News

Apple's New Phones - The Programmer's Take   Wednesday 11 September

Apple has just announced two new iPhones - a cheap plastic phone designed to conquer the Chinese market and a more expensive piece of hardware with some interesting innovations. What's in it for the app developer.

Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate Available   Wednesday 11 September

The release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download, and Microsoft has announced the official release date. 

PostgreSQL 9.3 Released   Wednesday 11 September

The latest version of the PostgreSQL open source relational database system has been released with improved JSON support, regular expression indexing, and writeable foreign data wrappers.

Microsoft Changes Mind - Devs Can Have 8.1 Early   Tuesday 10 September

Microsoft has announced that it has listened to the complaints of programmers and has placed the Windows 8.1 upgrade for download on MSDN and Technet. 

Cassandra 2.0 Available   Tuesday 10 September

Apache has released Cassandra 2.0, the new version of the NoSQL distributed database. Improvements include lightweight transactions, triggers and enhancements to the Cassandra Query Language.

Samsung Secure Android Available To All   Tuesday 10 September

Samsung Knox, a version of Android originally intended to address the mobile security needs of enterprise IT without invading the privacy of employees, has been made available to all users of its high-end devices and has become a solution for both work and play.

Chrome Apps Go Public   Monday 09 September

Despite having been around for what seems like ages, Chrome Apps, aka packaged apps, have just been released into the Chrome Webstore. Now the world can start to sample real web apps on the desktop.

SQL Server - Mostly Out Of Date   Monday 09 September

Mozilla Offering Geeksphones For Porting Apps   Monday 09 September

Mozilla is offering free Keon smartphone to app developers who have already created an HTML5 app and are willing to port it to Firefox OS.

Unboxing Atlas   Sunday 08 September

If you think its cool to video the unboxing of your latest mobile phone - think again. Unboxing a robot has a lot more going for it and reaches a whole new level of sci-fi realized.

AI Methods Save The Biosphere!   Sunday 08 September

Microsoft Research has figured out how to save the maximum number of plant species by protecting the smallest areas possible. 

$99 Eye Tracker With SDK   Saturday 07 September

Many of the exciting UI developments make use of depth cameras such as the Kinect, but a simple eye tracker might change the way we design our apps. 

Kodu Game Lab Challenge Winners Announced   Saturday 07 September

Although the 2013 Imagine Cup was over a couple of months ago, Microsoft has only just announced the winners of its Kodu Challenge, which added a contest for students as young as 9-years old.

Vuforia & PrimeSense Capri Bring Depth To VR   Friday 06 September

The PrimeSense Capri depth camera is small enough to be built into mobile devices and, coupled with Vuforia VR software, it creates new opportunities for games and serious apps.

Android Passes 1 Billion Activations   Friday 06 September

At the same time as unveiling the photo that gives the clue to the name of the next Android platform, it was revealed that Google now has over 1 Billion Android activations.

Extreme iPad Challenge   Friday 06 September

A new contest on Challenge Post, with $20,000 in prizes, aims to promote motion controlled games for iPad devices that utilize the Extreme Motion iOS SDK - which is also available to developers on other platforms.

Stick Figure Guide To AES Encryption   Thursday 05 September

If you are still trying to figure out what DES was all about then it's time to give up and try out AES in whole new and easy-to-understand way - try a stick figure guide.

NoSQL Job Trends   Wednesday 04 September

Job trends for the NoSQL sector shows this is a good sector to be interested in, with MongoDB leading the pack.

The Core

Date Hacks - Doing JavaScript Date Calculations   Tuesday 10 September

OK, you have mastered the way your particular language represents dates and times but.. this is just the start. Doing arithmetic with dates can go well beyond just working out the interval between two fixed points. What about the third Thursday in the month or how many days are we from the previous 11th of the month? Find out how to hack dates.

History

ERNIE - A Random Number Generator   Friday 06 September

It is hard to believe that a whole computer could be needed just to generate some random numbers, but this was the first ERNIE's role in life and in 1957 it was a sophisticated giant.