News

Why Programmers Don't Join The ACM   Wednesday 06 August

There's a lively Reddit debate currently taking place on the topic of why many programmers don't bother joining the ACM. So if you find yourself asking "ACM?" then read on.

Extracting Audio By Watching A Potato Chip Packet   Wednesday 06 August

This particular breakthrough sounds like a hoax but given the pedigree of the researchers involved - MIT, Microsoft and Adobe - we'd better take it seriously. Taken seriously it has a certain wow factor that makes you think that with the right algorithm anything is possible.,

Racket 6.1   Wednesday 06 August

A new version has been released of Racket, an open source language in the Lisp-Scheme family.

Oracle Valhalla   Tuesday 05 August

Oracle has announced an experimental OpenJDK project for trialing new features for Java.

Chrome 64-Bit For Windows In Beta   Tuesday 05 August

If you are running Windows 7 or later on a 64-bit machine you might be looking froward to having a 64-bit version of Chrome. It is now in the beta channel and you are invited to try out its features and provide feedback.

ScratchJr - Teaching Kids To Code With iPad   Monday 04 August

A new version of the Scratch programming language for use on the iPad has been designed to help teach young kids, who may not yet have learned to read, to create programs using a touchscreen interface.

Google I/O 2014 App As Reference Code   Monday 04 August

Google has just released the source code of the app that they made available to help people attend and generally manage I/O 2014. The idea is that this is an example of good practice for Android developers to take note of.

Venn Diagrams In Today's Google Doodle   Monday 04 August

Today's Google Doodle is great fun to interact with. Google has timed it to coincide with the 180th birthday of John Venn, who introduced the idea of using intersecting circles to to visually sort groups to illustrate their relationships to each other.

RoboCup 2014 - Are Soccer Robots Making Progress?   Sunday 03 August

The original goal of the annual RoboCup contest was that by 2050 a team of soccer robots should be able to beat the human world champions. Each year we have a chance to gage progress and this year we saw evidence that robots are getting better

Raspberry Pi Photo Competition Results Are Stunning   Saturday 02 August

The results of the Raspberry Pi photo competition organized by Adafruit have been revealed and, while the prizes awarded might seem low, the results are amazing. 

Researchers Jailbreak Current iOS 7.1.2   Friday 01 August

The constant war to jailbreak and patch iOS has taken another step in favor of the jailbreakers. Georgia Tech researchers have found a way to jailbreak the current version of iOS.

Google Play Publishing API   Friday 01 August

Google has released an API that you can use to publish and manage your Android apps on the Google Play Store portal.

Visual Studio Tools for Unity 1.9 Released   Friday 01 August

Visual Studio Tools for Unity is a free Visual Studio add-on for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform from Visual Studio 2010, 2012 and 2013.

React 0.11 Released   Thursday 31 July

The latest version of React, Facebook’s open source JavaScript library, has been made available.

PHP Gets A Formal Specification   Thursday 31 July

Given how important PHP is in terms of its use, it is very surprising to learn that it only now is getting a formal specification after 20 years of use. 

Three August MOOCs   Thursday 31 July

The Linux Foundation's Introduction to Linux starts on August 1st on the edX platform. Coursera has a course on Web Application Architectures and another on Algorithmic Thinking starting later in the month.

The Core

Covariance And Contravariance - A Simple Guide   Tuesday 05 August

Programming, and computer science in particular, has a tendency to use other people's jargon. Often this makes things seem more difficult. You may have heard of  covariance and contravariance and wondered what they were all about. If you want a simple explanation that applies to any computer language, here it is.

Android Adventures - Dialog Classes In DialogFragments   Thursday 31 July

The relationship between a DialogFragment and the Dialog within can seem mysterious, but in the previous chapter we discovered how to make a custom dialog using nothing but DialogFragment. Now we have to find out how we can use the Dialog class to do the same thing.