News

Windows Red - How To Fix Windows 8   Wednesday 05 June

For the average desktop user Windows 8 is a disaster that has happened. Windows Red is an open proposal to Microsoft to undo the damage and make everyone happy - and it makes a lot of sense. 

BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Programmer Days To Fix?   Wednesday 05 June

The BBC home page has just lost its clock because the BBC Trust upheld a complaint that it was inaccurate. All it did was to show the current time on the machine it was being viewed on and not an accurate time as determined by the BBC. Surely an institution as prestigious as the BBC can provide us with a reliable clock.? We tell them how.

Tablets Lure Users Away From Desktops and Laptops   Wednesday 05 June

A revised forecast from IDC suggests that global PC sales will fall 7.8 percent in 2013 as users increasingly opt for tablets rather than laptops or desktop PCs.

Octokit Becomes Official   Tuesday 04 June

GitHub has announced Octokit, its new line up of client libraries for the API. Currently two libraries are available - for Ruby and Objective-C.

Visual Studio 2013 Details Revealed   Tuesday 04 June

We have a been given a brief look at Visual Studio 2013 at this year's Tech Ed and a promise of a public preview later this month at Build. So what's new? What has Expression been built in, what about C++11, and any change in the UI?

Foxconn Mozilla Partnership Official   Monday 03 June

Foxconn officially became part of Mozilla's Firefox OS ecosystem today at a press conference in Taipei at which the first Firefox OS enabled tablet was displayed.

Carbon Dating The Web   Monday 03 June

While surfing the web, you find something really interesting. But us it of current interest or is it already long gone. One of the problems with the web is that we don't remove dead material and who ever adds an accurate date of posting? Now however we have a way to discover how old a webpage is.

Windows 8 Users Hardly Use Any Modern Apps   Monday 03 June

Windows 8 "metro-style" apps, as we used to call them until they were re-labeled as "Modern" apps, were supposed to be one of the big benefits of moving to Windows 8. Research has now indicated that, even users of touch devices, make little use of these apps.

The Earth Has Many Faces   Sunday 02 June

While others are spending time worrying about privacy issues associated with face recognition, generative design studio, Onformative, has created Google Faces, an algorithm-based agent, to search Google Maps’ satellite images for landscapes that resemble the human face. Yes, a search for the many faces of Earth.

Cuddly - Mobile Phone Reacts To Being Squeezed   Sunday 02 June

You might not be into soft toys, but Cuddly is a brilliant lateral thinking use of a mobile phone's sensors to create an animated toy. 

Are APIs Copyrightable? Computer Scientists Urge Court To Say No   Saturday 01 June

It is just a year since Judge Alsup found in favor of Google in its lawsuit against Oracle over Android with his ruling that APIs are not subject to copyright. This ruling is now on appeal to the US federal court and over thirty prominent computer scientists have filed a brief urging the court to uphold Judge Alsup's finding.

Cat To Human Translation App   Saturday 01 June

Coming soon - a Chinese mobile app that translates cat body language and lets you know what your cat is trying to tell you - as if you didn't know already.

Space Monkey - A Personal Distributed Cloud   Friday 31 May

The problem with the cloud is that it tends to be centralized and remote. Space Monkey has just secured $350,000 in Kickstarter funding to make the cloud personal by selling commodity boxes to end users.

Udacity Offers HTML5 Game Development Certification   Friday 31 May

Udacity has come up with a new way to get your skills as an HTML5 Games Developer recognized by potential employers. It will cost you $80 but you get more than a certificate.

Windows 8.1 - It's Official The Start Button Isn't Back   Thursday 30 May

Microsoft has just released some information about Windows 8.1 and the Start button isn't being reinstated. If you have read other headlines and new reports that say that it is, then you are simply being misled. 

Amazing Siggraph 2013   Thursday 30 May

Siggraph doesn't happen till July but it is already showing what amazing things are going to be unveiled. A video condensing some of the work being presented is well worth seeing. 

Imagine Cup 2013 - Finalists Announced   Thursday 30 May

Microsoft has announced the names of the student teams that will be heading to St. Petersburg, Russia for the finals of this years Imagine Cup. And it is an impressive line-up.

Opera Next 15 Released   Thursday 30 May

Next is Opera's terminology for its beta channel and Opera 15 is the first of its desktop browser to become available that uses Google's Blink rendering engine.

The Core

Android Adventures - Building The UI   Monday 03 June

If you've been reading Android Adventures, at this point you understand how the Activity and the View fit together to create a simple application, but the Android UI is more complicated than most because of its need to cope with a range of very different screen sizes and orientations. In this chapter we look at the problem of layout and working with the UI framework. On the way we build a calculator app.

What Exactly Is A First Class Function - And Why You Should Care   Friday 31 May

You may have heard people saying that in some language or another that functions were first class objects, or have come across the term first class function. What does it mean? And why is it so good?

History

Altair - The First PC   Wednesday 05 June

The Altair was the computer that brought computing into homes and small businesses. It was the first PC, the forerunner of the Apple, the IBM PC and all that would follow.