The Insider News

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft is building another Office Windows 8-style application. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Office plans have revealed to The Verge that the app, codenamed Office Reader, is designed to be a cross format tool for consuming different types of content. During yesterday's employee-only company meeting, Microsoft's Kirk Koenigsbauer demonstrated the tool alongside a number of updates coming to Office in what he described as the "Gemini" wave.

Mark Rendle[^]:

When groups of developers come together to talk about the state of OSS in .NET, the comparisons were traditionally drawn with Ruby; more recently Node.js has also become a focus for analogy. Both those ecosystems are almost entirely open-source, with lots of healthy competition and innovation, and a genuine sense that if somebody builds a better mousetrap, people will switch to it. “Why isn’t the .NET world more like that?” people ask, and they talk about whether it’s Microsoft’s fault and what they could do to help. What I rarely hear mentioned is the humungous elephant in the room: Visual Studio.

Apple Insider[^]:

Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer may be on his way out soon, but he's not leaving without taking a few more swipes at Apple, Amazon, and Google.

SD Times[^]:

Thousands of employees filed into Seattle’s Key Arena today for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s final company meeting. Reports out of the meeting are not official, but we have a pretty good idea of the main announcements made during Ballmer’s last hurrah.

Atomic Object[^]:

I found myself scratching my head at the details on the preview of Ruby 2.1 for a minute. I don’t know what most of the items are! So let’s dig into them and dive into some of the details.

ReadWrite[^]:

Google updates some search features that expand on its ability to answer your questions directly.

SmartBear[^]:

WebKit long has been the dominant open source Web-rendering engine, but with Google’s Blink fork, its future has turned murky.

The Next Web[^]:

Microsoft today launched BrowserSwarm, an open source tool to help Web developers automate testing of their JavaScript frameworks and libraries across devices and browsers. To take advantage, all you have to do is sign up for free here.

Tor[^]:

Scientists at the lab are reporting that they’ve successfully managed to get two photons to interact with each other and form a “photonic molecule” that acts as if it has mass but maintains the properties of light. Photons as a rule contain no mass and don’t interact with each other, which is why two beams of light pass right through each other. Lightsabers aside, the creation of a “photonic molecule” is actually a Pretty Big Deal.

InfoQ[^]:

Cloud-based IDE provider Codenvy has introduced the idea of “instant projects” where developers can jump into a configured environment and immediately begin coding. These temporary environments require no authentication and open up interesting new possibilities for developers seeking community assistance or evaluating technology.

News.com[^]:

Explore the tunnels and control rooms of the world's biggest particle collider from the comfort of your own home using Google Street View.

Infoworld[^]:

Terry Myerson is a tough guy to pin down. Where his predecessor, Steve Sinofsky, would post pages-long blogs explaining in raptuous telemetric detail many of the components that made Windows 7 and 8 (and by extension 8.1) tick, Myerson has a reputation for letting his products speak for themselves. That's going to make it hard to second-guess where the next version of Windows is headed -- but all indications at this point are encouraging.

BBC[^]:

Thirty years ago, on 26 September 1983, the world was saved from potential nuclear disaster.

GeekWire[^]:

Bill Gates made many exceptional decisions while he was leading Microsoft to immense success. He did, however, make a few errors. One of those was the idea of using “Control-Alt-Delete” — initially designed to efficiently reboot a computer — as a way to log into Windows.

Computerworld[^]:

In keynote address, Wozniak recounts hacking adventures in his college days and early Internet times.

News.com[^]:

Google confirmed this week it has made a change to better protect the privacy of how people search. However, it left loopholes in that protection and once again failed to seize an opportunity to encourage all sites to go secure.

Wired[^]:

If you know Java at all, you probably think of it as something from the late ’90s, a child of the original internet boom, a little piece of downloadable software that sent a cartoon mascot dancing across your Netscape web browser. You think of it as something that promised a world of software apps that could run on each and every one of your personal machines — from PCs to cellphones — but that ultimately failed in the face of endless security bugs and poor decisions from its creator, Sun Microsystems. “For the general populace,” says LinkedIn principal staff engineer Jay Kreps, “Java is some annoying thing that really out-of-date websites try to make them download.” And if you see it as anything more than that, you probably dismiss it as a way of building stodgy “middleware” tools that connect things like web servers and databases.

Sitepoint[^]:

Working from feedback from the PhoneGap app developer community, the folks at Adobe have built a new open source CSS library designed with speed in mind. This should prove incredibly useful for web app design. The language was initially based on languages for Brackets and Edge Reflow and it has evolved from there.