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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Game changer

  Audio API in Android development

Mobile devices of the first generation were not capable of playing any sounds except monophonic ringtones. Today any smartphone platform supports playback, record and to some extent manipulation of digital sound, often up to CD quality.Android is no exception to that. Even older 1.5 devices can do a lot of things with digital audio. However, due to lack of guidance, a developer who is doing his first audio feature might miss some of the available API facilities, or might choose the approach that...

   Audio,Android,MediaPlayer,AudioTrack,Sou     2011-04-21 11:32:32

  Using C for a specialized data store

Pixenomics stores and transports 1.2 million pixels from the server to the client. During development we played with various methods to store and process this. Our ultimate goal was to send the entire board in under 1 second. During the stages of prototyping we used a MySQL database without thinking too much about performance. With a mere 2,000 pixels we quickly realised this wasn’t even usable as a demo. Changing the storage engine to memory was much better but still obviously unu...

   C,Data store,Efficiency,Performance     2012-03-07 05:09:38

  A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place.Indeed, it’s a skill I’m still learning myself, although the contexts in which I still get stuck are shrinking with time, study, and experience.This morning, as I downloaded crash reports ...

   Programming,Enemy,Stuck,Game design,Crash     2011-10-15 15:06:46

  Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms?

Editor’s note: This is Part III of a guest post written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities In Part II, he discussed how software and mobile technologies can augment and even replace doctors. Now, in Part III, he talks about how technology will sweep through education. In my last post, I ...

   Teacher,Algorithm,Development     2012-01-16 10:17:45

  The Mature Programmer

1. The Mature Programmer The mature programmer manages their own time and productivity well. The MP knows that maintenance is as much work as the initial writing and code always takes longer than you think. The MP knows that any changes to code can introduce bugs, no matter how seemingly trivial. The MP knows that premature optimization is foolish and dangerous. The MP knows that sexy coding like writing big complex systems from scratch is rarely the best way to go. The MP does not get...

   Mature programmer,MP,Feature,Coding standard,Efficiency     2011-12-05 13:12:00

  HTML5 History of 20th Century Music

We've seen some neat interactive HTML5 infographics before -- but the periodic table, for example, doesn't really care that much about time.Visual representation of time introduces numerous complications. Traditional ways of representing time visually were, roughly speaking, translations of dimension-type, from temporal to spatial; the mapping selected would depend on what kind of temporal relation was meaningful for the particular application. For example, circles represent cyclical beha...

   HTML5,JavaScript,Music,Timeline     2011-12-16 09:35:55

  Simple Animation in the HTML5 Canvas Element

HTML5 is generating all kinds of buzz these days. Some of the buzz is about HTML5 being a replacement for Adobe’s Flash. I don’t think it’s there yet but it’s certainly on the way to changing the way content is presented on the web. This is a description of a very simple animation in an HTML5 canvas element. It is coded for readability and not for optimized operation. We’ll add a canvas element to a web page and then use javascript to draw on it. We will...

   HTML5,Canvas,Animation,Sample code     2011-07-01 10:20:08

  Good ways to build communities around a web product

If a product wants to be successful, there are must be a group of loyal users of the product. Though their influence, more and more people get to know and product and start to use the product and again promote the product. The most difficult thing to promote a product after building an excellent product is to find the first bunch of users. For web products, same conditions apply, but the ways to promote the product may be more abundant. Besides the advertisement, there are other ways a web produ...

   Web product,Community,Promotion     2014-03-12 07:37:05

  Disgusting programming language list

To avoid arguments among different programming languages, this ranking only covers the opinions from programmers with multi-language experience. Also it doesn't mean the language is not good if the language is on the list, it just means those developers don't like some features of the language. Below ranking is summarized from Quora、Stack Overflow and Hacker News. 10. Python Reason : It uses code indent to define block level scope, why not use curly braces? It also uses massive colons and ...

   Programming language rank     2013-09-27 09:53:39

  What we still can’t do client-side

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still things we can’t do, and there’s no specification to address them at the time of this writing and no way to do them with the APIs we already have (or if there is a ...

   Chanllenge,Client side,Server side     2012-01-10 07:22:31

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