It is always a very exciting time of the year here at Altova when we reveal our latest major software version, and I am pleased to announce our MissionKit 2012 release today!
As always, we've packed a ton of exciting new features into this release and they span the entire product line.
Just a quick pointer to make sure that you didn't miss any of the excellent articles that we published on the Altova Blog these past couple of months. These contain tips on using our products, helpful development pointers, use-cases, and much more. Here is a quick digest of some of the most popular articles…
I learned about the passing of Steve Jobs this Wednesday as I was in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. I was munching on a cream puff from Beard Papa's on my way back to the hotel when the message popped up on my iPhone.
Image credit: Jonathan Mak (麥朗)
I was thunderstruck by the news and observed a moment of silence and remembering. While I only ever had the opportunity to meet Steve in person once at a talk he gave during his time at NeXT, he and the company he built have made a huge impact on my life in numerous ways.
It is not often that I would give a piece of software the attribute “life-changing”. Certainly, XMLSpy and it’s huge success has changed my life and that of many people at Altova. And others have called DiffDog a life-saver before:
"DiffDog saved my life! Recordare developed MusicXML as an Internet-friendly format for publishing and sharing digital sheet music. As MusicXML became more popular, we needed a truly XML-aware differencing program to evaluate the XML files created by our Dolet plug-ins. DiffDog gives us the high quality regression testing tool that we had long sought for our MusicXML projects."
- Michael Good, CEO, Recordare
But the software I discovered on January 1st this year is the one that best deserves this label.
I’ve been traveling for a bit, so I haven’t even had time to tell you about the new version 2011r2 of our Altova product line yet. As always we’ve been very busy in the past four months and have added a number of very cool features to all our products. As a result the Altova MissionKit v2011r2 packs a nice punch and shouldn’t be missing from any professional developer’s toolbox.
I couldn’t resist the temptation to get my hands on the first Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) device and wanted to explore the tablet world outside of iOS a bit, so I bought a Motorola Xoom the day it came out. I’ve now spent a couple of days with the device, downloaded apps, explored all the features, and come to the conclusion that the Motorola Xoom and Android 3.0 are a huge disappointment.
I’ve been watching Jeopardy – The IBM Challenge for the last two evenings and the Nova documentary “Smartest Machine on Earth” the week before. What the folks at the IBM Watson team have pulled together is really quite impressive. Not only is Watson in the lead so far – and by a huge margin – it has also taken a giant leap forward for natural language processing in computers.
Obviously, cloud computing is one of the major trends of 2010 and continues to excite people. We just posted a brand new detailed article on the Altova Blog about XML in the Cloud that shows how to use DatabaseSpy, MapForce, XMLSpy, and StyleVision to work with an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance in the cloud.
Every now and then a new technology comes about that has the potential to change the way how we interact with computers in a profound manner. The first computer mouse, the first touchscreen display, the first use of multi-touch – all paved the way for a new generation of user interfaces.
I believe we are now witnessing the introduction of the next such new technology.
Every now and then – sometimes in response to one of my jubilant “inbox zero” tweets – people ask me for tips on how to communicate more efficiently using E-Mail as well as various social networks. For a long time I have resisted their questions or occasionally simply given people the link to the “Inbox Zero” video by Merlin Mann.
