News

Android Displaces Opera as Most Popular Mobile Web Browser   Wednesday 07 March

Android's browser overtook Opera to become the dominant browser in the mobile environment last month, according to figures from StatCounter. This situation, may, however, only be temporary.

Google Play - a Unified Store for Web and Android   Wednesday 07 March Google is combining its outlets for apps, music, movies and books as a single store which is intended to be equally accessible from the Web and from Android devices. 

Code of Conduct for Mobile Apps   Tuesday 06 March

Electronic Frontier Foundation has drafted a Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights that seeks to codify the best practices for app developers.

MSDN Magazine March 2012 - What Do You Want to Read?   Tuesday 06 March

I Programmer's regular review of the contents of the latest issue of the online magazine for Microsoft developers.

PhoneGap 1.5 Released   Tuesday 06 March

Surely that headline should read Apache Cordova 1.5 released?
Even though the list of fixes for this release includes several variants on "Rename PhoneGap to Cordova", PhoneGap seems reluctant to shed its previous identity. 

First Stable Release of MariaDB 5.3 Series   Monday 05 March

The MariaDB team has announced the release of version 5.3.5, the first stable general availability release of the MariaDB 5.3 series relational database.

MIT App Inventor Back Online - Just   Monday 05 March

If you have been missing App Inventor then you will be relieved to learn that it is now available again - albeit still in beta.

Barbara Liskov Admitted to National Inventors Hall of Fame   Monday 05 March

Barbara Liskov is among the 2012 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in recognition of her contributions to programming languages and system design.

Microsoft Flight Free Over Hawaii   Sunday 04 March

Microsoft has made Flight, its new flight simulator, available as a free download. Available only for Windows it is also restricted to the skies over the Big Island of Hawaii.

Joomla Magazine March 2012   Sunday 04 March

Lots of community news plus advice on setting your hourly rate and several mentions of Joomla extensions are part of the mix for this month's issue.

3D Kinect Art   Sunday 04 March

Yes you read the title correctly - it is Kinect not Kinetic art - but there is plenty of movement in it. As well as being an inspiration to practical engineering, the Kinect and its 3D depth maps are inspiring art of all sorts.

Leap Year Gotcha for Azure   Saturday 03 March

Although Microsoft responded in a timely manner to an outage of its Azure Compute service last week, it was left having to admit to a software bug that really should not have occurred.

Shake n Sense Makes Kinects Work Together!   Saturday 03 March

Microsoft Research has discovered that shaking Kinects, far from making them fall apart, makes them work together. See it in action in the video.

Computer Programmers - Relatively Sleep Deprived   Saturday 03 March

Computer Programmer comes joint 5th in a league table of the most sleep deprived jobs - a condition presumably induced by stress and lots of strong coffee.

Robots That Fly - Video   Friday 02 March

TED talks are always fun but this one looks more fun than average. It's about quadrotor based robots that play the James Bond theme.

Smartphones Outnumber Basic Cell Phones in US   Friday 02 March

The latest figures from Pew Internet show that 46% of American adults are now smartphone owners and fewer of them are confused about whether or not their phones are indeed "smartphones".

PHP 5.4 - A Major Update   Friday 02 March

PHP 5.4 brings improvements in memory management and performance, making it faster, and features that had been destined for PHP 6.0.

Stencils for Android   Thursday 01 March

The Android team at Google has introduced an easier way to make your Android apps look stylish.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Get It Now?   Thursday 01 March

If you have been working with the Developer Preview of Windows 8, then the release of the Consumer Preview will be a bit of a yawn - but you still have to have it.

FSF Opposes Restricted Boot   Thursday 01 March

The Free Software Foundation is running a Restricted Boot Webcomic Contest to raise awareness of the issues surrounding Microsoft's "Secure Boot" feature on Windows 8 ARM-based machines which threatens to lock out other operating systems. This is marketing masquerading as security.

Google Summer of Code 2012 Seeks Smaller Organizations   Wednesday 29 February

Mentoring organization applications are now being accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code and Google is looking for newer, smaller open source organizations to get involved

Professional Programmer

In Praise of Top-Down   Friday 02 March

Top-down modular programming is these days pushed aside by object-oriented programming. But there is a place for both methodologies to co-exist and it solves the ever-present problem of how to begin.

The Core

Document Caching With dtSearch   Wednesday 07 March

Continuing our look at facilities available in dtSearch, we examine the option to store the contents of a document within the index and show how it provides hit highlighting, report generation and document retrieval. It has lots of possibilities.

eBooks

Kinect SDK 1 - The Player Index   Monday 05 March

Kinect provides two levels of processed data - a skeleton map which gives you the position of the player's limbs and a user index which can be used to discover the player's overall position. In this chapter of our ebook on using the Kinect SDK for Windows we take a close look at the player index data.