Jumping Electron is a game developed with Unity 3D Game Engine that will run on smartphones with Android OS, iOS and their respective tablets. The first 2 chapters and 40 levels are a race on a track inside a Radio and a Jukebox. The action of next 40 levels will take place inside a Phone Switchboard and a TV. Unity 3D has an open source version but a license must be purchased for Android and iPhone. For a team with one developer, it’s OK; however, for a bigger team, Unity PRO is recommended for source control, merging changes etc.

The new operating system released by Microsoft has quite a few changes. One of these changes is the background tasks for Metro applications. Before talking about background tasks from Windows 8 we need to understand why they were introduced. Windows 8 appeared because of the necessity of the operating system to run on multiple types of devices. Besides those we are used to (desktop and laptop) more and more people have started using tablets. Even though in terms of CPU and memory they are becoming more powerful, the expectations we have from a tablet are different. Battery life is extremely important for a tablet.

All those who interacted, no matter how little, with Microsoft Project agree unanimously that it’s a very powerful scheduling tool. In other words, if we define and detail its tasks, it is very good at building a plan (the correct term is schedule), better than anything else. But, in order to define the tasks clearly, we need to know exactly what we expect from the project: what does it have to deliver, on what conditions, which standards to comply with etc. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? In practice, we all know how complicated (impossible?) it is to define the purpose of the project and the delivery from the very beginning. In this case, how could Microsoft Project help me if I (or my client) don’t know what I want from it?

Gogu set the alarm, turned off the lights and stepped out of the building. He nodded to the idly smoking doorman. He was standing in front of the door as if he was the owner of the dozens of offices standing in the darkness. Gogu choked back a sigh: „It’s not like someone made me stay until this hour like the doorman”. Actually, the pride made him stay „but that doesn’t count”. Some other time he would have smiled at his own remark, but now he was too bitter: he could not believe that a “child” was sent to give him indications, he who had been in that company for seven years,

Today’s interview differs from the previous ones through its main subject: ITCamp conference, represented by Mihai Tataran, who cofounded it along with Tudor Damian. Let’s start by introducing our guest: ITCamp conference 2012 “is a premium confe¬rence for specialists in Microsoft technologies”. In the hosts vision, the conference gets its premium from the speakers, ”the best speakers we can bring [..] extremely well-known people, which at top world class conferences like TechEd or PDC, constantly rank among the Top 10 rated speakers, based on audience feedback grades, and we have four of them this year”. The Microsoft technologies focus comes from this desire to invite only the best, Microsoft being the place where the two founders share the most connections and experience, allowing them optimum access, “If we were to spread out on several areas [technologies] it would prove more difficult to achieve this”.

In the beginnings of the Internet, during Web 1.0 ages, the general trend was to build portals where users could find many useful information about a certain subject. Everybody was impressed that an enormous amount of information could be found in one place. The hunger for information was finally satisfied. Then Web 2.0 generation arrived, which was more adapted to the demands of the new wave of users. These users already had the default right to have information one click away, but more important they needed to socialize, so everyone was connected in the virtual place.

One would probably wonder why a metric with such a complicated name is needed since experts developers, architects, requirements engineers etc.), directly involved in the production of information systems, already have their own methods (eg. Expert Judgment) that can estimate, with a margin of error, how long it would take to develop a product or a module / component of a software product. The method has as purpose: analyzing and improving productivity, project estimating, project control, using the method at different times of development phases.

Current dynamics of the software development industry is a real challenge for quality assurance. This is due to being orientated towards rapid and frequent delivery of applications (in the context in which their degree of complexity has increased), to the large number of end users and to their increasing expectations, to the different operating environments. We mentioned the growing expectations of customers, and we believe that there is no secret that they want increased quality for the offered products, rapid changes to them, personalized services and easy maintenance, integrated systems and, of course, delivery at prices as small as possible, preferably immediately.

The previous issue of the magazine talked about the trend of Big Data in the software industry. The current article presents the fundamentals of the technology that enables the storage and query of high volume of data. To get a better picture about the issues around Big Data, let’s take a look at an example. Not long ago there was this statistics showing up on the Internet: eBay collects about 20TB of user generated data daily. Facebook collects 20TB of user generated content and it generates another 10TB from daily analytics. The Insights service is powered by processing about 15PB of data. Google processes 20PT of data daily. It is pretty much clear that not only hardware is needed, but also a new kind of software concept is required to deal with such a data volume.

In the previous issue we covered Kinect, a new technology from Microsoft that can monitor the whole body of its users in real time. After a brief introduction, we included a sequence of code aimed at initializing the device and suitable for a Hello World type application. Next, we will take a detailed look at the sequence of code and try to explain how it works.