News

Toyota Code Could Be Lethal   Wednesday 26 February

You may have heard about the Toyota unintended acceleration case, but you might have missed the analysis of the software that connected the gas peddle to the throttle. Put simply it's frightening enough to make you buy a pre-computer car. 

Senchas State of HTML5   Wednesday 26 February

Half of HTML5 developers support both mobile devices and the desktop, with the typical developer supporting their apps on Windows classic, MacOS, iPhone, iPad and at least one Android phone.

Windows Phone 8.1 Not Kept Secret   Wednesday 26 February

The features in the SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 have been leaked on Reddit ahead of the expected announcement at Build 2014. This adds to the line up of anticipated features that already included a personal digital assistant.

Microsoft's Project Helios - The New ASP.NET   Tuesday 25 February

ASP.NET couldn't get more fragmented if it tried. Oh wait, it just has. Project Helios is the latest technology to hit ASP.NET programmers and if you haven't been paying close attention it is going to be very difficult to figure out what it is all about.

Sailfish OS Reaches 1.0 And Targets Android   Tuesday 25 February

The Finnish smartphone manufacturer Jolla which is responsible for the development of the Sailfish OS has announced that its software is moving out of beta and will soon be available for download to Android devices.

Nokia Forks Android   Monday 24 February

Nokia has announced three low-cost phones that run a customized version of Android intended to let users access Android apps while being introduced to Microsoft services.

I TOLD You Gotos Are Dangerous!   Monday 24 February

A recent security flaw in iOS is down to an error involving a spurious goto statement - but when you look a little more closely there is a bigger lesson to learn from the incident - and not just "goto considered harmful".

Firefox OS Now With Cordova Support   Monday 24 February

This sounds crazy. Cordova, aka PhoneGap, is a system that allows web apps to run on mobile phones as native apps. Now Cordova supports Firefox OS. But Firefox OS native apps are web apps. What's the point?

SnoBots In Training For RoboCup 2014   Sunday 23 February

SnoBots, a team of four kid-size robots trained at the University of Manitoba Autonomous Agents Lab, is getting ready for its second appearance at RoboCup. This video shows them not only to be cute, but also to have surprising agility.

Why You Shouldn't Collect Data - What The Government Could Do With Location Data   Saturday 22 February

As programmers we often think that users are overly sensitive about their data. What could it hurt to allow the collection of location data, for example. Here is a short video from the ACLU that might make you stop and think about persisting any data you capture. 

Bing Code Search for C#   Friday 21 February

Microsoft has released an add-on for Visual Studio 2013 that lets you search for code snippets from the cloud and inserts them directly into your code.

Google Moves Into 3D With Project Tango   Friday 21 February

Project Tango is a phone that has built-in depth sensors that make it easy to build a 3D model of its surroundings. The question is what are you going to do with it.?

Appcelerator Survey Claims JavaScript Reigns   Friday 21 February

The 2013 Q4 Appcelerator survey was its largest to date and found that mobile developers rank JavaScript as the most relevant language, with C/C++  being overwhelmingly the least relevant.

Google I/O 2014 Will Have Registration By Lottery   Thursday 20 February

Google's annual developer conference will take place June 25-26 at Moscone West in San Francisco.  Attendees will be will be selected at random from developers who has expressed an interest in the event.

Revenue Models for Mobile Developers   Thursday 20 February

As well as revealing the comparative revenues from apps on different mobile, the recent State of the Developer Nation report also looked into alternative revenue models and shows that your choices matter.

What's In Store for European Office 365 Connect   Thursday 20 February

Big Data, Yammer, and SharePoint Online are among the sessions and keynotes announced for European Office 365 Connect, which is being held on April 1st and 2nd at the Philharmonie Theatre, Haarlem, the Netherlands.

Professional Programmer

The Perils Of Mozilla   Thursday 20 February

Yes, it's a monster movie plot but you need to make sure that your sympathies are with the monster. Mozilla is riding high and creating lots of nice open source software, but its position is far from secure. It hangs by a thread and we should be worried.

History

The Rise Of People Power - Computer languages in the 70's   Tuesday 25 February

The 1970 saw the rise of languages created by small groups of people rather than committees or institutions and much of the cause was the number of personal computers that had appeared and where in need of software. This is the story of BASIC, Pascal and C.