News

Google Releases Object Detector Nets For Mobile   Wednesday 21 June

Google seems to be giving away its crown jewels. MobileNets are a small set of neural network models pre-trained to identify objects. In theory this software should be of great value, but Google is making it available for free. 

Micro:bit Launches in US and Canada   Wednesday 21 June

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation has announced that the credit card-sized single board computer, pioneered in the UK by a consortium including the BBC and Microsoft for teaching school children to code, is now available to schools, clubs and families across the U.S. and Canada. Scratch has been added to line up of block-based languages it can be programmed in.  

Udacity Launches React Nanodegree   Tuesday 20 June

Udacity, in partnership with React training has launched a new Nanodegree program for React, the open source JavaScript library from Facebook. The first presentation starts June 27th and enrollment opens today. 

Intel Drops Edison, Galileo & Joule   Tuesday 20 June

In a sudden, but not entirely surprising, move Intel has announced the discontinuation of its IoT boards - Edison, Galileo and Joule. The last of these devices will be supplied at the end of 2017. 

Top 10 From Around The Web: More Angular Resources   Tuesday 20 June

This round up of interesting posts from external sites has resources for those working with AngularJS, Angular 2.0 and React JS and also looks at websites built using the AngularJS framework. 

Vision Mobile Developer Survey Extended   Monday 19 June

There is still time to have your preferences and your experiences as a developer counted in Vision Mobile's Q3 State of the Developer Nation survey. Complete the survey by June 25th for chances to  win prizes and to discover what type of developer you are. 

Atom 1.18 Ships With Rich Git Integration   Monday 19 June

The latest version of Atom has been released with integration with Git and Github added directly in Atom via the Github package.  This is a new core package included with Atom and is available right now. 

Firefox 54 Multi-Process and Faster - Can It Woo Us Back   Monday 19 June

Firefox 54, the first version to be multi-process has been released. If you are tempted to think "so what", what is special about it is that Mozilla has achieved a balance between the number of process and RAM usage that makes it both faster and less of a memory hogger than Chrome. 

iNaturalist Launches Deep Learning-Based Identification App   Sunday 18 June

iNaturalist.org has launched an app for Android and iOS that automatically identifies animals and plants at species level. Trained using TensorFlow it already identifies over 10,000 different species with a new species added to the model every 1.7 hours. 

Animastage - Easy Physical Animation   Saturday 17 June

Animating physical objects can be done by fitting them with a variety of actuators, but a custom rig takes time and effort. Now MIT have a use for their 3D output device, inForm. Using it you can animate a puppet, sculpture or any creative art work you care to think up. 

Tabs versus Spaces? Not Just Contentious But Economic   Friday 16 June

Tabs versus spaces is a topic that divides opinion like no other programming topic. Now it seems your preference for indentation isn't just a personal matter, it impacts what you are likely to earn. 

Automatic Testing - Programmers Are Still The Problem   Friday 16 June

White box test generator tools can help you find bugs automatically by generating combinations of inputs that are likely to give the wrong answer. However there is a problem - how do you know when you have the wrong answer? 

RedMonk Rankings Reveal The Languages We Love   Thursday 15 June

RedMonk has published the latest of its twice yearly language rankings. There is very little change from January, and looking back over previous iterations it is remarkable how stable the rankings of the top languages have been.   

First International Airport Hackathon   Thursday 15 June

An international hackathon for apps to improve the travel experience of airport passengers has been announced. The hackathon is using data from seven international airports across Europe.

The Core

Getting Started With jQuery - Advanced Ajax Characters & Encoding   Tuesday 20 June

One of the biggest problems you encounter in using Ajax is the dreaded character encoding. No matter what data format you select, the data is actually transmitted as text. But it isn't as simple as this sounds. This is the final chapter in   the newly published Just jQuery: Events, Async and Ajax.

Speed dating - The Art of the JavaScript Date Object   Thursday 15 June

JavaScript's way of working with dates is simple but perhaps this is part of the problem. The Date object is so simple that it can be difficult to work out how to do things like date arithmetic. Find out how to get up to speed with dating ...