News

Swift 2 To Be Open Source   Wednesday 10 June

When Apple introduced its Swift language there wasn't much point in being interested in it unless you were an iOS programmer. Now, with Apple promising to open source the new Swift 2.0, the situation has changed. What's in Swift for the rest of us?

Dart Moves To GitHub   Wednesday 10 June

Google has moved Dart to GitHub including the entire SDK, the VM, dart2js and various libraries.

Underhanded C Contest - The Winner   Wednesday 10 June

The results of the 2014 Underhanded C Contest have been announced, revealing a variety of devious coding techniques used by competitors.

Joy In the App Store - You Can Test You iOS App For Free   Tuesday 09 June

Developers no longer need to shell out $99 to test their iOS apps on their own devices; all you need is XCode 7 and an Apple ID. Devs who have signed up to either of the separate OSX or iOS Apple accounts now have access to both for a single fee of $99 per year.

CockroachDB Released   Tuesday 09 June

A new database designed to scale, survive disasters, be always consistent, and support abstractions has been released by ex-Google developers.

DVLUP Challenges - Now With Reward Points   Tuesday 09 June

The Microsoft Developer Network has a new initiative that not only awards badges but also points that you can redeem for gift cards, for expert help or for Developer Kits.

Andreas Gal Leaving Mozilla   Monday 08 June

Andreas Gal who assumed the position of Mozilla CTO in April 2015 announced he is quitting that position to branch out into IoT. 

Perl 5.22.0 Released   Monday 08 June

The latest version of Perl has been released with a new double diamond operator, support for hexadecimal floating point numbers, and improved variable aliasing.

Robot Fear Of Falling - South Koreans Win DARPA Robotics Challenge   Sunday 07 June

It's all over! After waiting so long, we at last know how the big impressive robots did at the rescue tasks that DARPA thought up for them. And the sad news is that you aren't going to be rescued by a robot just yet. And a lot of robots fell over.

Twin Detection Using AI   Saturday 06 June

Have you ever seen another face that looks so much like your own that you think you could be taken for twins? See if Microsoft's new Twins Or Not site agrees with you.

Yahoo Shuts Services   Friday 05 June

As part of an initiative to focus on its core services, Yahoo has announced the imminent closure of Yahoo Maps with Yahoo Pipes put on notice of complete closure by the end of September.

Google Play Services 7.5   Friday 05 June

Smart Lock for Passwords, Instance ID, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, access to the Google Maps API on Android Wear devices and API enhancements  for Google Fit are all included in the new rollout of Google Play services. There's also a beta for building user referral called App Invites.

Baidu AI Team Caught Cheating - Banned For A Year From ImageNet Competition   Thursday 04 June

The race to build the best neural network seems to have descended into tactics that are not familiar in the academic world. Chinese search engine Baidu has built a world class team that delivers first class results - but now it has been caught cheating.

APL Problem Solving Competition   Thursday 04 June

APL is a classic programming language that was, and is, groundbreaking. Dyalog, which maintains a  dialect of APL, runs an annual competition aimed to introduce APL to a new generation of users.

Google Cloud Test Labs Coming Soon   Thursday 04 June

Android app developers will be interested in a new service that lets you test apps on a mix of real and virtual devices being launched by Google. Its free tier will cover around a quarter of the devices currently in use.

Projects

WPF The Easy 3D Way   Wednesday 10 June

WPF provides a full 3D graphics experience without the need to master DirectX. It really is the easy 3D approach.

A C# Oscilloscope Display In Windows Forms   Thursday 04 June

If you need a real time stripchart or oscilloscope style display for a Windows forms project then the good news is that it can be done without having to move outside of C#.