Software-Programming

Now that's a question I never expected to ask on Easter morning. But instead of waking up to egg hunts, I'm haunted by Brian Fagioli's Google+ Chromebook Community post overnight. He stirs up the hornets nest today.

"Using Chrome OS is a lot like prisoners in jail making alcohol in the toilet", he writes. "Even when you are limited, you will find a way. While it is fun to find a way to do things despite the limitations of Chrome OS, the question remains: why do we choose to put ourselves in jail?"

We've come a long way since our initial Inside the second article. That's where we first advocated for testing real-time graphics and gaming performance by considering the time required to render each frame of animation, instead of looking at traditional FPS averages. Since then, we've applied new testing methods focused on frame latencies to a host of graphics card reviews and to CPUs, as well, with enlightening results.

After years of development, a shift from closed source to open source, and the advent of popular competitors like Alfred, the OS X productivity tool Quicksilver is finally leaving behind the beta tag it has been carrying around since 2003. According to the Quicksilver blog, the new release "means more than just a change in the version numbering system—it signifies a maturity of Quicksilver and a sign of what’s to come."

Web browsers have been growing up over the past few years. Now that Internet Explorer 6’s hold on the web has been broken, browsers have been implementing a variety of cool new features that websites are taking advantage of today.

This article focuses on new web technologies that you can use on actual web pages today. Sure, some of you have no doubt heard of many of these, but the majority of people haven’t heard of all of them.

Apple has informed developers that it will begin officially rejecting newly submitted and updated applications that access the iOS device UDID. Apple says that this new policy will begin on May 1st. With iOS 6, Apple began offering developers a new Advertising Identifier system that replicates the use of UDIDs for developers. Apple recommends that developers move over to this new system.

 With the Samsung Galaxy S4 presumably coming soon, many are excited about the possibility of running a more stock Android-based experience, like CyanogenMod, on the hardware. It looks like that's going to be a slower transition than many were hoping, as the current Samsung CM maintainers have said that they have no plans to support the device.

Adobe today patched Flash Player, the fifth time this year it's updated the vulnerability-plagued software.

Unlike two of the three updates last month, however, today's was part of Adobe's regularly-scheduled patch cadence.

It was with some fascination that I happened across Ian Langworth's "VIM after 11 years" post last week. As a vi/vim user for more than 20 years, I wasn't expecting to learn much. But to my surprise, Langworth revealed many features and tweaks I never would've sought out on my own because -- well, why would I? My vim reflexes have been built up like calluses over decades, long before many of these features and plug-ins were a glimmer in anyone's eye.

If you have a nostalgic turn of mind, there's a new posting over on Github that you'll just love: the earliest known C compiler by the legendary Dennis Ritchie has been published on the repository.

It's not new: long before his death in 2011, Ritchie wrote about the effort to find, recover and preserve the early work on C here. Even as far back as 2001, the effort to recover the earliest life of one of the world's most important programming languages was considered computer industry palaeontology.

When Facebook's mobile app began misbehaving on an older version of Android in late 2012, Facebook engineers had to dive deep into Android's code to figure out what was causing the mishap. In a whiteboard session today at Facebook headquarters, mobile engineering director Mike Shaver described how Facebook identified a problem in Android itself, then created a workaround for its own app so users wouldn't have to suffer.