program

Windows 8 and anxiety over HTML5

By sending signals that it's inclined to move Windows 8 coding toward HTML5 and JavaScript, and away from more familiar programming tools, Microsoft has "horrified" developers, according to a post at Ars Technica.

Citing a demo of Windows 8 given by Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green at the recent D9 conference, Ars Technica author Peter Bright called attention to a comment several minutes into the video. Pointing to a new app in the upcoming Windows 8, Larson-Green said that "this application is written with our new developer platform, which is based on HTML5 and JavaScript."… Read more

iBuildApp expands EZ-programming to Android

Barely a day goes by that some company doesn't pitch me on its mobile application developer tools. It shows just how hot the market has become.

I'm not a programmer, but when I got the announcement that iBuildApp now supports Android as well as iOS, I thought I'd dabble a bit. The sales pitch is that anybody can create an app with their tools for free, after all. The company asserts that 10,000 people have already used it.

Not every app is necessarily great, though, and unfortunately, I found iBuildApp's tool unsatisfying. It was workable … Read more

Adobe's Web design work lands in WebKit browser

Adobe has begun putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to improving Web page design.

Today, the first bit of Adobe-written code landed in the WebKit browser engine project, an early step to try to bring magazine-style layouts to Web pages using an extension to today's CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Adobe calls the technology CSS Regions.

The move begins fulfilling a plan Adobe announced in May to build the technology into WebKit and--if the company can persuade others to embrace it--furthers Adobe's ambition to standardize the advanced CSS layout mechanism.

WebKit is the browser … Read more

U.S. spies want computers to analyze metaphors

Here's a linguistic can of worms for you: a U.S. intelligence agency is training computers to analyze metaphors used in foreigners' conversations to determine if they are a threat to national security.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a spy version of DARPA under the director of National Intelligence, is working on something called The Metaphor Program. It's no 1960s quiz show.

The program is meant to "exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture."

Researchers will apparently identify and define metaphors from English, Farsi, Spanish, and Russian texts and compile them into a database. But computers will do most of the work. … Read more

Flaky film organizer

While the casual movie fan might be content to keep her or his movie collection on a shelf and pay little attention to it, true film buffs tend to be a bit more proactive when it comes to organization. GrieeX Movie Archive Program is a database that lets people keep track of the movies they own and import a variety of related information from the Internet, too. We like the premise of the program, but in practice, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The program's interface is plain and fairly easy to navigate, although some of its features … Read more

BlueStacks puts Android apps on Windows

If you miss your Android apps when using your PC, a start-up called BlueStacks says it has the answer.

Today, the company announced first-round funding of $7.6 million from Ignition Ventures, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz for its virtualization technology that provides a foundation for Google's mobile operating system atop Windows. It's got partnerships with Citrix for distribution to interested businesses and with assorted as-yet unnamed PC makers for consumers.

"The idea is very simple," said Chief Executive and co-founder Rosen Sharma, who previously was McAfee's chief technology officer. It … Read more

Halo effect for iOS coders moving to Mac OS?

First came the halo effect of computer purchases: iPod or iPhone buyers deciding they'd like a Mac. Now I'm wondering whether there will be a similar trend among programmers.

I started pondering the idea after hearing from MacPhun, the developers of FX Photo Studio, a $1 iOS app that just made the jump to a Mac OS X app that costs $20 for the regular version and $40 for the pro version. If MacPhun is willing to take the leap, perhaps others are?

I see the move as an interesting possibility because of a few factors:

The Mac … Read more

JavaScript: Now powerful enough to run Linux

Step aside, Google Docs, there's a new JavaScript tour de force in town.

I'm talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser.

The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn't have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system's core--2.6.20--runs on the foundation.

Bellard published a technical description of the JavaScript PC Emulator … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1470: Amazon is bringing a quad-core tablet?...We hope. (Podcast)

Brian Cooley invades the studio! Bing uses your Facebook social graph to help you make better...Decisions. T-Mobile lets you make Wi-Fi calls for free, but that will probably go away if the merger with AT&T happens. Another reason not to like it. Plus, the Power Point versus Keynote debate rages on!

Google App Engine goes for Go language

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a … Read more