The web-based software hosting service GitHub is everywhere lately, hosting over 2 million source code repositories being visited by 1.3 million users. Wired has a great look at the origins of the company — and the service itself — starting with the very beginnings of the Linus Torvalds-created Git version control software in 2005. What GitHub has excelled in doing is providing access and opportunity to programmers from around the world, giving them the chance to tinker with code that they may not have otherwise had the chance to touch, and then share their changes with a broad community of participants. It's a marked shift from the way software development had often been approached, with only a select few given permission to commit...
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Find: Forking the code: how GitHub is changing software development
Monday, February 27, 2012
Data: Campaign Finance Data in Real Time
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Data: ben_fry: Oh hell yeah: RT @uscensusbureau: Tomorrow begins countdown to #1940Census release on 4/2/12: http://t.co/2y9nrxUA
Find: Adobe lays out the future for Flash: a platform for the next 5-10 years
Adobe has published its roadmap for its Flash browser plugin and its AIR desktop application counterpart. More releases, more features, and more performance, are all planned, but on fewer platforms: Adobe is giving up entirely on supporting smartphone browsers, sticking to the core desktop platforms for its plugin—and with a big question mark when it comes to Windows 8.
The company sees Flash as having two main markets that will resist the onslaught of HTML5: game development, and premium (read: encrypted) video. To that end, the features it has planned for future updates focus on making Flash faster, with greater hardware acceleration and improved script performance, and more application-like, with keyboard input in full-screen applications, and support for middle- and right-mouse buttons.