Today marks the start of Code.org’s second annual Computer Science Education Week, and with it another round of the Hour of Code campaign, this time with even higher goals. This year, President Obama kicked off the festivities with a speech, also taking on the title of “Coder-in-Chief” and becoming the first president to program a … continue reading
#1: Mermaid Mermaid is the whimsical name of a simple markdown-like script language for generating charts from text using JavaScript. Developed by Knut Sveidqvist, Mermaid simplifies documentation by rendering code as simple charts and graphs, styled in different shapes, nodes and classes. #2: Rocket is a new container runtime from CoreOS. Read all about Rocket … continue reading
As the year comes to a close, it’s the season of analyst firms looking ahead at the year to come in technology. Not to be confused with Gartner’s Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015, market intelligence firm IDC has released its own future forecast: “IDC Worldwide Predictions 2015: Accelerating Innovation on the 3rd Platform.” … continue reading
Stephen Hawking has a shiny new communications system courtesy of Intel and British language technology company SwiftKey, and he’s sharing the tech with the world. (He also may have hinted that artificial intelligence will bring about the apocalypse.) Hawking’s new ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit) replaces the 20 year-old system he was using (and finding … continue reading
PDFs have been around for a long time—more than two decades, in fact. As the platforms displaying the format have evolved beyond a simple desktop, more and more tools and components proliferate behind the scenes to ensure those documents crisply render and display on whatever application or screen they pop up in. Since its inception … continue reading
The flashiest news out of the Firefox 34 release may be Mozilla’s switch from Google to Yahoo as its default search engine, but the far more significant news is a WebRTC client built directly into the browser. The first Firefox 34 Beta release including a WebRTC client debuted back in September, but the official Firefox … continue reading
The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache Drill as a Top-Level Project. According to the Foundation, Apache Drill is a schema-free SQL query engine for Hadoop and NoSQL. By removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed, Drill users can run interactive ANSI SQL queries on complex or constantly evolving … continue reading
Welcome to a special Thanksgiving edition of the Top 5 trending GitHub projects. There are still five projects and they’re still open source, but this week… you get them on a Wednesday! “Hooray!” yell all our loyal GitHub-loving readers in overjoyed unison. That’s totally what’s happening right now. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving! #1: Interact.js Interact.js is … continue reading
Steve Jobs is about as iconic and complex a figure as the tech world has ever seen, so it’s no surprise his life story has been so quickly swept up into Hollywood biopic fodder. Walter Isaacson’s 2011 Jobs biography was a New York Times Bestseller, capturing a distinct cultural moment. It was hard to go … continue reading
Privacy advocates including Amnesty International, Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the EFF have teamed up to unveil Detekt, an open-source software tool to detect government spyware. Detekt scans Windows computers for traces of known surveillance spyware used to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world, according to the Detekt website. The … continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with a coalition of tech companies, organizations and researchers, have announced Let’s Encrypt: a new certificate authority (CA) initiative to implement the HTTPS encryption and communications protocol across the entire Web. Let’s Encrypt, which is also backed by Akamai, Cisco, IdenTrust, Mozilla and University of Michigan researchers, is intended as … continue reading
Google has released the first APIs for Android Auto, opening up third-party development for its in-car operating system. The two APIs support audio apps and messaging apps, allowing developers to integrate content into Android Auto for users to browse, play back audio from car and messaging apps that receive incoming notifications, read messages aloud, and … continue reading
