News

Google's New Brotli Compression Is 25% Better   Wednesday 23 September

Compression is less important these days for storage, but it is still a valuable way of saving bandwidth. Google has offered improved compression algorithms in the past and now we have Brotli, which claims to be even better. 

New Incentive For Microsoft Virtual Academy   Wednesday 23 September

Microsoft has launched a new campaign to encourage devs to improve their skills using free training offered by Microsoft Virtual Academy. You have until October 15th to complete one of three courses to be eligible.

Apple TV For Developers   Wednesday 23 September

Apple has upgraded its set-top box and announced that the future lies in apps. To ensure apps are forthcoming it has launched the tvOS SDK.

Rust 1.3 Released   Tuesday 22 September

The Rust core team has released a stable version of Rust 1.3 with new object lifetime defaults.  

Silverlight Bridge To UWP Apps   Tuesday 22 September

Part of Microsoft's strategy to make Universal Windows Platform apps appealing to us - universally appealing I suppose - is creating "bridges" from old technologies to the new. Who would have guessed that a Silverlight bridge would become available? It has, but only in beta and not from Microsoft. 

Podcasts Explore Impact of IoT   Tuesday 22 September

The rise of the Industrial Internet as an opportunity for developers is behind Pivot , a new podcast series from GE Digital intended to pique your curiosity about Predix, GE’s cloud platform for the Industrial Internet.

JetBrains Responds To Backlash   Monday 21 September

After an outcry from its existing customers when it announced  a new a subscription service for its range of desktop developer tools, JetBrains has now settled on a pricing model that includes a Perpetual Fallback Licence. Is this enough?

Udacity Nanodegree Partnership For India   Monday 21 September

Udacity is launching local operations in India in partnership with Google and Tata Trusts, offering 1,000 full Android Nanodegree scholarships and a job fair for graduates and potential employers.

Drones Build A Rope Bridge   Sunday 20 September

Drones are either for fun, snooping or, less likely, delivery services - but what about construction? RTH Zurich has at last done something that really proves that drones could be useful in the very near future, building a bridge that humans can walk across.

Tech Generations   Saturday 19 September

Technology is changing and it is changing us. The Joy of Tech's latest offering puts it all into perspective and you can't help but think, how true!

BBC Micro Bit Delay - A Chance For CodeBug?   Saturday 19 September

The BBC has confirmed that the Micro Bit, its tiny development board, will be delayed until the end of 2015. At the same time CodeBug, which offers many of the same features, is now available to buy.
UPDATE: Micro Bit Website launched.

BlueMix Cloud Contest for JavaScript Devs   Friday 18 September

CoderPower has just launched a new JavaScript contest in which you test your skills against the clock and other coders with a chance to win cash and other prizes.

Facebook Releases React Native   Thursday 17 September

React Native for Android has been released by Facebook, providing Android developers with a way to create apps in JavaScript.

NSA Codebreaker Challenge 3.0   Thursday 17 September

NSA, the United States National Security Agency, is challenging university students in the US to exercise their reverse engineering and low-level code analysis skills while working on a fictitious, yet realistic, security threat.

The Core

Exploring Edison - Fast Memory Mapped I/O   Wednesday 23 September

Fast memory mapped mode allows the Edison to generate pulses as short as 0.25 microseconds wide and to work with input pulses in the 10-microsecond region. In this chapter we discuss the best way of making use of the fast Atom CPU to work with the GPIO.

eBooks

Understanding Percentages   Thursday 17 September

Spreadsheets take the hard work out of calculations, but you still need to know how to do them. Percentages are something familiar to us all, but they present many pitfalls that need to be understood before we can move on to exploring Financial Functions.