News

Scratch Blocks For Beginners In Developer Preview   Wednesday 18 May

Scratch Blocks has been released as an open-source developer preview ahead of Google I/O which starts today. It is a collaboration between Google and MIT Media Lab and builds on Google's Blockly technology and the Scratch Team’s expertise in designing creative interfaces for young learners. 

What Student Developers Want   Wednesday 18 May

How do student developers feel about their career options? Devpost has just published its second annual Student Hacker Report based on a survey of students from US university students participating in its hackathons. 

SIGGRAPH 2016 Video Trailer Doesn't Disappoint!   Wednesday 18 May

One of the highlights of the programming year is SIGGRAPH and particularly the video trailer that showcases the work that is being presented. This year's is well worth the three minutes it takes to see. 

Vue.js 2.0 Announced   Tuesday 17 May

A new version of front-end framework, Vue.js, has been announced. It is leaner and faster than the previous version. 

Komodo IDE 10 Released   Tuesday 17 May

In response to enterprise develop requirements for mobile development Active State is releasing a major update to its cross-platform Komodo IDE, and its free open-source counterpart Komodo EDIT, with improved support for JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks.

Perl 5.24.0 Released   Tuesday 17 May

While stepping down as Perl 5 Pumpking, in charge of the Perl release cycles, Ricardo Signes still managed to deliver Perl's latest stable release, 5.24, together with the development release, 5.25, that will evolve into  5.26.0 over the course of the next year.

Telerik Survey of .NET Developers   Monday 16 May

A survey intended to capture the pulse of the .NET developer
community going into 2016 has been made available by Telerik. It makes interesting reading.

NativeScript - to rule them all?   Monday 16 May

NativeScript 2.0 was recently released with tighter integratin for Angular2, extended support for 3rd-party native libraries for iOS and Android, and support, via plug-ins for TypeScript and UWP. A webinar tomorrow from John Papa will show you how to use Angular and NativeScript to build native mobile apps.

Anders Hejlsberg - Compiler Construction The Modern Way   Sunday 15 May

What you are taught as the theory of compiler construction in computer science is simply out of date. See what Anders Hejlsberg has to say on theory versus practice. 

A Neural Net Creates Movies In The Style Of Any Artist   Saturday 14 May

Deep Neural Networks have not only been impressing people with their AI ability, but also with their artistic abilities. The latest work can take the style of any artist and convert existing video into that style. You have to see it to believe it.

AWS IoT Button   Friday 13 May

Amazon has just added a small Wi-Fi device to its Internet of Things collection. Designed to be easy to configure to get started with AWS IoT, it is a programmable button based on the Amazon Dash Button hardware.

Google Open Sources Accurate Parser - Parsey McParseface   Friday 13 May

A lot of news items are making much of the naming of Google's English parser "Parsey McParseface", but there is some serious AI going on, as well as a sort of joke. 

Electron 1.0 Released For Desktop Apps   Friday 13 May

GitHub has released version 1.0 of Electron, its open source framework for cross platform development of desktop applications, formerly known as Atom Shell.

Cayenne Makes IoT Easy, Really Easy   Thursday 12 May

This really is the IoT for the rest of us. Cayenne is a drag-and-drop IoT builder that makes working with the Raspberry Pi to create IoT apps as easy as it possibly can be. This isn't just another IoT cloud offering, it really is something new.

Schmidt and Schwartz Defend Google's Use Of Java APIs   Thursday 12 May

At the start of the second Oracle v Google trial, Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt told the court that in creating Android Google used only what it thought was freely available, including the Java language and its APIs.

Professional Programmer

The BBC Micro:bit Which Language?   Monday 16 May

The micro:bit is supposed to be a breakthrough educational tool that will introduce physical computing to the masses, starting with 11- to 12-year olds. However, even physical computing needs code and this raises the question of which language to use. 

The Core

Android Adventures - Activity And UI   Thursday 12 May

So you know how to create an Android app, but do you really know how it works? In this second part of our ebook on getting started with Android using Android Studio 2 we look at how to create a UI and how to hook it up to the code in the Activity.