi University. I'm developing software for more than 10 years. I've spend most of this time developing on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft developer tools. I've started my software development career working on Motorola MCU software. I've developed software with C++, Delphi, C# and ASP.NET MVC during my 10 year career. I worked on military, education, media, document management, OCR, workflow, Windows CE and mobile projects. I've contributed to some open source projects and in the mean time I maintain my own open source project PragmaSQL.

Yalla Apps: What gets you started on developing for a certain platform? What are all platforms you develop for?

Ali Özgür : Ecosystem of the platform is very important in my opinion. By ecosystem I mean developer tools, platform APIs and SDKs, programming model of the platform, the quality of the hardware running the platform, market share, general profile of the platform users, nice looking appstore There are also some technical parameters I take into consideration. For example providing a unified programming model to developers for different form factors, having strong DRM (Digital Rights Management) to allow just licensed software are some of the technical parameters. 

I'm developing software for Windows platform as part of my regular job with Microsoft .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Under PragmaTouch (my side project) we develop primarily for Apple iOS. Weare also evaluating Android and WP7 and have some demo apps. Personally I've also developed for Windows CE couple of years ago.

Yalla Apps: Would you consider developing for WP7? What you think is missing in WP7 development platform – what is better in others?

Ali Özgür: We are not just considering actually we are actively evaluating WP7 by writing some little demo apps. I think WP7 has a great development platform. First of all you build software for WP7 with the greatest development IDE in the market, in my opinion, which is Visual Studio. You develop with C#, which is the master piece of primarily Anders Hejlsberg and all other great guys at Microsoft. I really love C# as a programming language and when combined with Visual Studio you have the bare minimums to produce a quality software.  WP7 has an emulator not a simulator, the difference is somehow technical but important. As a developer in my opinion others have nothing better than the WP7 development platform. But as a platform for example copy/paste and hardware is better in iOS,

Yalla Apps: Do you think WP7 will play a significant role in mobile OS?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I definitely think that WP7 will play a significant role in mobile. Especially the recent Microsoft-Nokia agreement and the success of the partnership will be very important in determining the place of WP7 in mobile market. Nokia is the biggest mobile manufacturer by quantity and has high market shares in developing countries where demand for new technology is increasing every year. Xbox customers will also play important role during this process since Microsoft has great customer base on this platform.

Yalla Apps: Do you consider learning new technologies for mobile – which ones?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I consider learning new technologies for mobile. HTML5 is the number one in my personal list.