News

Coding Together - Free iOS5 App Class with Friends   Wednesday 20 June

Stanford's free iPhone and iPad apps online course is about to restart. It now has a new interactive social dimension that allows you to share it with friends and get help from other participants.

Opera 12 Faster and More Stable   Wednesday 20 June

The latest version of the Opera web browser has been released with some good additions for web developers, including support for WebRTC.

SQL Fiddle   Wednesday 20 June

SQL Fiddle is a new tool that allows you to experiment with SQL queries without even having a dbms.

Update for Kinect Developer Toolkit   Tuesday 19 June

Microsoft has released Kinect Studio 1.5.1. This updated SDK boosts performance and stability, improves face tracking, and introduces offline documentation support.

Mozilla Launches Thimble   Tuesday 19 June

Thimble is the new tool from  Mozilla that makes it really simple for anyone to create and share their own web pages in minutes. Now everything is in place for Mozilla's Summer Code Party.

Microsoft's Surface - What's a Tablet For?   Tuesday 19 June

The overall design of Microsoft's new pair of tablet's perhaps indicates its approach to the genre and the driving force behind Windows 8.

ACM Turing Centenary Event   Monday 18 June

The flood of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing is now reaching its peak. When you can't attend in person, the Internet lets you join in virtually. 

Faster Jigsaw Solving   Monday 18 June

You might imagine that computers would be good at solving jigsaw puzzles, but the task is harder than you think. Pattern matching is fairly easy when you have a specified orientation. If you try it when you don't know which way to hold the pieces, you'll soon see the problem.

Mozilla Ignite - A New Competition   Monday 18 June

Mozilla has launched a competition with $500,000 in prize money for the winning apps.

I-SoDog - Your Robot Best Friend   Sunday 17 June

A new six-inch high robot dog that can dance to music, guard your laptop and respond to more than 50 voice commands is being launched by Japanese toy maker, Takara Tomy. The Omnibot I-SoDog can also eat ‘food’ that you offer it from your smartphone.

The Singularity is Near - A Movie   Sunday 17 June

Ray Kurzweil's bestseller "The Singularity Is Near" has been made into a movie. It should be available to the view this summer.

MITx - the Fallout Rate   Saturday 16 June

Robot Pizza Maker   Saturday 16 June

A robot that makes pizzas to your own specifications in just three minutes is being launched in the US market. It could revolutionize programming as we know it... or not...

Ubuntu's App Creation Competition   Friday 15 June

Ubuntu has announced App Showdown, a competition with a tight deadline. The challenge is to create an entirely new app from scratch, preferably using the Quickly framework.

iOs and Android AWS Support for DynamoDB   Friday 15 June

Amazon has announced support for DynamoDB in the AWS Mobile SDKs.

A Tax On IE7   Friday 15 June

Some browsers are just too much effort to support - IE6 and IE7 are the two that top the list. You might think that there is nothing we can do about it, but an Australian electronics retailer has decided that it can - by applying an IE7 tax.

Error Code 451 Proposed for Censorship   Thursday 14 June

A proposal has been made for new HTTP error code, to be returned when a page being requested is unavailable because of censorship.

Samsung TecTiles - NFC Stickers to Program Your Phone   Thursday 14 June

Near Field Communication has been available on phones for a while, but it still hasn't really been exploited by clever apps. Now Samsung thinks that with TecTiles you can program your phone to do what you want, simply by touching.

The State of PHP in the Enterprise   Thursday 14 June

A new survey provides insights into the use of PHP to create applications in large enterprises and concludes that the availability of developer talent and quality frameworks is key to the success of PHP.

Professional Programmer

On Statistics and Open Education: A Brief Chat with Sebastian Thrun   Friday 15 June

Udacity is launching its third crop of university-level courses and Sebastian Thrun has an ambitious aim for his Intro to Statistics course. He explains to us why this course should be on our to-do-now list and when we can look forward to complete Computer Science degrees from Udacity.

eBooks

WinRT JavaScript - Templates & Data Binding   Wednesday 20 June

The Template object is useful in its own right, but add it to data binding and you have a easy-to-use way to present data to the user.  It also happens to be the easiest way to find out about data binding in general.

The Stone Tapes

Reddit Admits Banning Major Sites   Monday 18 June

Reddit has caused some surprise by announcing bans on Business Week, Phys.org, The Atlantic and more. Some Redditors are happy that evildoers are punished, some are not so sure, but this news shouldn't come as a surprise. Reddit has been banning sites and users for a very long time - just not admitting it.