Web telephony provider twilio, which is based in San Francisco, has today announced its first international office, in London. You can now purchase UK telephone numbers at a cost of $1.00 per month, or Freephone numbers for $2.00 per month.

Twilio is not in competition with Skype or Google Voice; rather it offers an API so that you can incorporate voice calls and SMS messaging into web or mobile applications. The REST API lets you provision numbers with various options for what happens to incoming calls (conferencing, forwarding to another number or voice over IP, recording, transcriptions), as well as notifications so that you can get email or SMS alerts.

CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson came from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has a similar business model in that twilio targets developers and offers infrastructure as a service, rather than selling complete applications to its customers. Twilio does not own any datacenters, but uses mainly AWS and some RackSpace virtual servers to provide...

This is what happens when Windows 8 crashes:



The restart message proved false, and I had to reset the virtual machine.

I did the search, which told me:

The CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check has a value of 0×00000101. This indicates that an expected clock interrupt on a secondary processor, in a multi-processor system, was not received within the allocated interval.

This proves that you make give blue screens a prettier face, but that does not make the error messages any more helpful to a non-expert user. Or should I head for my nearest computer store and ask if they have a spare clock interrupt?

Related...

Zend has announced Zend Studio 9 beta, the latest version of its IDE for PHP. The feature that caught my eye is integrated support for the Zend Developer Cloud, currently in technical preview. Setting up a PHP development environment is not too difficult, but can be a hassle to maintain, and the idea of being able to fire up an IDE anywhere and start coding is attractive.

You do not need Zend Studio to use the Developer Cloud; they are independent projects, and you can use the free Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) or another IDE or editor.

The PHP Developer Cloud is not just a shared hosting environment for PHP applications:

All applications are housed within a container on the Zend Application Fabric. This container is separate from all other containers and has its own database instance and is easily connected to your IDE.

The Zend Application Fabric is for deployment as well as development. It is a server framework that includes the Zend Framework and also the capability...

The unstated theme of Adobe MAX 2011 last week was this: what is the future of Flash? The issue being that with HTML 5 ascendant and Apple wrecking the idea of Flash as an ubiquitous web plug-in, should Adobe be frantically retooling its design tools for HTML and apps, or does Flash still have a future?



The answer is a little of both; but let’s be clear: there was more Flash than HTML at MAX. What was the most eye-catching demo? It was Flash running Unreal Tournament with the claim of better graphical performance than on Microsoft Xbox 360 or Sony Playstation 3.

It is also worth noting that the touch...

Yesterday saw the 1.7 release of Subversion, the widely used open source version control system. It is a significant release with many new features, bug-fixes and performance improvements, and I suggest reading the release notes or complete change log. One thing to highlight is that the default working copy metadata storage is now a single sqlite database per working copy, rather than a .svn direction containing metadata in sub-directory.

I upgraded my TortoiseSVN, which is already updated to 1.7, and tried upgrading one of my own projects. Here is the .svn folder before the upgrade:



and...

Adobe’s Damon Cooper, who runs the BlazeDS and Data Services team at Adobe, has posted about BlazeDS vs the paid-for Data Services.

It is a curious post, in that he simultaneously highlights new features coming in Data Services 4.6 while also giving a number of reasons not to use BlazeDS.

BlazeDS is the free and open source version of Data Services, for publish/subscribe messaging and remote object invocation of Java objects in a Flash or AIR application.

He points out that the LGPL licence may be problematic; he emphasises that BlazeDS is unsupported; he says that while it is open source there are no non-Adobe committers; and as the knock-out punch adds:

Additionally, while we will absolutely be making sure we keep BlazeDS fresh and the bug fixes flowing, we don’t currently have any major new features planned for BlazeDS. That could change, but we’re currently full-out on delivering innovation to our customers have asked for in Data Services and we are full steam ahead there. ...

Google has announced an early preview of Dart, a new language for web applications. The news is not a surprise, especially if you have been keeping track of the developer conference GOTO Aarhus, whose organisers had pre-announced that Google would be announcing its new language there, as indeed it did.



Dart is a curly-brace language like JavaScript, Java, C, C++ and C#. In Dart, as in C# and Java, a class can implement multiple interfaces, but only inherit from a single class. Dart supports both static and dynamic typing. Google says it can be executed by a Dart VM, or converted to JavaScript:

Dart...

Embarcadero’s CodeRage virtual conference starts next week from October 17 2011, and is worth a look if you have any interest in Delphi or the new RAD Studio XE2.

There are sessions on 64-bit Delphi, the new cross-platform FireMonkey framwork, the new LiveBindings data binding system, Prism (Delphi for .NET), and extras including a session on Regular Expressions in Delphi and elsewhere, Dependency Injection and Delphi Spring, unit testing with Delphi, and using 3D graphics in business applications.

Of course you could wait for the replays to be available, but if this is like previous events there is a chance to ask questions to people who might actually know the answers, so there is an advantage to the live event – though the event is schedules for Pacific Time so the afternoon ones involve a late night if you are in the UK.

Related posts:Updated SQLite wrapper for Embarcadero Delphi (and Free Pascal) What’s coming in Delphi RAD Studio XE2: more details of 64-bit and Mac announced,...

Adobe announced six touch apps for Android and Apple iPad tablets yesterday at its MAX conference in Los Angeles. These hook into cloud services offered by the Creative Cloud, also just announced.

My favourite among the new apps is Adobe Debut. The problem this addresses: you want to show your client the work you have done in one of the Creative Suite apps like Photoshop or InDesign. A tablet is ideal for handing round at a meeting, but Adobe will not be porting the full Creative Suite to iPad any time soon.

The solution: Debut runs Creative Suite in the cloud and sends down static images to your device. You can even see the separate layers in a Photoshop image.



It...

Adobe has announced the acquisition of Nitobi, the company which created and sponsors the open source PhoneGap project for creating cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5 technology.

Apparently this does not affect the plan to donate PhoneGap to the Apache Software Foundation:

We are also excited to announce our donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation,” said Dave Johnson, chief technology officer, Nitobi. “Adobe has been fully supportive of our decision.

Adobe already offers PhoneGap integration in Dreamweaver 5.5, though I found some gaps in this initial release.

I spoke to Nitobi CEO André Charland earlier this year.

Smart move, though it will be interesting to see how Adobe now balances mobile app development with PhoneGap vs mobile app development with Flash – both of which are cross-platform approaches.

Here at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles I will be quizzing Adobe about how it plans to evolve its design and development...