News

Introduction To Programming Nanodegree   Wednesday 06 May

Enrollment opens today for Udacity's Nanodgree programs. This month's line up includes a new set of courses: Introduction To Programming. There's also a one-time offer of a reimbursement of half your tuition fee.

Microsoft HoloLens For A Mixed Reality Future   Wednesday 06 May

The star of the show at Build was Microsoft HoloLens, which promises us a future in which the virtual and the real are blended thanks to "holographic computing". 

Pinterest API Open To Select Few   Wednesday 06 May

Pinterest is showing signsof letting third party developers use its API and has opened a Pinterest Developer site. At the moment it is only for US developers whom Pinterest approves.

Azure Big Data Announcements   Tuesday 05 May

At Build 2015, developers learned about new options for big data: a data warehouse service; a way to run elastic databases; and a data lake where customers can store large amounts of data.

Data Lakes For Big Data MOOC   Tuesday 05 May

A MOOC that sets out to introduce the value, opportunity and insights that Big Data can provide starts next week on the edcast platform.

Windows 10 And The Seduction Of Arduino   Monday 04 May

Microsoft seems to be trying hard to break into the embedded hardware market with Window 10. It even plans to put it on the Arduino. Surely this humble open source hardware doesn't have a processor big enough to to take on even a cut down version of Windows 10? 

Chrome Makes More Gains Firefox Continues To Decline   Monday 04 May

While Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser on the desktop Chrome now has a full quarter slice of the pie. Firefox's share has now dropped to 12%.

How Old - Fun, Wrong, Potentially Risky?   Sunday 03 May

A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates the age and gender of any faces it detects has attracted more attention than expected - not all of it complimentary.

Reboot Your Dreamliner Every 248 Days To Avoid Integer Overflow   Saturday 02 May

You may be used to rebooting a server every so often to ensure that it doesn't crash because of some resource problem, but what about a modern jet airliner like the Boeing 787?

MIcrosoft's Project Oxford AI APIs For The REST Of Us   Friday 01 May

An announcement that has mostly gone unnoticed at this year's Build is Project Oxford - a set of REST APIs that give you some advanced AI in a really easy-to-use form. 

AspectJS 2.0 Released   Friday 01 May

A new version of AspectJS has been released with a set of clients to extend the usefulness of the product.

RocksDB on Steroids   Thursday 30 April

Yahoo researchers have made changes to RocksDB that, they claim, has put it on steroids.

Microsoft Releases Visual Studio Code IDE For Linux, Mac And Windows   Thursday 30 April

The most important thing to say is that this is not Visual Studio - not even close - despite the name that attempts to make the connection. This is a brand new cross platform IDE - the real question is why?

Android And iOS Apps For Windows 10   Thursday 30 April

For mobile developers the key announcement at Microsoft's Build Developer Conference is that Android and iOS apps will run on Windows 10.

The Core

Android Adventures - Menus & The Action Bar   Tuesday 05 May

A UI isn't just made up of buttons and other widgets - the menu is still a useful way of letting the user select what happens next. Android's menu system is easy to master. This completely new chapter of Android Adventures is an introduction to all things menu and the action menu in particular. 

Babbage's Bag

Artificial Intelligence - Strong and Weak   Monday 04 May

The search for intelligent machines started long before the computer was invented and AI has many different strands. So many that it can be difficult to see what it is trying to do or what it is for. We already have an easy way to create intelligent beings from scratch why do we need another one?