developers

Microsoft has completely overhauled its Windows Phone Dev Center and added some extra ways for developers to get paid.

The company today announced the changes in a blog post, saying that the site, which allows developers to do everything from submit applications to download software development kits, was completely rebuilt "from the ground up." The design itself comes with a healthy amount of white space and a streamlined, basic feel. According to Microsoft, the redesign aims "at providing faster access to common tasks."

For developers, however, the key additions come by way of availability and payments. … Read more

Amazon has launched a social game development effort called Amazon Game Studios, as well as a game for Facebook called Living Classics.

"Amazon Game Studios is exactly what it sounds like: a new team at Amazon that's focused on creating innovative, fun and well-crafted games," the Amazon Games Studios team said in a company blog post today. "We know that many Amazon customers enjoy playing games -- including free-to-play social games -- and thanks to Amazon's know-how, we believe we can deliver a great, accessible gaming experience that gamers and our customers can play any … Read more

More than a billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, and some 300 million of them are in Africa. Industrial design students Ryan Lynch and Marcus Triest have an interesting approach to tackling the problem in sub-Saharan African with his Solar Bag.

This design concept is both a shoulder bag-style container to transport water from a distant source, as well as a tool to purify it.

The container is made of polyethylene, which allows UV rays to pass through the clear outer layer and kill most of the bacteria in the water. It's similar to … Read more

Facebook announced today it is doubling the site's release speed to shipping new code twice per day. The push is driven by Facebook's New York office as well as the social network's daily push already managed by its California release engineering team.

As Facebook grows towards 1 billion monthly active users and beyond, maintaining and frequently improving the site is a must. The company's hacker mentality of "move fast and break things" definitely applies here.

"We're making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1,000 engineers … Read more

Google today issued a wide-ranging update to its Developer Program Policy, with the aim of making "Google Play a great community for developers and consumers."

The search giant zeroed in on two issues it's seeing across the Google Play landscape: "deceptive app names and spammy notifications." From now on, developers will not be allowed to use app names or icons that are deemed "confusingly similar to existing system apps," the company wrote in an e-mail viewed by CNET. Google didn't say what would make a respective application confusing.

On the spam front, … Read more

Venturing out of its typical terrain Flurry announced today that it is launching a collection of cloud services to "empower developers to build better apps faster."

To accomplish this feat, the mobile app analytics company acquired the mobile startup company Trestle (it bought Trestle back in May but didn't announce the acquisition until today). Together they worked to create the data driven app built on cloud infrastructure. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The way AppCloud aims to work is by letting developers put cloud-driven capabilities into their apps, such as user account management, scalable … Read more

Xamarin, a company that provides developer tools to hundreds of thousands of mobile app developers, has received $12 million in first-round funding, the company announced today.

The financing comes from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Floodgate, and will be used to expand the company's software and build a sales and marketing team, according to a press release.

The desire to build mobile apps can often be hindered by a lack of mobile developers, but Xamarin's software makes it easier for traditional programmers to make the transition to mobile, according to an analyst quoted in Xamarin's release. … Read more

Mobile devices are making the world go round. A study by the World Bank and infoDev titled "Information and Communications for Development 2012" found that an estimated three-quarters of the world's people have access to a mobile device. The number of worldwide mobile subscriptions grew from less than 1 billion in 2000 to over 6 billion today, the study said. Close to 5 billion of the subscriptions are in developing countries, and mobile subscriptions in low- and middle-income countries increased by more than 1,500 percent between 2000 and 2010, from 4 to 72 per 100 inhabitants.… Read more

When the time is right to propose to your significant other and you decide the way to do it is to create a custom boot animation for their Android phone (and you think they'll say yes and not "what the hell is wrong with my phone?"), who you gonna call? XDA Developers forum, that's who. … Read more