Just noticed a nice update on developer facing Android Market panel. Now the developer can see the device user and the app version on each comment on Android Market. Which is a very nice addition to quite barren otherwise control panel. This will help to pinpoint problems more easily for the developers.

Another things that I would personally (and probably many of other Android developer as well) like to see are:

• Andriod OS version

• Possibility to answer to the comment - let the developer answer and send the answer to the user's email automatically

If you want to remove XCode on OS X (aka Developer Tools) you can do the following:

If installed from the developer portal:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

If installed via App Store it should be:

sudo /Library/Developer/Shared/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

NOTE: To be able to install Developer Tools from the App Store, you need to delete Install XCode from your /Applications folder something like this should work:

sudo rm -Rf /Applications/Install Xcode.app

Then once you download the Xcode from the App Store, it is not installed yet. You need to go to the same place /Application/Install Xcode.app and run the installer.

A bit of unusual post but this is the (almost) naked fiancee of Sean Parker Alexandra Lenas

Last year I've put some stats for BB OS distribution here: [link id='540']

Beginning 2012 I was wondering what is the OS distribution now with the BB OS 7.0 devices in the wild and especially since I wanted to do updates only for the devices running BB OS 5.0 and up.

So the distribution looks like this:

Making devices that run OS below 5.0 to be about 5-6% of all the devices. Of course this data is based on the users who use this specific app, but I am almost positive that this is pretty close to the generalized numbers.

The numbers look like this:

Here's the chart of smartphones market share according to market research firm NPD

Quite interesting trend can be seen by the end of the year with huge spike in iOS sales. This of course can be attributed to the iPhone 4S and the holiday season. Apple products are still considered luxury and make great gifts as opposed to say Android which is considered more of a necessity.

UPDATE:
Additional source (showing the same trend though) from Nielsen
***Note the shift in timeline. Otherwise the graphs correlate.

An interesting infographics was published on the WP7 developer blog.

The most interesgint points that we saw are that 56% of the users can purchase apps via carrier billing which is amazing number for a young platform. Android did not have carrier billing for at least a year into its existence if not two years. Which was a significant barrier for selling paid apps since billing mechanism was not oiled like on Apple's iOS platform where all the users have iTunes setup with their billing information.

Surprising enough the Games category is not as huge as we'd expect it to be. Taking a little smaller percentage than the Entertainment apps in the app to category distribution. But in the paid apps category Games are far ahead of any other category in purchases which of course should not be surprising, although this trend is not so prominent on other platforms.

Overall it seems pretty good info and quite useful for developers. Enjoy!

If you are using Chrome and Firefox and well pretty much any other popular browser, you are used to switching tabs with CMD+number which switches to the desired tab e.g. CMD+1 will switch to the first tab (including the pinned ones for Chrome). This however does not work for Safari.

For safari to cycle between tabs use CMD+SHIFT+Left/Right

If you were playing with the "Live Tiles" from the latest (at the moment) OS update to the Windows Phone code named "Mango", you might have been wondering what makes Live tiles unique and how many live tiles can be placed on the home screen of the user. Accidentally I found out that what makes the live tile unique is the tile reference or the tile URI

a usual way to create a tile would be:

ShellTile.Create(new Uri("/GotoPage.xaml?param1=value1&param2=value2, UriKind.Relative), tileData);

so whenever you change the value1 and value 2, a new live tile can be created.

Happy coding and have fun with the live tiles!

If you are getting the:

"failed to connect to device as it is pin locked"

when trying to deploy your app to a windows phone 7 device no worries. Just make sure to disable the "screen lock" or "screensaver" whatever it is called. That's what it is all about!

I was lucky to figure this one immediately but if you got here means you got stuck with it and had to look it up. Hopefully this will help you with that problem.

If you are getting an error similar to the error below while trying to install and/or update BlackBerry SDK as a plugin for Eclipse


An error occurred while collecting items to be installed session context was:
(profile=AppceleratorProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).
Unable to read repository at:
Unable to read repository at https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/auth/contactFormPreload.do?code=
...


You are in luck!

Your problems are over as you found the solution. All you need to do is to clear the "Secure Storage" contents. To do that go to

Windows -> Preferences

Type secure, drill down to find the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository, expand this, and you will see the swdownloads.blackberry.com. Select this entry and delete it. This should resolve the issue next time you try to update/install the plugin you should be asked again for your credentials to the BlackBerry developer portal and once you put them in the installation should proceed normally.

Here's how it looks in Eclipse: