Software-Programming

Mozilla today pulled out the PR stops to trumpet the 10th anniversary of Firefox, and in celebration released an interim build of Firefox 33 that includes a new privacy tool and access to the DuckDuckGo search engine.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9, 2004, at a time when Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) had a stranglehold on the browser space, having driven Netscape -- Firefox's forerunner in many ways -- out of the market two years before. Mozilla has been widely credited with restarting browser development, which had been moribund under IE.

THE UK MINISTRY OF DEFENCE (MoD) has revealed that it has put a piece of code into the open source community for the first time.

A commercial subsidiary of the MoD known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) has posted a program that has been used internally at the MoD to collate ideas and exploit "the creative power of a workforce".

DARPA is funding a new project by Rice University called PLINY, and it's neither a killer robot nor a high-tech weapon. PLINY, named after Pliny the Elder who wrote one of the earliest encyclopedias ever, will actually be a tool that can automatically complete a programmer's draft -- and yes, it will work somewhat like the autocomplete on your smartphones.

Skype for Windows desktop has shed the beta tag in its latest version and is now available for download.

Earlier in the month, Microsoft made a preview version of Skype for Windows and Mac OS X available, which introduced a new user interface similar to that seen on Skype's mobile apps, closely following Microsoft's modern design language while making it look a bit like MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

Apple has today notified developers about some upcoming rules regarding App Store submission, via its developer news portal. From 1st February 2015, newly-submitted apps and updates must be built against Apple’s iOS 8 SDK. This is not particularly surprising: Apple required similar adoption of the iOS 7 SDK last year.

The next version of iOS may not be an upgrade for fans who use their iDevices to emulate classic games. The latest beta version of iOS 8.1 removes the famous (or infamous) "Date Trick" workaround used by iOS emulator makers to bypass App Store restrictions on their work, without the need to jailbreak the device.

JENNY BOURBEAU is frustrated. For the last 10 months, the Massachusetts mother has been expressing breast milk for her young son. Like many mothers, she needed to use a pump but found the experience impersonal and difficult.

"I spent a lot of time with the pump and the process, thinking about how much it sucks and how it could be better and wondering why it isn't yet," she says.

Apple's new programming language Swift has been public for a few short months, but the Apple faithful are already bowled over. They toss around words like "cleaner," "simpler," "modern," and "powerful."

The rest of the world, however, can only speak about Swift hypothetically -- while the coding tools are free, they run inside only Xcode or a Playground, which, in turn, run on only Apple hardware. Of course, if you're really desperate, a clever website lets you try some basic Swift code as long as you don't touch the libraries.

Facebook says that hundreds of online companies have adopted its plan to let mobile apps operate more like the world wide web, seamlessly linking together in much the same way that pages do inside your web browser.

Google has unveiled a special collection of online Blockly Games that are built as playful ways to engage children in their first efforts at programming, and the search giant wants parents to help build the interest of their children.