News

All About C/C++ Developers   Wednesday 12 August

Prior to launching its newest IDE, CLion, JetBrains conducted research into the target market for this product. Now it has shared what it discovered about C++ and C developers, including where they are, what they do and what tools they use, in an infographic.

WebGLStudio.js - 3D Development For The Web   Wednesday 12 August

Sooner or later everything will be written in JavaScript. Now we have WebGLStudio.js, which is a full 3D graphics suite written in JavaScript and fully open source. 

Rust Releases New Versions   Tuesday 11 August

Two new versions of Rust have been released; 1.2 in a stable version, and 1.3 as a beta release.  The main improvements in Rust 1.2 are faster compilation and parallel code generation, along with support for the MSVC toolchain.

Vulkan For Android   Tuesday 11 August

Vulkan is the new open standard cross platform graphics API from Khronos which is still under development. Android is working towards bringing Vulkan to Android while at the same time continuing to support Open GL ES, giving devs a choice of which rendering engine to use.

io.js 3.0 Released   Tuesday 11 August

Although io.js has re-merged with Node.js as part of the Node.js Foundation, it has recently released a third version of its breakaway version of Node.js. 

Microsoft Doubles Bounty Payouts   Monday 10 August

Microsoft has announced an increase for its Bounty for Defense program from $50K to $100K and an expansion of its Online Services Bug Bounty program, including and a bonus period during which some authentication vulnerabilities will receive double bounty payouts.

Alan Turing Institute Starts Work   Monday 10 August

The UK's new national institute for the data sciences has appointed Andrew Blake, Head of Microsoft Research UK, as the inaugural director of the Alan Turing Institute. The institute has also announced a partnership with GCHQ to work on next generation ideas and methods for the use of big data.

Git 2.5 Released   Monday 10 August

The latest version of Git has been released with support for multiple working trees and triangular workflows.

Choosing A Computer Language   Sunday 09 August

If you are new to programming there is a bewildering array of possibilities. Which is the best language to start with is a question that will get many different answers - but knowing which one is right for you depends on what you hope to get out of it.

Your Phone's Battery Leaks - Your Id That Is   Saturday 08 August

You can run, but you can't hide. It is amazing how innocent technological features turn out to have a hidden dark side. So it is with the battery API. Designed to help out with running out of juice, it now seems that it can be used to track you even if you don't want to be tracked.

Microsoft's Islandwood Now On GitHub - An iOS Bridge To Nowhere?   Friday 07 August

The problem with a bridge is that no matter how beautiful or structurally ingenious it is, if there are no takers for the crossing then it is a bridge to nowhere. Microsoft has delivered a first look at Islandwood, its "bridge" that takes iOS programs to Windows Universal. Are there any compelling reasons for iOS apps to take the trip?

Mycli 1.0 - Kickstarter Success Story   Friday 07 August

Wondering how to fund your great idea for an app? Maybe the answer lies with Kickstarter as mycli, a command line interface for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona demonstrates.

Cloud Apps Best For Revenue   Thursday 06 August

The latest State of the Developer Nation report has revealed that more than half of mobile developers and an even higher proportion of those developing IoT are making an income below the app poverty line.

React Devtools Beta   Thursday 06 August

A completely new version of the Devtools for React, the open source JavaScript library from Facebook, has been released as a beta version.

The Core

Managing Asynchronous Code - Callbacks, Promises & Async/Await   Wednesday 12 August

You can understand asynchronous code very deeply and still have no clear idea how best to write such code. There are so many possible approaches. In the follow-on to What Is Asynchronous Programming? , we start from  the idea:
Asynchronous code is inevitable if we insist on the simplicity of a single threaded UI. 

Android Adventures - Staying Alive!   Thursday 06 August

One of the things that you have to get used to when programming for a mobile platform is that your app can be shut down and restarted without much warning. This is something that often causes programmers from other platforms and beginners to make mistakes.  You have to learn how to cope with this start-stop existence and that, for an Android app, it is a tough life just trying to stay alive.