The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

In the face of negative press about iOS 6's new Maps app, a bit of detective work by mobile app producer Onavo has unearthed a positive tidbit of news. The company says that iOS 6's Maps app uses considerably less data than its Google-powered predecessor—in fact, Onavo claims the much-maligned Apple Maps is "up to five times more efficient" than the previous incarnation.

Technology Review[^]:

Microsoft's Kinect, a 3-D camera and software for gaming, has made a big impact since its launch in 2010. Eight million devices were sold in the product's first two months on the market as people clamored to play video games with their entire bodies in lieu of handheld controllers. But while Kinect is great for full-body gaming, it isn't useful as an interface for personal computing, in part because its algorithms can't quickly and accurately detect hand and finger movements.

Owened by Owen Williams[^]:

Yes, I have switched to Windows 8 full-time, and it’s not because of the new Metro interface or charms. It’s not because of the ribbon or Internet Explorer 10. It’s really not because of anything you may expect. It’s much more simple than that. Here’s my top reasons I’m sticking with Windows 8 on my laptop.

Computerworld[^]:

Research in Motion Wednesday released a BlackBerry PlayBook OS update that adds full device encryption to secure personal data stored on the device to go along with the already-available encryption for corporate data. The PlayBook OS 2.1 update, which is fully described on a BlackBerry site, is available for Wi-Fi-only BlackBerry Playbook tablets.

VentureBeat[^]:

A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next. When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks. But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools. Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

Marijn Haverbeke[^]:

Acorn is really fast. Just like Esprima. Acorn is tiny. About half as big as Esprima, in lines of code. Still, there's no good reason for Acorn to exist. Esprima is an excellent project, well-documented, and small enough for any practical use. It exposes an interface very similar to Acorn. The only reason I wrote Acorn is that small, well-defined systems are so much fun to work with, and that Esprima's web page very triumphantly declared it was faster than parse_js, the implementation in UglifyJS version 1, which is a port of my own parse-js Common Lisp library. I just had to see if I could do better.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and you write it like you write JavaScript which I like. Any existing JavaScript is already TypeScript. One argument has been made that TypeScript is for people who don't want to learn JavaScript. I don't buy that. As Ward Bell said in an email: TypeScript is not a crutch any more than JSLint is a crutch. It doesn’t hide JavaScript (as CoffeeScript tends to do). - Ward Bell. I think Ward says it well. Folks rail against static typing but they don't complain about JSLint. TypeScript offers optional type annotations - it's hardly a perversion of JavaScript.

codeface[^]:

It’s been known for some time that Anders Hejlsberg was doing something interesting in the JavaScript space, and when Anders is doing something interesting, it’s worth paying attention. This is, after all, the man who got Real Programmers to use Pascal, and pulled off C++++ (put two of the +’s over the other two: #! See what they did there?). Today the covers were taken off the latest project by the man himself, and it’s TypeScript: “a strict superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript”.

Matt Watson[^]:

OK, so why do I think JavaScript sucks? Well first off, as an enterprise web application developer, I don't like any scripting or dynamic languages. I like code that compiles for lots of obvious reasons. It is messy to code with and lacks all kinds of modern programming features. We spend a lot of time trying to hack it to do things it was never really designed for. Ever try to use different jQuery based plugins that require conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.

PC Advisor[^]:

With Java SE 8, Oracle will not have Project Jigsaw's modularity capabilities, which will be postponed until Java SE 9. Java Development Kit 8, though, which would be based on Java SE 8, will feature Project Nashorn capabilities for JavaScript programming. "This is a modern implementation of JavaScript that runs on the JVM," said Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development.

wpcentral[^]:

Information has come forward to Windows Phone Central that demonstrates Microsoft does have their own Windows Phone hardware in the works; in fact, we’ve heard it already exists and is in testing. The source(s) are known to us and not anonymous, though for obvious reasons we must keep them off the record. Details about what it looks like, hardware specifications, launch times, etc. have not been shared with us by the person(s) who have provided the information. The only thing we do know is when compared to current WP8 hardware it’s something unique.

InformIT[^]:

To celebrate this milestone guide, we asked the leaders in computer science to share their thoughts about The C Programming Language. Read on to discover what Bjarne Stroustrup, David Patterson, Andy Tanenbaum, and many others have to say.