This week I made a project with parts from the Arduino Starter Kit. I skipped over building the Proto Shield from the kit, since I made a how-to a while back. Otherwise, it's a simple build that doesn't require any soldering. Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Arduino is open source! In addition to the genuine Arduino, resistors, buttons and other goodies,...
Filed under: Retro Mac, Blast From the Past, Found FootageAl Diblasi over at Alfred.TV keeps coming up with fun videos with old Apple or related devices as the centerpiece. In this latest 53-minute masterpiece on YouTube (below), Al boots up a 1991 68040-based NeXT Cube, and then shows off some of the built-in applications, an original brochure for the NeXT, a cool NeXT black turtleneck (Steve Jobs' influence, obviously), and a couple of versions of the NeXTstep OS and development environment.For those of you who are new to the Mac world, NeXT was the company Steve Jobs founded after being...
The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment. Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable...
What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric. This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now...
Adobe, ARM, and Qualcomm, among a host of several other players in the telecommunications and entertainment industry, are teaming up to develop and launch the Open Screen Project. If you aren’t familiar with the OSP, we’ll brief you on what it is and what it means for both developers and consumers. It is going to change the future of rich Internet content and media and how it will be delivered to consumers. With the OSP, users will be able to see and share videos, pictures, and other content across all devices and platforms from set-top boxes, computers,to mobile devices....
I played with an early prototype of delightfully engrossing Meggy Jr at Maker Faire Austin in October. It's an open-source kit to build your own pixel-based video games. It's made by my friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Windell, Lenore, and Chris. Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It's based around a fully addressable 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. The kit is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller, and you can write your own games or otherwise control...
Filed under: Developer, iPhoneiPhone developer Pádraig Kennedy sent us news of this jewel of a tool: iPhone Backup Extractor, a way to read the backups that iTunes automatically makes for your iPhone or iPod touch using the Finder. Kennedy already had a command-line tool to do this, but he wrapped an easy-to-use GUI around the whole process. Just select a backup, select an application, and away you go. What makes this useful, writes ADC award-winning iPhone developer Craig Hockenberry, is that it allows developers to track down customer bugs that they can't reproduce themselves. "You can instruct your customer to...
After a year in the making, and with very little fanfare, Microsoft last month launched Small Basic, a free programming language aimed at kids. Unlike Scratch and Alice, tools designed for kids to learn programming in a 'codeless' environment, Small Basic is essentially a small version of the BASIC language. Sponsor Drawing inspiration from the original BASIC language, but based on the newer .Net Framework, Small Basic consists of three distinct pieces: The Language Consists of just 14 keywords, Small Basic is pure imperative code that runs on the .Net Framework. The Environment Small Basic's development environment is simple but...
Massimo Banzi writes over at the Arduino blog: After a couple of years of prototypes, tests and announcements, finally we have produced an ethernet shield for Arduino. This module gives Arduino the ability to open connections to other Internet hosts or behave like a server, for example a simple web server. We like this design because it uses the w5100 chip from WizNet that implements the whole IP stack in itself providing up to 4 sockets simultaneously. I believe this will provide Arduino enthusiasts around the world with a platfrom that is initially simple to use but with room...
The developer of an online game-building platform is switching from Java to Flash. The reason? Users don’t want Java. “Up front, I’ll say that the reason we are moving to Flash is because of Java’s adoption rates. It is not, in fact, because of the language itself but because of Java’s deployment model. We suspect that we lose somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of users due simply to the fact that we are in Java.” It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to load applets on the web. They are slow and prone to...
Just because you aren't attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference doesn't mean you can't follow the announcements. The most exciting announcement so far [from my perspective] has been Windows Azure which is described as follows from the official site The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture...
Microsoft just made its first cloud OS, dubbed Azure, officially official. The system allows developers and hobbyist alike to collaborate together on a flexible and interoperable application platform. Applications created within can run from the cloud or even enhance non-cloud based applications with the hive-like features. Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The entire service is an open platform that supports not only the Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net Framework,...
Ray Ozzie just publicly announced our Software + Services platform Azure. The Azure Services Platform is built on the Windows Azure operating system in the cloud. Windows Azure provides service hosting and management, scalable storage and a development environment for the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Service Platform includes: SQL Services for relational data storage and querying .NET Services for service-connectivity, workflow, and messaging Live Services for application extension of the Windows Live platform SharePoint Services which provide extensibility for SharePoint Server Dynamics CRM Services which provide extensibility for Dynamics CRM Rough timeline today is that we’re entering community tech...
