News

Amazon Launches Mojito OS   Wednesday 25 September

Amazon has announced two new versions of its Kindle Fire tablet which are on a par with the Nexus 7. At the same time Fire OS has been upgraded to version 3.0, codenamed Mojito. Is the gulf between Android and Fire widening?

Free Version of PyCharm Python IDE   Wednesday 25 September

JetBrains has released PyCharm 3.0, an update to its integrated development environment for Python, in two versions - a paid-for Professional Edition and a free Community Edition.

Chrome Drops Support For Plugins   Tuesday 24 September

Google has announced that Chrome will gradually phase out support for the Netscape Plug-in API, NPAPI. In its place it will offer its own native code interface for any extensions that are required. Of course, these will only work with Chrome. 

100 x Faster Queries Promises Oracle   Tuesday 24 September

A new In-Memory Option for Oracle Database 12c will run queries 100 times faster than the current speeds for Oracle on standard data, according to Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.

Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013   Tuesday 24 September

Google's Cloud Developer Challenge 2013 was launched at the beginning of September. The app submission period for the contest is October 22nd - November 21st so there is still plenty of time to enter.

Feedly RSS API Now Ready   Monday 23 September

When Google killed off  its RSS reader a vacuum opened up in the app fabric. Of all of the attempts to fill its place, Feedly is probably the most successful. Now it has an API and you can create custom RSS readers.

Major Update to Google BigQuery   Monday 23 September

Google has announced a major update to BigQuery, adding real-time support to its service for analyzing large amounts of data.

Amazon GameCircle Now On iOS and Android   Monday 23 September

Amazon GameCircle v2 has been released bringing Whispersync for Games and its other features, which until now have been restricted to Kindle Fire, to iOS and Android.

Skeuomorphism?   Sunday 22 September

There are some words that seem to come out of nowhere and move from "never heard of" to "over used" in an instant. So it was, and is, with "skeuomorphism". What does it mean? We have a video that sends up the whole idea... so what does it mean? 

FutureLearn's Inaugural Game Programming Course Already Full   Saturday 21 September

FutureLearn, the UK-led mooc provider, has now opened its beta website and published its first set of course offerings, which includes Begin Programming: Build Your First Mobile Game.

GCHQ Challenges Hackers To Crack Cryptic Codes   Friday 20 September

The UK's national security agency, GCHQ, is currently conducting an online treasure hunt, the starting point of which is a set of codes. It is presented as part of a recruitment drive to fill open positions that require problem solving skills.

Tributes Abound for Hiroshi Yamauchi Creator Of Nintendo   Friday 20 September

Hiroshi Yamauchi, the man who brought Nintendo to prominence as a leading player in the video games industry, has died aged 85.  The great-grandson of Nintendo's founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, Hiroshi Yamauchi ran the Japanese firm from 1949 to 2002.

Internet Explorer 11 Preview Updated   Friday 20 September

Microsoft has released an update for the Developer Preview version of Internet Explorer 11 with better web standards support and web console improvements.

Updated Version of Indigo Studio   Thursday 19 September

Infragistics has release a new version of Indigo Studio, a wireframing tool for prototyping desktop, web, and mobile apps.

$1 Billion For Linux   Thursday 19 September

IBM is to invest US$1 billion in promoting Linux development over the next five years for its Power Systems servers.

Top Coder And CloudSpokes Join Forces   Thursday 19 September

Appirio, the parent company of crowdsourced cloud development community, CloudSpokes, has announced the acquisition of its much larger competitor, TopCoder. The merged developer community will have almost 6000 members. providing a valuable resource for those looking for developer and data analytics expertise.

The Core

Android Adventures - Spinners And Pickers   Thursday 19 September

Working with Android Studio makes building the UI easy with an interactive editor, but you still need to find out how to handle the things it isn't quite so good at. In the next two chapters of our ebook on Android the easy way, we look at spinners and pickers, the next step up from buttons and text controls. 

History

History of Computer Languages - the classical decade, 1950s   Tuesday 24 September

In the first of a series of articles about the development of computing languages we look at the struggle to create the first high level languages.