smitty777 writes "Veteran usability experts Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting article lamenting the current state of the art in gesture interfaces. According to them, the lack of standards for interacting with these devices puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner test-drives five leading JavaScript servers and finds the results compelling though still a work-in-progress. 'I enjoyed the challenge and stimulation of rethinking everything I know about the server, but I still found myself hesitant to push these new ideas too far or too fast. The speed of experimentation and development is heady and exciting to the open source crowd, but it will probably seem scary to corporate developers who like the long, stable lives of tools from Microsoft or Oracle. Some of these platforms will probably morph three or four times over the next few years, something that won't happen to the good, old JSP standard in the Java world,' Wayner writes in review of Node.js, Jaxer, EJScript, RingoJS, and AppengineJS."

RickJWagner writes "I'm pretty certain this is the definitive guide to Apache Camel, destined to be referred to as 'The Camel Book' by Camel users for a long time. It covers Camel inside and out, upside and down, 550 pages worth of gritty detail that takes the reader from level zero to monitoring of your production applications. If you use Camel, or think you might want to, you need to pick up a copy of this book." Read below for the rest of Rick's review.

itwbennett writes "For the first time since the 3rd quarter of 2007, IDC is reporting an increase in sales of Sun hardware. Oracle logged $773 million in server sales during the quarter, up from $681 million the year before, according to IDC's estimates."

jrepin writes "In new free book the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think." Note: the whole text of the book, under a Creative Commons license, is available on the site.

tal197 writes "Zero Install, the decentralized cross-distribution software installation system, announced 0install 1.0 today after 8 years in development. 0install allows authors to publish directly from their own web-sites while supporting familiar features such as shared libraries, automatic updates, and digital signatures. Is this the end of the walled-gardens of traditional app stores and Linux distributions and the beginning of a true 'Web of Software'?"

theodp writes "After having taught introductory programming (CS 1) for the past six years,' writes GVSU's Zack Kurmas, 'and having watched many students struggle through this course and the subsequent course (CS 2), I have come to the conclusion that it is absurd to expect students who don't have any prior programming experience to be well prepared to study Computer Science after a single 15-week course (i.e., CS 1). I believe that expecting a student to learn to program well enough to study Computer Science in a single 15-week course is almost as absurd as expecting a student with no instrumental musical experience to be ready to join the university orchestra after 15 weeks.' Kurmas' frustrations are not unlike those voiced by Physics professor Dr. Yung Tae Kim, who argues the up-or-out, one-size-fits-all rigid pace approach to learning set by teachers and administrators is as absurd as telling a toddler, 'You have ten weeks to walk, and if you can't, you get an F and you're not allowed to try to walk anymore."

Julie188 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on Apple to indemnify its developers from Lodsys — a patent troll that's alleging patent infringement on the in-app purchasing used by iOS apps. (That's the technology developed by Apple and forced on many of its developers.) The letters Lodsys has been sending out came to light on May 13th, and apparently developers have been asking Apple for help to no avail."

Gibbs-Duhem writes "The LeafLabs Maple, an ARM device designed to be pin compatible with the Arduino, and with a strikingly similar and familiar development environment, has reached a new milestone — being carried by SparkFun. By swapping the popular 'avr-gcc' compiler with CodeSourcery's 'arm-non-eabi-gcc,' LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture. Also, while some Arduino shields are incompatible due to certain capabilities being allocated to different pins, several of them are currently supported and there are more to come."

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses whether independent software developers should follow in the footsteps of Google and Mozilla and begin offering bug bounties before black hats pay up for their undisclosed software flaws. 'Whichever side of the fence you fall on, the fact is that bounties are being paid for undisclosed software flaws. They're just not always being paid by the vendor who developed the software. As ever more commercial data moves into the cloud and the stakes for cyber crime rise, black hat hackers are offering real money for exploitable bugs. In turn, when exploits happen, vendors may be held legally liable for any customer data that was compromised. Maybe it's time more software shops thought seriously about using their own cash to turn the tide in their favor.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments has struck back against Nspire gamers and hackers with even stronger anti-downgrade protection in OS 3.0.2, after the TI calculator hacking community broke the anti-downgrade protection found in OS 2.1 last summer and the new one in OS 3.0.1 a month ago. In addition to that, in OS 3.0.1 the hacker community found Lua programming support and created games and software using it. Immediately, TI retaliated by adding an encryption check to make sure those third-party generated programs won't run on OS 3.0.2." But if you want it, you can get OS 3.0.2 here.

msmoriarty writes "Microsoft told a group of MVPs today at Tech-Ed that it plans to take Visual Basic 6 open source and will release the source code on CodePlex. A source at the event said that Microsoft is planning to release only the VB6 language on codeplex – not Visual Studio or related tools." Update: 05/20 02:24 GMT by T : Alas, too good to be true. msmoriarty writes with an apologetic retraction: "We got it wrong — Microsoft denied and went back to our source and they pulled confirmation. Our apologies."

CowboyRobot writes "The creators of the Lua language describe the process of designing a new language and the constraints that certain parameters, specifically embeddability, place on the process. 'Many languages (not necessarily scripting languages) support extending through an FFI (foreign function interface). An FFI is not enough to allow a function in the system language to do all that a function in the script can do. Nevertheless, in practice FFI covers most common needs for extending, such as access to external libraries and system calls. Embedding, on the other hand, is harder to support, because it usually demands closer integration between the host program and the script, and an FFI alone does not suffice.'"

rysiek writes "Last weekend marked the first Startup Weekend in Poland. Three days, about 100 developers and designers, 20 mentors, forming 30+ teams. The big winner — CityRace.me — will be launching soon, with a few others close on its heels. Most hackteresting project — Nest of Worlds (conceived by the Warsaw Hackerspace people) — has it all: Game of Life on hexes, with sound in pure JS (needs Firefox 4, but still awesome). There is also a lengthy summary of the network setup and problems for the network admins among you. Ralph Talmont also offers a more general write-up. Disclaimer: I was the network guy."

tgeller writes "British web designer Jonathan Brown tweeted that Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has surpassed 10,000 commits to the open-source content-management system he created ten years ago, Drupal. In a private email, Dries said, 'I'm mostly committing other people's patches: Credit really goes to the community at large.' Still, it's rare for individual to log that many commits. Can anyone claim more?"

rubycodez writes "After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing."

jammag writes "It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury). Soon, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth began. As this project manager recounts, developers feel strongly — very strongly — about needing a second monitor (maybe a third?) to work effectively. But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a heretofore unknown company named Lodsys sent FedEx packages to a number of independent iOS developers informing them that their use of in-app purchasing infringed on valid patents they owned. Now Lodsys has publicly responded to a number of issues/questions levied at them over the past few days."

chromatic writes "Pumpking Jesse Vincent has just released Perl 5.14, the latest stable version of the venerable Perl 5 programming language. The list of changes in Perl 5.14 includes several enhancements, including performance tuning, Unicode improvements, and updates to the core libraries and documentation. Perl 5.16 is on track for a release next April."

An anonymous reader writes "Due to Washington State budget concerns, Western Washington University is considering cutting their Computer Science Department. The news comes even as local stations report a hiring boom in the tech sector. The WWU administration seems completely out of touch with the current state of the department. This story has gotten a lot of attention and support from local industry and the University of Washington professors."