Son günlerin gündemde tutunamayan konusu Fatih Projesi ciddi vaadleri olan ve ülkemizin geleceğini yakından ilgilendiren bir proje. Bu proje kapsamında yapılması planlanan çalışmalar şu 5 ana başlık altında toplanmış

1. Donanım ve Yazılım Altyapısının İyileştirilmesi 
2. e-İçeriğin Sağlanması ve Yönetilmesi
3. Öğretim programlarında Etkin BT Kullanımı
4. Derslerde BT Kullanımı İçin Öğretmenlere Hizmetiçi Eğitim
5. Ağ Altyapısı ve Geniş Bant İnternet Kullanımı ile Bilinçli ve Güvenli BT Kullanımının Sağlanması

Oh well... It seems that we are making the same old mistake again. It is hard to articulate my feelings about the trending tablet business. It feels like we are traversing the same path again. To be more clear I guess we again do what we did in the past when the PC business was in its early days. 

History

I'm relatively young and unexperienced character in this software business but as far as I remember from my readings about the evolution of the PC age once hardware vendors used to create their proprietary OSes running only on their hardware and some software companies were making contracts with rest of the hardware vendors for deploying OSes on their platforms. As time went by PC market changed characteristics and more consumers began to purchase PCs. Increase in demand forced hardware vendors to standardize the hardware specs so that they can build cost effective PCs. Then proprietary OSes were replaced by generic OSes like Windows and Linux distros. And today as a consumer when you buy a PC, laptop or netbook you know that you can install Windows or other Linux distributions on your hardware; you believe that it is your right and freedom to use any OS on your hardware.  You should have already noted this scenario is in action right now for the tablet business.

Future

I hope within 5 to 10 years period tablet hardware vendors like Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Sony and otheers will realize the similarity I've tried to articulate above and decide to produce standardized tablet hardware so that we can install either Android or Windows 8 or even better have dual boot option on our tablets. 

Exceptions

• Apple will not follow this trend as it was the case with PCs
• Motorola (well actually Google) will probably not follow the trend as well

Early Adopters

As of today Microsoft seems to be on right path since Microsoft has no Windows Phone or Windows Tablet hardware unit. But if rumors about the Nokia acquisition comes true Microsoft will jump in the Exceptions wagon with Apple and Motorola

Lets wait and see...

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.

Prize winner in Competition "Android Development Competition"

Introduction

I have been designing and developing mobile applications for less than 1 year, though I'm a professional software developer for 10 years or so, and this new mobile era makes me feel excited. As of today there are two and a half major platforms gaining pretty well reputation by the mobile users. Two of them are iOS (formerly known as iPhone OS) and Android and the half is long debated Windows Phone 7.

In this tutorial article I will try to introduce you to the general development principles of Android by building a real calculator application (TouchCalculator). By the end of this tutorial you will be able to build Android applications with simple user interfaces and backing business logic.

Preparing Yourself and The Development Environment

Before you get started, if you are totally new to Android I would suggest you to read the What is Android? section from the Android Developers site and I would also suggest you to have a look at Android Developers Blog.

If you have not configured an Android development environment already, please follow the instructions in this link.

TouchCalculator MockUp

TouchCalculator, our sample and simple calculator, is a standard calculator supporting four arithmetic operations and three mathematical functions (namely square root, reciprocle and percentage) along with a memory buffer.

Let's start with the mockup of our calculator. Below is a color coded sketch of our application. I've seperated the UI into locigal parts and each part is represented with a color highlight. There is a reasoning behind the conceptual seperation and this will be evident in the next sections of the tutorial.

More...