News

Android Studio 3   Tuesday 23 May

Google I/O is a place where new things are announced and just occasionally you get the feeling that the new thing was rushed out to meet the artificial deadline. With Android Studio in a bit of a mess, version 3.0 arriving in the Canary Channel feels a bit like a rush job.

Graphcool Eases Your Way Into GraphQL   Wednesday 24 May

GraphQL, dubbed by many as REST's successor, is a query language in which you can query database driven, JSON schema-exposed APIs. The problem is that because it is so different from REST, getting the hang of GraphQL when starting out is not that easy. 

Why Deep Networks Are Better   Wednesday 24 May

Why is it that deep neural networks are better even though we have known for a long time that anything a deep network can compute can also be computed by a shallow network? Physicist Max Tegmark and Mathematician David Rolnick have a reason for us.

AlphGo Defeats World's Top Ranking Go Player   Tuesday 23 May

AlphaGo has won the first of three games against the world’s number one player, Ke Jie at the Future of Go Summit, taking place in Wuzhen China.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator Reaches Preview   Tuesday 23 May

An accelerator for Amazon DynamoDB has been released in a public preview. The accelerator, called DAX, is a fully managed caching service that sits in front of your DynamoDB table to improve the performance on read-intensive workloads, so long as your app fits with eventually-consistent results. 

Java Turns 22 Today   Tuesday 23 May

Can you believe that Java was first publicly launched 22 years ago? Few could have. foreseen that the language would go on to be such an influential part of computing and still remain relevant over two decades later. This is especially so when you take into consideration the humble beginnings of Java and its original intentions.

Google Improves Firebase Analytics and Open Sources SDKs   Monday 22 May

Google has announced that its Firebase client libraries, for developers creating realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web, are being open sourced, and that Firebase Analytics is getting new features. 

AWS Chatbot Challenge   Monday 22 May

A contest to build a chatbot that understands, and responds with, natural language and does something useful, such as booking a hotel or answering queries, is underway on Devpost. The chatbot must run on Amazon Lex and AWS Lamba and be deployed to a messaging platform like Slack, Facebook, or Twilio.

Button Feedback With An Electric Arc   Sunday 21 May

Yes, its another odd ball idea from the ACM CHI Human-Computer Interactions conference. Have you ever wished that your keyboard could be more responsive? Well careful what you wish for. Your next keyboard could come with 10K Volts of feedback!

Virtual Lorenz Machine Honors Bill Tutte   Saturday 20 May

A Virtual Lorenz SZ42 machine, the encryption device used by the Wehrmacht High Command in World War II, has been put online for anyone to use as part of the centenary celebrations honoring Bill Tutte, the codebreaker who cracked its code.

Google Assistant Prepares For Dominance   Friday 19 May

So far Google seems to have been oddly lagging in the race to incorporate AI into interfaces. But news from Google I/O suggests that it could leapfrog the competition - and all because of its superior search.

Top 10 From Around the Web: Web Design Resources   Friday 19 May

The I-Programmer team reports a lot of news and originates loads of helpful articles, but there's far more out there than we can possibly cover. So we look out for interesting external blog posts. Here's some on the topic of web design. 

CockroachDB Production Ready   Friday 19 May

CockroachDB 1.0 has been released as the first open source, cloud-native SQL database. The announcement included details of $27 million new funds invested in the company behind CockroachDB.

Kotlin - New Language For Android   Thursday 18 May

This is not one you could have guessed and even with perfect hindsight it doesn't seem obvious. The latest Android Studio 3.0, now in the Canary channel, supports Kotlin, the JVM language that JetBrains invented in 2011. What does this mean for Android?

AWS and Ionic Team Up In Starter Project   Thursday 18 May

Amazon is quick in recognizing that just offering support for a number of popular programing languages is not enough to lure hoards of developers to the platform. That's why we are seeing a move towards wrapping its AWS services with greater user-friendliness.

Azure Data Lake Tools For Visual Studio Released   Thursday 18 May

Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio is now generally available. The toolkit gives you a code editor for developing big data queries, including U-SQL scripts, from within Visual Studio. 

The Core

Perlito - 4 Years On   Monday 22 May

Perlito, the open source compiler collection that implements a Perl5 and a Perl6 compiler has just launched a brand new Java backend. It seemed a good time to catch up with the project by talking to its lead contributor, Flavio Glock.

Parentheses Are Trees   Thursday 18 May

Parentheses are at the heart of programming. Understand parentheses and you can rule the earth. No, seriously! Parentheses, trees and stacks are all interconnected in a very deep and fundamental way.