News

Is The Future Of Windows RT In Doubt?   Wednesday 21 May

Microsoft launched a new Surface tablet, the 12-inch Surface Pro, but at the same event there was no sign of the expected 8-inch mini. Could this mean that the tide is turning against Windows RT? If so in favor of what exactly?

New API For Image Tagging   Wednesday 21 May

Alchemy API, known for its natural language processing technologies for text mining and semantic analysis, has launched a computer vision API for analyzing and tagging images.

Qt 5.3 Released   Wednesday 21 May

The latest version of Qt has changes to make it more stable, faster and easier to use.

Hadoop RDBMS Announced   Tuesday 20 May

A database that combines Hadoop and traditional relational abilities has been released as a public beta by Splice Machine.

Code School Adds AngularJS Course   Tuesday 20 May

A new Angular JS course has been released by Code School adding to its JavaScript track which also covers jQuery, Backbone.js, Node js, Coffeescript and Ember.js.

Google Doodle Rubik's Cube   Monday 19 May

Google's latest doodle celebrates 40 years of Rubik's cube. It is interesting not only for the cube itself, but because of what Google uses as the enabling technology for the animation - three.js and CSS3.

Baidu Hires Andrew Ng   Monday 19 May

At the grand opening of its US Research and Development Center in Sunnyvale, California, Chinese "search giant" Baidu announced that it has appointed Andrew Ng as its Chief Scientist.

Scratch 2.0 Open Sourced   Monday 19 May

An open source version of the Scratch 2.0 project editor has been made available on GitHub, enabling more people to get involved with this popular bloc-structured programming language suitable for kids.

Unified Particles Make Better Graphics   Sunday 18 May

This is one that somehow got away from the SIGGRAPH video earlier in the week - but it's very well worth seeing. A new unified particle system creates some amazing graphics effects.

Ultra-fast Robot Catches On The Fly   Saturday 17 May

Usually robots that do complex things are slow, so slow that the videos are often speeded up, but this robot arm moves fast and learns fast. Watch it catch objects with a perfection that is spooky.

Intel's Make It Wearable - Development Track   Friday 16 May

The Development track for Intel's Make It Wearable Challenge is now open. Intel is looking for  innovative, feasible product concepts that simultaneously balance creativity with execution and is offering over a million dollars in prizes for this second phase of the contest.

Entity Framework Everywhere   Friday 16 May

The latest version of Entity Framework is much more lightweight than previous versions and can be used across a wide variety of platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store.

WebKit JavaScript Goes Faster Thanks To LLVM   Friday 16 May

The efforts to make JavaScript faster have now spread to WebKit and, of course, to Apple's Safari browser. The way that this has been achieved is very clever. 

SIGGRAPH 2014 Teaser Video   Thursday 15 May

Yes, it's that time again. SIGGRAPH 2014 is only a short time away and there is a showcase video that lets you see some of the amazing things coming your way.

Microsoft Expands Redis Support   Thursday 15 May

Microsoft has released a preview Redis Cache for Azure, along with an ASP.NET Session State Provider for Redis that can be used with standard Redis servers or with the Azure Redis Cache.

Open Source BBC Micro In JavaScript   Thursday 15 May

The BBC Micro was a revolutionary computer that had a worldwide impact. Now you can try it out in JavaScript in your browser.

The Core

C# Bit Bashing - The BitConverter   Tuesday 20 May

Is C# a high-level or a low-level language? It doesn't really matter - all languages are low-level when you are thinking in terms of bits, and sometimes you just can't avoid thinking in bits.

Just JavaScript - How Functions Become Methods   Thursday 15 May

In this part of our radical exploration of JavaScript the topic is how a Function object becomes a method with the help of "this" - perhaps the most maligned of JavaScript keywords. We also look at how to early and late bind methods.