News

Windows 8.1 Released To OEMs But Not To Devs   Wednesday 28 August

Developers are up in arms about the fact that while Microsoft has started to release Windows 8.1 to its hardware partners, developers have been told they will have to wait for it until its general release in mid October.

Computer Graphics Honored By Katayanagi Prizes   Wednesday 28 August

This year's Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science, presented  by Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with the Tokyo University of Technology, have been won by Pat Hanrahan and Doug L. James for innovations in computer graphics.

FoundationDB Version 1.0 Released   Wednesday 28 August

FoundationDB, which combines a NoSQL key-value store with support for ACID transactions to ensure consistency, has reached general availability after an 18-month Alpha and Beta testing program involving more than 2,000 participants.

Oracle Mobile BI Designer   Tuesday 27 August

Oracle has released a design tool that lets users create their own custom analytical apps for mobile devices.

Pixy - Low Cost Camera Recognizes Objects   Tuesday 27 August

Pixy is a video camera that you can train to recognize objects. Instead of outputting a large, difficult-to-process image it simply provides information like, purple dinosaur detected at x=54, y=103. Is this the revolution we are waiting for? 

Google Strengthens Content Policies   Tuesday 27 August

Google has faced the criticism that its lax level of app regulation for submissions to its Play store meant that users were subjected to offensive and intrusive content. Its revised Develop Program Policies address some of these issues. 

Brick - Mozilla Does UI Web Components   Monday 26 August

Not content with having an entire OS to develop, not to mention a well known browser, Mozilla has now taken on the task of creating a UI for the modern web app. But why call it Brick?  

Twitter Used To Map Happiness In New York   Monday 26 August

Central Park is the happiest spot in New York City according to research that classified over six hundred thousand tweets in order to map people's mood to their time and location.

Quantum Computers Animated   Sunday 25 August

If you have always wanted to know how a quantum computer works, then you might get a tiny flavour from this animation ...

Google Code Jam - 45,000 Registrants, One Winner   Sunday 25 August

The in-person finals of the 10th annual Code Jam competition, that challenges contestants with tough coding problems, took place in London last week. The leaderboard is now online and so are the problems. So we can all see just how tough they were.

The Magic Of N-Body Solutions   Saturday 24 August

The physics of n-body problems isn't something everyone can appreciate as mathematics, but as an animation there is no barrier to understanding and being amazed.

Knowledge Engineering Applied to Baby Names   Saturday 24 August

Parents-to-be who are searching for suitable names for a new arrival are about to get help. Computer scientists from the University of Kassel are coordinating an international competition to improve the algorithms used by Nameling, a web-based name search engine.

Steve Ballmer To Retire   Friday 23 August

Steve Ballmer, who succeeded Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft in 2000 has announced his plans to retire within the next 12 months once his successor has been chosen.

Browser Reliability Improves - Even For IE   Friday 23 August

Browser crash data from Sauce Labs reveals that, although over the long term IE has been the worst performing browser, if you consider the latest browser version it has cleaned up its act considerably.

Lenovo Reintroduces Start Menu - Will It Encourage Sales?   Friday 23 August

One of the biggest criticisms desktop PC users have of Windows 8 is the lack of a Start Menu. Lenovo has now announced a partnership with Sweet Labs which will bring the  Pokki start menu to its new range of devices.

Release Candidate of First Open Source Entity Framework Available   Friday 23 August

The Release Candidate for Entity Framework 6 is now available for download, with improvements including Async language support, multi-tenant migrations, and support for custom Code First conventions.

Quantity Not Quality A Problem For BlackBerry World   Thursday 22 August

Over a third of the apps in Blackberry's app store come from a single vendor and most of these fall into the "spam" category. What does this say about Blackberry's efforts to entice developers to contribute content to populate Blackberry World?

Hive on Hadoop for MongoDB   Thursday 22 August

There’s a new version of 10gen’s MongoDB Connector for Hadoop with added support for Apache Hive and incremental MapReduce jobs.

Xbox One - Free Dev Kits!   Thursday 22 August

Microsoft has just announced that it will give development systems to programmers who want to create games for its Xbox One. Of course, it isn't as simple as just saying "Yes please"!

Professional Programmer

HTML Apps - The Long Road Yet To Travel   Friday 23 August

You all know the argument about HTML or web apps. There is a lot said about how they aren't ready yet and native apps provide a better experience. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot of work to do to make web apps as good, both in their production and their use, before they equal native apps. 

Projects

Automatic Web Page Use With .NET   Wednesday 28 August

Using web browser macros, the need to get more control over what is happening during the automated use of a web page becomes increasingly obvious. After trying a number of possible solutions, C# and .NET provided the best option. Find out how.

History

Super Mario - Nintendo Goes Forward   Monday 26 August

Nintendo graduated from a playing card manufacturer to a games console maker but where to go next? The answer is into software and so Mario was born.