Android 4.1, Jelly Bean: The world’s most popular platform gets even better

Fast & smooth

With buttery graphics and silky transitions. We put Android under a microscope, making everything feel fast, fluid, and smooth. Moving between home screens and switching between apps is effortless, like turning pages in a book.

More reactive and uniform touch responses mean you can almost feel the pixels beneath as your finger moves across the screen. Jelly Bean makes your Android device even more responsive by boosting your device’s CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don’t need it to improve battery life.

Simple, beautiful and beyond smart

(Expandable, actionable notifications)

Android has always put you in control when it comes to staying notified and connected. Now you can take action directly from the notifications shade. Late for a meeting? Email everyone to let them know. Missed a call? Call them back in an instant. And because they’re expandable, you can get an even deeper look into the things that matter most, like multiple emails or photos on Google+.

Widgets work like magic.

With Jelly Bean it’s now even easier to personalize your home screen. As you place widgets on the screen, everything else automatically moves to make room. When they’re too big, widgets resize on their own. Interacting with your favorite apps and customizing your home screen has never been easier.

Seamlessly take and share photos.

Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, made snapping photos super fast; Jelly Bean brings that same speed to the next step: viewing. Just swipe over from camera to filmstrip view to instantly view the photos you just took, and quickly swipe away the ones you don’t like. Now sharing--and bragging--are a breeze.

A smarter keyboard.

Android’s dictionaries are now more accurate, more relevant. The language model in Jelly Bean adapts over time, and the keyboard even guesses what the next word will be before you’ve started typing it. With improved text-to-speech capabilities, voice typing on Android is even better; it works even when you don’t have a data connection, so you can type with your voice everywhere you go.

Accessibility.

With Jelly Bean, blind users can use 'Gesture Mode' to reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output. Jelly Bean also adds support for accessibility plugins to enable external Braille input and output devices via USB and Bluetooth.

Android Beam.

With Android Beam on Jelly Bean you can now easily share your photos and videos with just a simple tap, in addition to sharing contacts, web pages, YouTube videos, directions, and apps. Just touch two NFC-enabled Android devices back-to-back, then tap to beam whatever's on the screen to your friend. Instantly pair your Android phone or tablet to Bluetooth devices like headsets or speakers that support the Simple Secure Pairing standard by just tapping them together - no more syncing or searching required.

Windows 8

Windows 8 is the next version of Microsoft Windows, a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, Microsoft Tablet PCs, and home theater PCs. The release to manufacturing (RTM) is expected around July 2012,[2] three years after the release of its predecessor, Windows 7. Windows 8's server counterpart, Windows Server 2012, is in development concurrently with Windows 8. The most recent official pre-release version of Windows 8 is the Release Preview, which was released on May 31, 2012.

Unlike Windows 7, which was intended to be a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows line,[3] Windows 8 has been "reimagined from the chipset to the user experience" to connect more with the user. It features a new user interface based on Microsoft's Metro design language, similar to that in Windows Phone. The new interface is designed to better suit touchscreen input, along with traditional mouse and keyboard input. A version of Windows 8, called Windows RT, also adds support for the ARM processor architecture in addition to the previously supported x86 microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and VIA.

EnStream mobile payments app

transacting and managing personal information. Enstream is trying to become a force at the heart of mobile commerce, for global transactions and making commerce faster, secure, and valuable to users. It is still on process of demos and testing the enstream mobile payment app is easy to use. It allows you to scroll through your list of cards, bank card, credit card – then select and point to the merchant terminal. Charges are then billed/debited from your associated account. 

uide EnStream is in talks with banks CIBC, TD, RBC, Scotiabank and BMO, about the introduction of technology payments for NFC-compatible phones. The plans to create a single standard SIM-card, which will replace the usual credit cards. How it works, look in the video below.

What makes a good IT professional 

The world of IT is large. In it there are a lot of different types of people. Some are good, some are bad, some are mediocre and some are brilliant. Although I like to think I am one of the brilliant ones I am sure that others will disagree. So what separates the good from the bad.

Everybody has different reasons to get into IT and there are too many to list so I am not going to get into it. One thing the best IT professionals have in common is a passion for their work. To them it is not work but a way of life. They eat, live and breathe IT, especially the particular facet they specialize in. To them eight hours in front of a computer is not enough. It is not just work it is a knowledge base, it is entertainment, it is relaxation, it is life! A reason for living, a thing of excitement where change is welcome and advances in technology are eagerly awaited.

But that in itself does not make a good IT professional. The one thing that I would say is most important. The only thing that leaps the dividing line from the good and the bad is the ability to solve problems. Our profession is usually a case of one problem after another that needs to be solved. This continuous problem solving, often the same problems over and over again with minor variations that are enough to make it interesting, are what gives us our zest for the industry.

However just being able to solve problems is not enough. The speed at which we can solve problems is most important. A common saying in business is that time is money. What this translates to is pressure on us to solve the problem in the smallest amount of time. Generally the bigger the problem, the less time we have to solve it and an exponential amount of pressure from the higher ups to find that solution. This means that often to find a solution we not only have to think logically but also laterally. About ninety nine percent of solutions to our problems can be found on the Internet, unless we have some new technology that is hot out of the factory, so the better we can search on the Internet the quicker we can find solutions to our problems.

That is what makes a good IT person. Not willingness, although that does play a big part in learning to become a good IT person. Not intelligence as some people can be very intelligent at some things but totally brain dead in other areas. Not perseverance as even though it will find the answer in the end it can be too late. No it is the ability to research and solve problems in the quickest amount of time. That ability can be learned or it can come naturally but it is a needed ability to make you a good IT professional.

How to become an IT professional

How to become an IT professional

Hey guys warmly welcome to the blog,this is my very first post so first of all I will tell you some points which will makes you professional in IT field.it's not as easy as you heard or as you seen.it fills with lots of hard working and dedication.i hope following tips will actually guide you.

• Language.  This is what someone will typically know coming out of University, or after having taken certifications in a programming language.  It consists of knowing the core library classes/functions of the language(s) concerned, as well as techniques for exception handling, reflection, concurrency, and so on.  Note that superficial knowledge is not enough here - to write a language well, or code review other people's work, you need to know and understand all the features that are available out of the box.
• Language skills.  Once you know a language, you must then learn how to use it.  This involves stylistic aspects - the way you structure, format and document code. It also involves technical aspects - how to use concurrency safely, pessimistic rather than optimistic programming, how to instrument code to permit analysis/debugging, the different forms of collection object and their uses, proper management of loading/binding, and so on.
• Design patterns.  Since the late 1980s it has become accepted practice to utilize standard abstraction techniques when writing code, mainly for maintainability but also for code quality and productivity.  The key reference here is the "Gang of Four" book ("Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides), which uses C++ and Smalltalk for its examples.  The GoF book has inspired a decade of further research. A professional programmer must know not only the 23 design patterns from the GoF book but also many additions to and enhancements of these patterns. They will also understand when and how to use each pattern, and how to refactor code - to restructure it to conform more (or less) closely to specific patterns, or just to improve its elegance and readability, without changing its functionality.  As well as for programming, there are also design patterns for enterprise application architecture - the key reference here being Martin Fowler's book, "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture"
• Frameworks.  No-one now writes enterprise applications without using an abundance of frameworks - code libraries that embody best-of-breed solutions to common technical problems. Frameworks are based on design patterns, and you cannot properly understand how to use frameworks unless you first gain confidence with application of design patterns. Many frameworks are open source and can be used to build a product intended for commercial sale.  Frameworks often have associated domain-specific languages such as XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and OCL (Object Constraint Language). The productivity advantages of using a framework are enormous, since you may be drawing on hundreds of man-years of previous effort. For example, the HumanEdj framework for human work draws on research going back to the 1980s, and allows you to build collaborative applications in minutes that would otherwise be beyond most development budgets.
• Standards. Any software going into a corporate environment must interact with other software in a standardized way.  Hence such applications need to conform not only to accepted standards but also to emerging standards. For instance, any Java-based application that talks to a content management system must be aware of JSR-170 and JSR-283, which are standards for communicating with such a system via the Java language. There are many important standards pertaining to application development, some like the above arising from a language-specific community, and others (such as Topic Maps for XML documentation of linked content, or DocBook for technical documentation) from non-language-specific bodies such as ISO and W3C.
• Work Management.  Any professional developer should have some grasp of the various possible approaches to managing a software project, ranging from traditional waterfall techniques through to the many different agile methods and techniques.  There are also design patterns for work management - the key references here are "Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development" by Coplien and Harrison and my own book "Human Interactions".  I will have a lot more to say about this in future postings, since agile techniques are key to the successful management of outsourced application development - whether or not the project is officially viewed as being "agile".
• Take Away. The first step towards successful outsourced application development is to make sure you know what is going on.  This means that your own staff must be able to understand technical matters at least as well as your outsourcing supplier.  To achieve this, you must ensure that your organization possesses people with skills at all the levels described above.  Some of these people will have only skills to a certain level - but you will need at least some people who have all the skills right up to level 6.   The number of such people required depends on the size of your organization and the number of outsourcing projects you have going on.This is the first step towards outsourcing success and the most crucial.  In my own consultancy work, I provide clients proposing to engage in an outsourcing project with a learning trail that their key technical staff should follow, customized to the particular type of project they are considering.  If their people are familiar with the material already, all well and good.  If not, acquiring this knowledge not only prepares them for the project in question, but is a valuable contribution to their organization's general capability - a contribution that will stand the organization in good stead in future (as well as, of course, being useful professional development for the individuals in question).Only once your organization has developed such an in-house capability are you in a position to code review the work that is done on your behalf, as well as to engage with your supplier as to how the work is being carried out.  In the next postings to this series I will discuss how to position yourself so that such engagement is not only painless, but viewed as beneficial by both sides.

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