programming

The highest court in the European Union issued a ruling yesterday that essentially declares programming languages are not copyrightable.

The European Court of Justice ruled in favor of World Programming Limited (WPL) over the SAS Institute, which developed the SAS System, an integrated set of programs that enables users to carry out data processing and analysis tasks.

WPL emulated these functionalities with its World Programming System to ensure that its platform would work the same way, meaning the same inputs would produce the same outputs.

Here are the most important parts of the ruling, according to the court judgment:

In … Read more

Seeking to boost original content for its Amazon Instant Video service, Amazon Studios today put out the call for pilots for comedies and kids shows.

Since it launched in November 2010, Amazon Studios had focused on films, both full-length features and shorter films. This is its first foray into episodic programming.

"In the course of developing movies, we've heard a lot of interest from content creators who want to develop original series in the comedy and children's genres," Amazon Studios director Roy Price said in a statement.

Amazon Studios works differently than traditional Hollywood production companies. … Read more

Yesterday, Google appeared to have scrapped a software project to dramatically speed up browser-based games and apps on mobile devices -- but it turns out the project is still alive.

The software in question is called Native Client, and it lets programmers adapt software they've already written so it can be packaged up as a Web app -- one that runs nearly as fast as a regular native app, in Google's aspiration. Native Client today works on personal computers using x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but the company is adapting it to devices using ARM processors -- … Read more

Many developers are ready to dump Flash in favor of Web standards -- and for those who aren't ready, Adobe Systems is throwing its weight behind a new project called CreateJS to ease the transition.

CreateJS is a collection of libraries -- prewritten code, essentially -- that lets people program with Web standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript the way they're accustomed to with Flash. And along with the libraries there's the Toolkit for CreateJS, an extension for Adobe's Flash Pro developer tools that lets programmers work with Flash Pro and then export an HTML/JavaScript … Read more

Google has released version 1 of its Go programming language, an ambitious attempt to improve upon giants of the lower-level programming world such as C and C++.

Graduation to Go 1, which happened this week, makes the project less academic and more real in several ways. For one thing, Google has declared it mature enough to use. For another, it's available for use on Google App Engine, a foundation for cloud-computing applications.

And last, there's a bit of validation for Go readiness: it's being used today on one of the Internet's highest-profile sites.

Go is used … Read more

Adobe Systems released Flash Player 11.2 today -- along with a plan to make the browser plug-in a direct source of revenue for the company.

In the past, the Silicon Valley company has charged programmers to use development tools such as Flash Pro. But for any games published August 1 or later that use premium features in the new version of Flash Player, Adobe will require programmers to pay.

More specifically, Adobe will require developers to share 9 percent of net revenue beyond $50,000 for using the premium features, Adobe announced today. The premium features are Stage 3D … Read more

Ordinary folks may not notice much right away from the fact that Google's Android programmers are bringing their work back into the Linux kernel fold.

But it's an entirely different situation for a smaller but important group: the programmers who like to experiment with Google's open-source mobile operating system.

So predicts Tim Bird, the Sony programmer who's centrally involved in the merge of Google's Android Linux work with the "mainline" Linux kernel project. That cooperation took a big step Sunday when Linux leader Linus Torvalds released version 3.3 of the heart of … Read more

Android is gradually slipping down mobile programmers' priority list, with Web apps stepping in to as an answer to development difficulties, a survey released today concludes.

Appcelerator, maker of cross-platform programming tools used by 280,000 programmers to create 35,000 apps, tallied the changes in its quarterly survey. In it, the number of programmers who said they were "very interested" in programming for Android phones declined for a second quarter in a row, this time from about 83.3 percent to 78.6 percent. Android tablet interest also continued a decline for a second quarter, from about … Read more

Program Starter by A-B Tools is a freeware program launcher. It lets you organize your most frequently used apps in a customizable tree view menu for superquick access, and it launches tools very quickly with a single mouse click. It handles both installed and portable apps and even launches programs from desktop shortcuts.

Program Starter's interface is about as simple as they come: a compact dialog with a plain white background and a tree view displaying the icons of some of our most popular tools under folder headings such as Audio/Video, Internet/Downloader, Messenger, and Other tools. Clicking … Read more