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Facebook wants to help you write code faster with its 'Hack' programming language
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook often try to assist and provide tools for coders, both current and future ones. With that in mind, the social network today announced Hack, an open-source language for programmers. This new language has been used internally at Facebook for the past year and offers a lot of potential for developers, enabling them to program faster and be able to catch errors more easily, among other things. Hack, which was developed for the HHVM platform, is designed to be extremely friendly with PHP; as Facebook puts it, its new programming language "offers the best of both dynamically typed and statically typed languages, and that it will be valuable to projects of all sizes." Essentially, this means you theoretically could have access to websites that are faster and more reliable. Interested in learning more? Head over to Facebook's Engineering blog, where you'll find all the nitty-gritty details you're looking for.
Google Coder lets you build Raspberry Pi web apps in your browser (video)
It's undoubtedly possible to turn a Raspberry Pi into a web server, but it's not always easy. Thankfully, Google just streamlined the process with its new Coder project. The open source tool lets developers build web apps for a ready-made Raspberry Pi web server using only a desktop browser. Coder manages all the files, including any media. The mini PC, meanwhile, only requires a network connection and an SD card reader to store the server. Beyond the hardware, Coder is free to use; if you've wanted a cheap testbed for web programming, you'll find one at the source link.
The one OMGPOP employee who turned down Zynga
When Zynga announced that it bought OMGPOP, the developer of the newly minted hit Draw Something, a lot of people shared some frustration. Zynga has earned a reputation as a less-than-popular developer out there, and the fear is that Draw Something, which currently has a relatively simple charm, will get overloaded with social cruft and other nonsense. But at least one person out there has a real problem with the Zynga takeover: Developer Shay Pierce actually walked away from his job because of it. His story is an interesting one, and he wrote it up over at Gamasutra earlier today. Basically, he was a developer for OMGPOP (though he says he didn't actually work on Draw Something), and when the news came down that Zynga was acquiring the company, he was concerned about his own iPhone app. Pierce published a puzzle game called Connectrode on his own time (with his employer's blessing), but he was worried that self publishing like that wouldn't fly under Zynga's banner. And indeed, long story short, it didn't. He was basically told to stop publishing on his own or leave the company, and instead of joining up with the house that Farmville built, he quit his job. It sounds like he'll be all right -- he was compensated for his leaving, is planning to work as an independent developer for a while, and the press from this has probably grabbed a nice bump in sales for his game, I'm sure. Still, Pierce doesn't mince words talking about Zynga. "When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves)," he writes, "yes, I believe that that is evil. And I believe that Zynga does exactly that." I would agree that many of things Zynga is doing (mostly revolving around its social and casual games) are unsustainable. Its audiences need to grow to continue to make the company successful, and Zynga has built a model so thin on gameplay that I believe there's a limit to just how interested in these games people can become. But I wouldn't argue that the company is evil -- being a flash in the pan just makes them a fad, not the devil. Still, you may disagree. I think the final part of this story is to see what happens to Draw Something over the next weeks and months. The app has garnered such a huge audience so quickly that it seems as though it'll be very difficult for even Zynga to hold that interest for long. As for Pierce, he's made his choice, and we'll look forward to what he's working on next.
The real story behind the iPhone unlock GUI drama
So as you may have seen on some other sites, there was a little bit of drama today around the iPhone unlock program written (in part) by our own Erica Sadun. Lots of rumors are flying around, and lots of folks have it almost right. But none of them knows the real story. And since Sadun works for us, we have kind of an inside track on what really happened. So here it is. var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/apple/The_real_story_behind_the_iPhone_unlock_GUI_drama'; First of all, Erica didn't write the unlock application itself. The iPhone Dev Team did that, and it apparently is a real, no-code-stolen software unlock-- put it on your iPhone, run it, and then use any SIM you want. Erica only started to write the barebones of a GUI application for the unlock, and gave that code to the dev team.Which is where this haRRo person gets involved. He, a Belfast, UK man, is not a member of the dev team, but pretended to be. He apparently took Erica's code out of the IRC channel, with the intent of selling it as his own application. He even got an offer from an Australian company, $50k AUD, to allow the application he said he'd written.But he didn't write it. At all. Because while yes, the code he tried to sell was updated from Erica's code, it wasn't by haRRo. He actually contacted another coder to do the job-- who we spoke with, and our IM conversation can be seen after the jump.Update: Post updated below.
