News

Android Outstrips Apple ...   Wednesday 26 August

... on almost every count. The one where Apple still wins is in terms of developer revenue, but perhaps that doesn't really matter so much. 

Do We Need More Emoji?   Wednesday 26 August

The Unicode Consortium has accepted another 38 emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, with new characters including bacon and a duck on the list. Why could we possibly need a duck?

Now You Can Buy The Raspberry Pi HAT That Went Into Space   Wednesday 26 August

OK it hasn't actually got to space just yet but it is on its way. When the Sense HAT was announced everyone seemed envious that this multifunction add-on board was available to space men but not to us IoT men. Now it is and for just $30. 

Firefox 42 Developer Edition   Tuesday 25 August

Firefox 42 is now the Developer Edition. It brings with it the enforcement of Add-On signing, but there are also other features that are less controversial.

Twenty Years Ago Window 95 Was Released   Tuesday 25 August

As far as personal computing is concerned the release of Windows 95 twenty years ago marked a change from the old ways of doing things to the new. You could say Windows 95 was the first step to 21st century computing. Where were you when Windows 95 hit the shelves? 

Underhanded C Contest 2015 Launched   Tuesday 25 August

The latest annual Underhanded C Contest has been launched, with a new challenge for writing innocent-looking C code that is as readable, clear, and seemingly trustworthy as possible, yet covertly implements a malicious function.

Firefox To Adopt Chrome Extensions   Monday 24 August

Mozilla has announced that Firefox is taking another step to becoming just like Chome. Put simply, Firefox is dropping its core technology XUL and XCOM and adopting Chrome add-ons in place of its own. 

Facebook's Relay For React Open Sourced   Monday 24 August

Facebook has open sourced a technical preview of Relay, its framework that enables declarative data fetching and updates for React applications. Relay v0.1.1 can be downloaded from GitHub together with a starter kit with the components you need to try it out.

Brian Kernighan On C   Sunday 23 August

If you know any C you will know that Brian Kernighan is one half of the team responsible for the seminal book The C Programming Language or just K&R (the R for Dennis Ritchie) that most of us have heard of if not actually read.

Leaked Mozilla Tax Return Causes Furore   Saturday 22 August

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that is exempt from income tax. Even so, it has to complete an annual return for the United States Internal Revenue Service. The completed form for 2013 was posted to Hacker News, leading to heated debate.

JavaScript Holiday Challenge   Friday 21 August

There's still a week in which to compete in CoderPower's JavaScript Holiday Contest. Not only does it offer the opportunity to win a Moto Smartwatch, it also introduces some popular JavaScript libraries.

RethinkDB 2.1 Released   Friday 21 August

The latest version of RethinkDB has been released with a major restructuring of its clustering layer and over 200 enhancements.  

Google's Go Finally Kills Off C   Thursday 20 August

Don't panic - Go has eliminated C only in the sense that it no longer makes use of C within its own code. Yes, with its latest release, the Google alternative to the C language finally frees itself from C. 

Cleaner, Leaner Ember.js 2.0 Released   Thursday 20 August

Despite moving from 1.x to 2.x, which suggests major changes, the new version of Ember.js has been released with no new features. Internally the new version has been referred to a “garbage collection release”.

The Core

Getting Started With jQuery - Ajax The Basics   Monday 24 August

Ajax is the technology that turned the web page into the web app. Since Ajax was invented there have been lots of innovations and frameworks that make web apps easier but a mastery of basic Ajax technique is still important and jQuery makes it easy and cross browser.  

Android Adventures - Spinners   Friday 21 August

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 the next two chapters of our ebook on Android the easy way, we look at spinners and pickers, the next step up from buttons and text controls.