Category: IT News (page 2 of 2)

Picturex

What is Picturex?

Have you ever waited days or weeks for others’ pictures after a party, company event or city trip? Picturex is the solution! Picturex is the easiest way to exchange pictures with friends, family and aquaintances. Create a new album with just a few clicks, invite others into the album and upload a ton of pictures. Every invited person can also up- or download pictures. So, you can keep your best pictures and memories and easily enjoy them at any time.


Features

  • create and share new albums for free
  • very easy manual picture up- and download
  • automatically detect and suggest pictures to upload
  • very easy management of your albums
  • early-adopter bonus: benefit from very competitive features
  • and a lot more!

You can still use your favourite camera or filter app and upload these pictures! We also plan to release an iOS, Android and web version of Picturex soon!
We love feedback and suggestions to improve Picturex! Please contact us via info@picturex.ch. You may find more information  on www.picturex.ch.

Download

Free Download for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone!

 

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Screenshots

TelerikSelfie – My three secrets to app success

This is my entry to the TelerikSelfie Contest. The first time ever I took a video of myself and the first take of the video 😉

QuickTip: Block ads in Internet Explorer

The only reason I use Google Chrome (besides that it’s fast) is that I can install an ad blocker. It not only makes websites a lot faster, but also more stable, secure and less cluttered. And I am aware that many websites rely on ads as their main revenue channel – and I am willing to accept some ads – but when 40% of the space is used for ads, it’s just too much. Anyway, i just found a solution to block ads in Internet Explorer (also the modern version of Windows 8.1): Tracking Protection Lists. There, you can add EasyList Standard (the list AdBlock uses too) and Stop Google Tracking, if you want.

 

Now I can use Internet Explorer without ads, and enjoy the most secure & energy-saving browser, and let the tabs sync to my other devices (Lumia & Surface)!

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Picturex App for Android: Release!

I am extremely happy to announce, that our team at the MIT Innovation AG just released the first version of Picturex for Android (requires Android 4.0 or higher). Developed with Xamarin, followed by an intensive private and public beta testing, we were now able to release the first version, just right for the summer time. This is THE app to exchange pictures with others from your city trip, bathing holiday or openair event with others! Please go on and download the app for free for your Windows Phone or Android device. And thanks for a good rating in the app store! By the way, we just started with the development of the iOS version. So stay tuned 🙂

 

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Personal Analytics – Two Studies on Software Developers’ Perceptions of Productivity [Thesis]

I am happy to announce, that I just finished and submitted my master thesis. In the past five months, I’ve intensively worked on this project, got amazing opportunities (e.g., research trip to Vancouver and Redmond), could talk to numerous people about my work, and learnt a ton. Thanks to everyone for their help!

Abstract

The better the software development community becomes at creating software, the more software the world seems to demand. One way to address the gap between software demand and supply is to try to increase the supply, by optimizing the productivity of software developers. Although there is a large body of research about measuring and investigating productivity from an organizational point of view, there is a paucity of research about how software developers, those at the front-line of software construction, think about, assess, and try to improve their productivity. To investigate software developers’ perceptions of software development productivity, we conducted two studies: a survey with 379 professional software developers to help elicit themes and an observational study with 11 professional software developers to investigate emergent themes in more detail. In the survey we found that software developers perceive their days as productive when they complete many or big tasks, without significant interruptions or context switches. Yet, the observational data we collected shows our participants performed significant task and activity switching, while still feeling productive.

We analyze such apparent contradictions in our findings and use the analysis to propose ways to better support software developers in a retrospection and improvement of their productivity through the development of new tools and the sharing of best practices. Based on the finding that there might not be a single and/or simple measurement for a software developer’s productivity, we discuss a new idea to provide a software developer with a meaningful retrospective analysis of his workday and workweek and its possible impact on a developer’s productivity.

Download

You may download the thesis here. Here you find the post relating to our paper on Thomas Zimmermann’s website. Thank you!

Exchange unforgettable memories of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil with Picturex!

A picture says more than a thousand words:

Picturex_WorldCup2014More information here.

 

Tagi-News für Windows: Ich brauche Ihre Hilfe!

Liebe Windows Tagi-News Benutzerin und lieber Windows Tagi-News Benutzer

Unser Problem

Seit etwas mehr als zwei Jahren nutzen knapp 8’000 Benutzer die Tagi-News App für Windows Phone und seit ca. einem Jahr inzwischen knapp 26’000 Benutzer die kostenlose Tagi-News App für Windows 8. Tagi-News gehört seit jeher zu den beliebtesten und meist-gedownloadeten Apps in der Kategorie News (in der Schweiz) und die Version für Windows 8 wurde 2013 von Microsoft sogar zur App des Jahres gekürt.

Tagesanzeiger hat die Veröffentlichung der beiden Apps nicht unterstützt, aber gutgeheissen. Durch die Einführung der so genannten Paywall (kostenpflichtige Artikel) können wir die Inhalte und somit die Tagi-News Apps leider nicht mehr anbieten. Mehrere Versuche zur Einigung mit Tagesanzeiger und einer Einführung einer offiziellen App auf beiden Plattformen sind leider aus Desinteresse von Tagesanzeiger gescheitert.

Wir bedauern diese Entwicklung sehr, können aber leider nichts mehr unternehmen. Nur noch Sie können uns helfen: Bitte teilen Sie Tagesanzeiger mit, dass Sie weiterhin auf Ihren Windows Geräten Tagi-News lesen wollen und nicht weiterhin systematisch ignoriert werden wollen. Besten Dank für Ihre Unterstützung!

Ihre MIT Innovation AG
info@mit-innovation.ch

Möchten Sie jetzt mithelfen?

Sie können uns helfen! Bitte senden Sie eine E-Mail an Tagesanzeiger (oder melden Sie sich via Twitter oder Facebook) und bitten Sie Tagesanzeiger, den Entscheid nochmals zu überdenken. Bei Fragen stehen wir Ihnen gerne hier zur Verfügung!

Ja, ich will helfen!

(öffnet eine neue E-Mail, die Sie nur noch absenden können!)

Weitere Informationen…

… finden Sie auf hier. Herzlichen Dank für Ihre Unterstützung!

 

Information Fragments

In my master project, two colleagues and I got the chance to develop a powerful web-application, using Asp.Net, Azure and TFS, to help the developer answer his daily questions using the information from multiple software repositories.

In a typical workday, developers have to answer several questions, such as “Who is working on what?” or “Which is the most popular class?”. Today’s tool support is limited, as we only found tools, where the usage was tedious and time consuming, where the user has to learn a new query language or where the license costs are very high. Besides this issue, there are enormous amounts of information a developer has to manage. A solution to increase the efficiency of answering everyday questions is needed to support the developer in keeping track with the growing complexity of the information. Fritz and Murphy developed a concept, information fragments, which compares and merges different data sets from different repositories using an id and text matching algorithm between the connections of these repositories. These nodes and edges are aggregated to a graph, the composed fragment, and presented to the user. We base our work on this approach and developed an extensible web application prototype that lets the user easily manipulate and filter the composed data by using an easy to understand abstraction of the model. Additionally, the data is represented using five different visualizations, each meaningful for different situations. The usefulness of the approach and its implementation was evaluated, using four usage scenarios. Finally, interesting directions for future work have been presented and discussed.

You may read our report here.

Extended Todos

During a course at the university (Human Aspects of Software Engineering, by Prof. Thomas Fritz), Claudio Anliker and I got the chance to develop a small application to help the developer in his daily tasks. Our result is a Visual Studio add-in that extends the representation and management of task annotations (=todos):

 

It is common practice that developers use task annotations in their code to improve its readability and the communication between team-members. Their fast creation makes them easy to forget, as there is usually no connection to a planning tool and only a limited view to manage them available. We introduce a new approach by connecting task annotations with an agile planning tool, improving their rep- resentation by adding contextual information and extending their default view. This approach aims to extend the very limited possibilities present in current modern IDEs such as Visual Studio, but also to keep the lightweight characteristics. An operability study and a small-scale evaluation shows the approach’s great potential, despite its prototype nature and many possibilities and ideas for future work.

 

You may read our report here.

TouchMountain video made by Nokia

Nokia just released the video we made at the Mobile World Congress 2013 featuring TouchMountain, the cooperation with Nokia and Augmented Reality in general. You can find more information at Nokia Developer.

 

«Es war spannend, herauszufinden, wie viel man mit einem Smartphone machen kann»

In der neusten Ausgabe der Netzwoche erkläre ich im Interview, warum wir die App für Windows Phone entwickelt haben und diskutiere die Herausforderungen bei der Entwicklung einer Augmented-Reality App. Interview: Marcel Urech, Netzwoche

 

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Windows 8 App of the Year Award

Ich wurde heute von Microsoft an die Shape (The App Conference) eingeladen. Die Shape findet dieses Jahr zum fünften Mal statt und richtet sich an Entwickler (aller Plattformen!), die sich für App Entwicklung im Allgemeinen und App Entwicklung auf der Windows Plattform interessieren. Erich Gamma war übrigens der Keynote Speaker und startete den Anlass mit seinem Vortrag über seine Arbeit an Entwicklertools, die vollständig im Browser funktionieren und mit TypeScript (JavaScript) entwickelt worden sind. Spannend!

 

Vorher wurden die besten Windows Phone und Windows 8 Apps ausgezeichnet. Tagi-News für Windows 8, das ich bei der MIT-GROUP im letzten Sommer (mit einigen Updates ;)) entwickelt habe gehörte ebenfalls zu den Gewinnern, was mich natürlich sehr freute :-).

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Hier das Video von der Demo:

 

Weitere Infos finden Sie z.B. hier auf im Microsoft Media Corner, auf Inside-IT, auf ITMagazine oder auf  Computerworld.ch. Sie können Tagi-News hier kostenlos herunterladen.