Agile - A revolutionary approach to programming

Agile development emphasizes close collaboration between the programmer team and business experts; face-to-face communication (as more efficient than written documentation); frequent delivery of new deployable business value; tight, self-organizing teams; and ways to craft the code and the team such that the inevitable requirements churn was not a crisis.

It helps the companies to adopt proactively to ever changing requirements. They are revolutionary in the sense that they contradict the tradional waterfall model in many ways and present a whole new different yet very practical approach to software development process.

Read the Manifesto for Agile Software Development at: http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

and visit the agile alliance at http://agilealliance.org/ to get more info about agile methods.

Palm OS fights back

Palm OS users have reasons to rejoice as their favourite Palm OS is back with new Treo 700p.

The 700p announced today sports a 1.3-megapixel camera, bluetooth, and software allowing it to act as a modem -via bluetooth or USB- to Windows and Mac PCs. Its a CDMA device which supports EV-DO (evolution, data optimized) and this is really a big plus for it as it allows users to experience broadband internet on their devices.

We hope that soon its GSM version will be launched and available in India. Current CDMA model is going to be available only on sprint and verizon in near future.

PDA Watches

For all of you geek out there, there are 2 interesting choices for you from Fossil. One is watch running the good old familiar Palm OS and other with MSN Direct service. Check them out at http://www.abacuswatches.com/

Good news is that their street price is as low as $50, you can get some good bargains from amazon.com too.

I think it can be even used for small applications. PDA model has same memory as Zire21 model, that is 8 MB. Field Force Solutions targetting these PDA watches can be offered for small corporates which do not want to spend a huge some of money to just get the PDA hardware.

You can read a complete review of Palm PDA watch at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31360

Microsoft Email Pushes Blackberry?

In a strategic development, Microsoft has tied-up with major cellular operators for a new breed of mobile phones that will allow users receive email when it hits servers instead of getting it when they synchronise with their servers.

Unlike the Blackberry and its peers who are way ahead in this game, phones running Microsoft's latest Windows Mobile operating system will receive emails "pushed" directly from the company server, sans the need for a separate mobile server or additional license payments.

Microsoft says that Direct Push technology added to Windows Mobile 5.0 gives customers faster access to all of its Office Outlook information. The new version communicates directly with Microsoft Exchange Server and Windows Small Business Server without the need for servers and other middleware.

Speculation is rife that Microsoft will most probably overtake RIM as the leading mobile email provider while RIM which has approximately 4.3 million Blackberry customers, has been sued for allegedly infringing patents belonging to NTP, a US technology company.

New Linux-based Palm OS Unveiled

Access and its wholly owned subsidiary, PalmSource, have announced the Access Linux Platform (ALP), the latest evolution of Palm OS for Linux.

The ALP is designed to be an integrated, open and flexible Linux-based platform tailored for smartphones and mobile devices and to provide a complete, consistent and customizable solution for handset and mobile device manufacturers and mobile operators.

Access and PalmSource expect to make the ALP Software Developer Kit (SDK) available to its licensees by the end of this year (2006).

ACCESS Linux Platform An open and flexible software platform - Major components of ALP include:

* Standard, commercial-grade Linux kernel - version 2.6.12 and above
* Optimized implementation of GIMP ToolKit (GTK+) - popular open source libraries for the creation of graphical user interfaces
* GStreamer - an open source, modular and multi-threaded streaming media framework
* SQLite - a high-performance database engine commonly used in embedded devices

A number of ACCESS and PalmSource technologies have been incorporated into ALP, including:

* ACCESS NetFront™ browser - a proven success with over 200 million deployments in 721 commercial products for more than 30 handset and 90 Internet device manufacturers worldwide
* PalmSource messaging and telephony middleware - a highly modular and scalable implementation
* PalmSource mobile applications including PIMs, multimedia, messaging, PalmSource HotSync® and Palm Desktop -includes the recognized ease-of-use that users expect