News

First Release of Dart SDK   Wednesday 17 October

It's a year since Google released a technology preview of Dart, its JavaScript replacement. Now, to coincide with Dart's first birthday, comes the M1 release of the SDK.

NetBeans Does Android   Wednesday 17 October

For lots of reasons which mostly have little to do with technology, Android development is tied to Eclipse. But Eclipse is not the only Java IDE. You can do Android using NetBeans and now there is a layout addon making it even easier to use.

Project Hawaii - SDK for Windows Apps   Wednesday 17 October

Microsoft has released an SDK for Windows 8 that you can use to develop Windows Store apps that take advantage of cloud services and Windows Azure. An equivalent SDK is also available for Windows Phone 7.x.

OpenROAD Brings Data to the Web   Tuesday 16 October

Porting  a data centric app to the web just got a lot easier by leveraging the power of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 with Actian OpenROAD, 

JavaScript Your Way - Sweet.js Macros   Tuesday 16 October

Macros have a long history in computing and sweet.js may just give you JavaScript any way that you would like to program it.

Celebrate Ada Lovelace Day   Tuesday 16 October

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and events which aim to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths are taking place around the world.

Ruby Track on CodeAcademy   Monday 15 October

Codeacademy's latest new track offers a tutorial introducing  Ruby, the object-oriented scripting language you can use on its own or as part of the Ruby on Rails web.

Appeals Court Lifts Ban on Samsung Galaxy Nexus   Monday 15 October

Last week a US appeals court ruled that Samsung can continue to sell the Galaxy Nexus while the appeal against a ban imposed in June works its way through the courts.

Mitsuba Makes Graphics Realistic   Monday 15 October

Mitsuba is a free, open source, advanced rendering program. Its latest version includes new algorithms that claim to bring real life to 3D graphics.

Rodney Brooks On Robotics And Baxter   Sunday 14 October

 If you are interested in robots and AI, you can't help but know who Rodney Brooks is. As well as having interesting views on the subject, he is also the founder of iRobot - of Roomba robot vac fame. Now, as CTO of Rethink Robotics, he's announced Baxter, a new industrial robot.

Beamatron - Steerable AR   Sunday 14 October

Take one Kinect and one projector, add suitable software and you have Beamatron, an immersive augmented reality environment that lets you interact with virtual objects and lets virtual objects interact with you.

MediaGoblin Looking For Support   Sunday 14 October

The Free Software Foundation has launched a fund raising campaign on behalf of GNU MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing system for images, video, and audio.

SmoothLife - A Continuous Conway's Life   Saturday 13 October

Conway's Game of Life is well known, but what about a version that works not on a discrete grid but in the continuum? It has all of the features of Life, including gliders, and it really looks alive.

The Coding Explosion   Saturday 13 October

The world has woken up to the idea that coding is a good, even marketable, skill to possess. Students of all ages and from all over the world have signed up to free online tutorials and classes.

Inky-Linky Adds QR Codes to Printouts   Saturday 13 October

Here's a clever idea. Inky-Linky lets you add QR codes to the margins of a web page - so that when you print out the page you can scan the codes to reach all the links it references.

Amazon RDS Adds Replication Feature   Friday 12 October

Yet another feature has been included in Amazon RDS for MySQL. It now supports for MySQL’s “Promote Read Replica” feature, which means you can take a database replica and convert it to a standalone database.

LoveLetters Wins Tony Sale Award   Friday 12 October

The first Tony Sale Award has been won by Dr David Link for his computer art installation LoveLetters, a replica of a 1951 computer with reconstructed software that generates texts to express and arouse emotions.

Google Issues More Tablet Guidelines   Friday 12 October

Google has added a new checklist to its Android Developer site with the aim of improving the user experience of tablet apps published on Google Play.

A Faster Web - mod_pagespeed Comes Out Of Beta   Thursday 11 October

It all sounds too easy. If you are running an Apache server, then all you have to do to make your web site run faster is install a new mod.

$170K Developer Challenge for Android   Thursday 11 October

The AllJoyn Peer-2-Peer Challenge has prizes of cash and hardware for building games, social apps and games using Qualcomm's open source SDK.

Firefox 16 Has Developer Goodies   Thursday 11 October

For an average user the upgrade to Firefox 16 must seem like one big yawn. However, for developers things seem to be really moving. Why?

Professional Programmer

Living In The Post .NET Era   Friday 12 October

We need to talk about .NET.
Microsoft isn't really focused on this old, but excellent, technology and this raises the question of whether we should be taking it seriously any more.

The Core

Getting Started With jQuery - CSS Selectors   Monday 15 October

Selectors are what jQuery uses to pick out particular objects in the DOM. While this might start out simply enough, it can appear to be complicated in more testing examples. The trick is to always remember what the selector is doing.

History

Ada Lovelace, The First Programmer   Saturday 20 June

Ada, Countess of Lovelace was born almost 200 years ago but her name lives on. In the 1970s a computer language was named after her in recognition of her status as the first computer programmer and in  2009 Ada Lovelace Day was inaugurated to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.  Here, for Ada Lovelace Day 2012,  we tell the story of her, tragically short, life.