News

Microsoft And Universal Apps   Wednesday 04 March

Microsoft has chosen to talk about universal apps at this year's Mobile World Congress, but real hard facts are still thin on the ground. What has emerged has that sort of PR speak that indicates that perhaps Microsoft isn't really sure what it is all about. 

AI And Growing Old In-Place   Wednesday 04 March

Can AI and robotics help with one of our most serious social problems - the aging of the population. 

Google Shrinks List of GSoC Open Source Organizations   Wednesday 04 March

The list of mentoring organisations for Google Summer of Code 2015 has some surprising omissions. The Linux Foundation and Mozilla are among those missing from the list of just 137 open source organisations.

The New OpenGL - Vulkan and SPIR-V   Tuesday 03 March

Previously referred to as the Next Generation OpenGL, Vulkan is the new open standard cross platform graphics API. Khronos has now made it available in technical preview and also released the provisional specification of Open CL 2.1.

Google's DeepMind Learns To Play Arcade Games   Tuesday 03 March

Google has another breakthrough in AI and it's big enough for a paper in Nature - so what exactly is it all about?

HBase 1.0 Released   Tuesday 03 March

 Apache has announced the availability of HBase v1.0, a distributed, scalable, database for Hadoop and HDFS.

Apple And Google Break W3C Standards   Monday 02 March

The story of pointer events and its API is a complicated and divisive one, but now that it is effectively a W3C standard browser makers should start to support it. The problem is that Apple won't and Google probably won't unless Apple changes its mind. 

Firefox 64-bit For Windows Coming Soon?   Monday 02 March

The long-awaited Windows 64-bit version of the Firefox browser is in prospect. It is already available to download in the Firefox Developer Edition Channel.

Waterbear Spaceship - Conway's Life   Sunday 01 March

What do programmers do for fun? Some play code golf, some contribute to open source, but some try to build an alternative universe within Life. Waterbear is an amazing testament to what can be achieved if you put your mind to it. 

New Milestone For Google - 1000 Chrome Experiments   Saturday 28 February

To celebrate reaching 1,000 Chrome Experiments that showcase what you can do in the browser with HTML5 and JavaScript, the Google Chrome has created an experiment that visualizes every other experiment on the site.

ASP.NET 5 Cross Platform - But Is It Still ASP?   Friday 27 February

Microsoft has announced version 5 of ASP.NET and seems pleased that the 15 year old technology is alive and well - but is it? If you replace the heart, mind and soul of a technology all you have left is the name.

Firefox 36.0 Released Firefox 37.0 In Beta Channel   Friday 27 February

Firefox 36 implements support for the HTTP/2 network protocol which should lead to it being faster, more scalable and more responsive. 

All Change For Pwnium V   Thursday 26 February

Google has scrapped its annual one-day contest to demonstrate vulnerabilities in Chrome. In future bugs can attract rewards all the year round.

Android For Work - A Developer Opportunity?   Thursday 26 February

Google has finally made a move on its promise of Android for Work, first announced at last year's I/O conference. It has a range of features that make Android more business-friendly, but there are some important things to know before you decide to adopt it.

Apache Storm On Azure   Thursday 26 February

Apache Storm,  a distributed real-time analytics system for Hadoop that can be used for processing large volumes of rapidly changing data, has been released on Microsoft Azure HDInsight.

Neural Networks Beat Humans   Wednesday 25 February

Another neural network breakthrough has been announced by Microsoft Research. Its neural network now outperforms humans on the 1000-class ImageNet dataset.

Professional Programmer

What is a Data Scientist and How Do I Become One?   Thursday 26 February

What exactly is it that data scientists do? Why does everyone want one? And, how do you become one? These are the some of the key questions circulating as the term "data scientist" spreads.

The Core

Android Adventures - Basic Controls And Events   Tuesday 03 March

Working with Android Studio makes building the UI easy with an interactive editor, but you still need to find out how to handle the things it isn't quite so good at. In this chapter of our ebook on Android the easy way we look at the basic UI components and general event handling - i.e beyond onClick. 

Updated for Android Studio 1