News

Fear And Loathing In the App Store 5 - Apple Doesn't Want Amateur Hour   Wednesday 11 June

Of course apps should be as professional as possible, but the latest App Store Review Guidelines put the matter bluntly and tell it like it is. it makes for interesting reading.

Major Update For GitHub for Windows   Wednesday 11 June

GitHub for Windows 2.0 has been shipped just over two years after the initial version was released. The new version has had an application wide interface overhaul, a new consistent look and feel and provides more of the GitHub feature set.

Micro Python - The Latest Python   Wednesday 11 June

Python on  a micro-controller sounds like a dream - now it has come true.  You can download and start working with it today and a development board is soon to be released. 

JetBrains Announces 0xDBE An IDE For SQL   Tuesday 10 June

0xDBE has been designed to suit the specific needs of professional DBAs and developers. It has an intelligent SQL editor, schema management, version control integration and other database tools all running on the IntelliJ platform.

Box2D Benchmarks Show Everything Is Getting Faster   Monday 09 June

The browser is the logical platform for development, but making it as fast as the desktop is key in making it a viable platform. A new set of benchmarks gives us an idea of how well things are progressing. Is JavaScript getting close to native?

Passing The Turing Test Brings It Into Disrepute   Monday 09 June

Chatbot Eugene Goostman, which has been programmed to have the "personality" of as a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, has "passed" the Turing Test by convincing judges 33% of the time that it was the human rather than the computer program.

Algorithm Challenge To Aid Environmental Protection   Monday 09 June

A new Marathon Match contest on [topcoder] is sponsored by the US Environment Protection Agency and has $15,000 in prizes. The challenge is to use past records and environmental data to devise an algorithm, that will be deployed in an Android app, to predict future cyanobacterial harmful blooms.

Project Tango Tablet Hardware And SDK Announced   Monday 09 June

Google has unveiled its Project Tango Tablet Development Kit and is inviting professional developers interested in mobile 3D sensing to sign up for when it goes on sale later this year for $1024.

FIrst Person Engine In 256 Lines - The Simplicity Of Raycast   Sunday 08 June

If you are looking for an easy and fast way to create a 3D game or puzzle then you might want to know about raycasting. Hunter Loftis has managed to create a first person shooter type engine using just 256 lines of JavaScript.

In Celebration Of Alan Turing   Saturday 07 June

It is sixty years today since Alan Turing committed suicide, ending his life at only 41 years of age. During his life time he had laid the foundations of much that we now take for granted.

KitKat Increases Its Share Of The Pie   Friday 06 June

KitKat has been slow to take off but Google's latest figures, show that it has achieved 13.6% adoption, representing a more than 50% increase in usage over the previous month and an almost eight-fold increase since February 2014.

Windows Chrome 64-bit - Faster, Better More Stable   Friday 06 June

Is 64 bits better than 32 bits? The answer isn't as obvious as you might think but now we have Chrome 64 and it suggests that 64 is best.

Kinect For Windows v2 - Ready To Order   Friday 06 June

Microsoft may have dropped the Kinect as an essential component of the XBox, but there are a lot of programmers waiting to get their hands on the Windows version. Now you can - and the price is not bad.

Pepper - Aldebaran's New Robot Designed To Be Your Friend   Thursday 05 June

Aldebaran, best known for the Nao humanoid robot, has created a new robot for mobile phone company SoftBank Mobile and its role in life is to live with humans as a companion.

What's Next For Visual Studio   Thursday 05 June

The first CTP of the next major release of Visual Studio, VS "14", is now available for download. What's in store?

Mozilla's PlayCanvas Open Sourced   Thursday 05 June

In the same week as Apple announced support for WebGL in both OS X and iOS 8, Mozilla's WebGL Game Engine PlayCanvas has gone open source and the engine's source is now live on GitHub.

The Core

The Working Programmers Guide To Language Paradigms   Tuesday 10 June

You would think that we would agree on how best to program. In fact we are still warring tribes trying to make the case for our own particular view of how programming should be done. The question is:

How should we program?

Its not a difficult question to ask - but to answer it is another matter.

Projects

Monitor Mobile   Thursday 05 June

Monitoring mobile apps should be easy, all you need to do is arrange to send the data back to a server - but what server? There is enough to do without having to implement a complete monitoring system as well.