News

Android Studio 3.1 Released - Widgets Lost
Wednesday 28 March

Android Studio 3.1 is a minor upgrade but it still has the power to cause problems for its users. In this case why have familiar pickers and other widgets disappeared?

HHVM 3.25 Defaults To PHP7   Wednesday 28 March

Developers from Facebook have released a new version of HHVM, the Hip Hop Virtual Machine. The PHP support in new release has been changed to default to PHP 7 rather than the PHP 5 of the previous version.

Appeals Court Rules In Favor of Oracle   Wednesday 28 March

The Federal Appeals Court has ruled in Oracle's favour in yet another round of the seemingly never ending wrangle about whether Google infringed its copyright in the Android operating system. And we can't let it stop there as the decision that would negatively impact every developer and every piece of software.

Udacity Announces School of AI   Tuesday 27 March

Udacity Intersect 2018 is taking place today at the Computer History Museum with the theme of Lifelong Learning. In its keynote Udacity CEO Vish Makhijani announced new and expanded industry partnerships leading to both new virtual opportunities and new funding and a new School of AI.

Interactive Examples On MDN   Tuesday 27 March

If you have visited MDN web docs recently you may have noticed the addition of interactive examples. This is the result of an ongoing project that is now complete for JavaScript and CSS. 

Right On The Button - New Ways To Press 
Monday 26 March

Buttons they are the "hello world" of the UI and yet we know little about how users interact with them. OK yes, we know that they click them or tap them or whatever, but how should a button respond to the human interaction?

D3.JS 5 Adds Promises   Monday 26 March

There's a new version of D3.js, the JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. The new release adds support for promises instead of asynchronous callbacks to load data.

Say It With A Smile - Male Or Female   Sunday 25 March

AI researchers have managed to predict if a subject is male or female just from the way they smile. This raises some interesting questions, but probably not the ones you are thinking of.

SoFi - A Robot Fish Contributes to Scientific Research
Saturday 24 March

Researchers at MIT CSAIL have created a soft robotic fish that can independently swim beside real fish without spooking them, giving scientists a better opportunity to observe marine life.

RISC Pioneers Gain Turing Award   Friday 23 March

John Hennessy and David Patterson are the recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their foundational contributions to the development of the RISC microprocessors that led to today's mobile and IoT revolutions.

Microsoft Introduces DirectX Raytracing   Friday 23 March

Microsoft has announced a way of specifying the details of 3D scenes for rendering. DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a new API that will be included in DirectX 12. Aimed at providing more realistic lighting and shadows, it will enable DirectX applications to use hardware-accelerated raytracing.

Choosing Tools for Efficient Deployment on AWS  
Thursday 22 March

More and more we are relying on the cloud — specifically on Amazon Web Services. Here we explore the benefits and use cases of deploying your applications on the cloud before getting the lowdown on five tools that can assist with efficient deployment on AWS.

JDK 10 Released   Thursday 22 March

The latest version of Java, JDK 10, has been released, just six months after Java 9 hit the shelves. This version adds local variable type inference among other improvements.

The Core

Just JavaScript - How Functions Become Methods  
Monday 26 March

In this chapter extract the aim is to show how Function objects are used as methods by other JavaScript objects. Methods aren't just functions, they are functions that work with the object they are bound to. Find out how Functions become methods.

Babbage's Bag

Processor Design - RISC,CISC & ROPS   Friday 23 March

When it comes to processor architecture we still don’t  have a clear agreement on what sort of design philosophies should be followed. How do you make a faster general purpose processor? This is a question about architecture.