News

Deobfuscated JavaScript Through Machine Learning   Wednesday 04 June

Minification and obfuscation are two useful techniques for making code smaller and providing some protection. Now a machine learning technique promises to undo both and you can try it out.

Safari On iOS8 Supports WebGL - The New Era Can Now Commence   Wednesday 04 June

The biggest announcement at WWDC has mostly gone unnoticed and uncommented - WebGL support in the Safari browser on OSX and iOS. At last the big browsers all support 3D graphics and web apps and web games in particular are effectively universal.

Bitcoin Isn't As Anonymous As You Might Hope   Wednesday 04 June

Three researchers have put forward a procedure that can associate the pseudonyms used in Bitcoin transactions with the IP address of the user. They even have a way of disabling the Tor network so that you can't hide behind it. In principle, this means that a monitoring agent could put together a complete ledger of transactions that a user engaged in.

Apple's New Language - Swift   Tuesday 03 June

This year's WWDC has been dominated by software announcements rather than the cool hardware that most Apple fans were eagerly predicting and anticipating. The most important is the new Swift language.

Perl 5.20 And Mojolicious 5.0 Released   Tuesday 03 June

New versions of Perl and of Mojolicious, one of its real-time web application frameworks have been released within a couple of days of one another.

Windows 8.1 Overtakes Windows 8   Tuesday 03 June

May 2014 saw Windows 8.1 creep past Windows 8 in terms of desktop operating system use among Internet visitors. However, Windows 7 saw a bigger gain in percentage terms than Windows 8.1

Spring Into Summer MOOCs   Monday 02 June

I Programmer's regular MOOC round up has suggestions to fill any spare time you might have over the coming few months. Or you might want to suggest them to other people since some of them are aimed at non-programmers or beginners.

LEAP Skeletal Tracking API   Monday 02 June

The LEAP motion controller made a big hit until it actually came to market when the excitement seemed to dissipate without any real explanation other than it just didn't quite live up to the promise. Now there's a new API the could make the splash the device initially promised. 

Functional JavaScript With Ramda   Monday 02 June

Ramda is a library of functions designed to make functional programming in JavaScript easy and powerful without making it any less like JavaScript.

Intel's Robot - Jimmy   Sunday 01 June

Intel seems to be branching out. A new open source humanoid robot called Jimmy has Intel inside.

Crowdfund Film About Grace Hopper   Saturday 31 May

Born With Curiosity is a proposed biopic about computer pioneer Grace Hopper. With a week to go before it closes on June 7, a crowdfunding campaign on Indigogo has so far raised 94% of its $45,000 target.

Analytics - An Expanding Jobs Market   Friday 30 May

Demand for specialists in big data and analytics continues to grow as more and more companies are collecting more internal and external data than ever before.

Googlebot Gets Better At JavaScript Web Apps   Friday 30 May

It seems amazing but true that one of the disadvantages of almost any JavaScript generated content is that it stands a very good chance of not being properly indexed by Google, or anyone else for that matter. 

Nitra Open Sourced   Friday 30 May

Jetbrains has open sourced a low-level language toolkit called Nitra which comprises a language for describing grammars and a build tool to compile them.

Microsoft Makes Clear Where IE Is Going   Thursday 29 May

In another sign of openness, Microsoft has created a page where you can see which of the many standards it is planning to implement in IE. This is good - unless you happen to spot a missing standard that is vital to your project when it suddenly turns bad.

Xamarin 3.0 Released With Xamarin Designer for iOS and Xamarin.Forms   Thursday 29 May

Xamarin gives .NET developers a way to develop apps for iOS and Android using C#. Things just got better with the release of Xamarin 3.

PHP Next Generation Project Announced   Thursday 29 May

With all of the fuss about making things go faster in JavaScript, it is probably inevitable that PHP should get a speedy makeover. The PHP group has announced PHP Next Generation.

The Core

Javascript Jems - Asynchronous Patterns And Closure   Tuesday 03 June

If you have ever been kept awake at night worrying about closure then this is for you? You can understand closure, but what is it for? We explain how it can be all so easy and really, really useful. Closure in Javascript was made for asynchronous code and for Ajax in particular.

All About Dancer - In Conversation With Sawyer X   Wednesday 28 May

Nikos Vaggalis talks about the Dancer Perl Web-framework to one of its core devs, Sawyer X. The conversation isn't limited to Dancer, however; Sawyer also gives his opinion and knowledge on finer grained aspects of the craft that is developing for the Web, such as the advantage of routing over query strings, MVC vs Routes, and Perl vs PHP vs Ruby.