Bitwise Magazine

Parallels Desktop 8 Review

Integrate Windows and OS X

Saturday 15 September 2012

Parallels Desktop 8 - $79.99 / £77.34 (upgrade: $49.99 / £34.99)
http://www.parallels.com

If, like me, you are a Windows user who also uses a Mac, it can be frustrating to be cut off from many of your favourite applications every time you boot into OS X. While it is possible to install Windows on Mac hardware, the default way of doing so is to create a separate partition for Windows and use the Boot Camp utility to switch between operating systems. But it's an all-or-nothing choice. When you boot into Windows, you have no access to OS X applications; when you boot into OS X, your Windows programs are unavailable. An altogether smarter alternative is provided by the Parallels Desktop. This lets you boot into OS X and then run your Windows and Mac programs right alongside one another. Here I am simultaneously running Visual Studio and XCode on my Mac! Parallels Desktop 8 (...)

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Visual Studio 2012, Grey no more!

Putting the colour back into your programming life

Monday 10 September 2012

I’ve already made my feelings known about the depressingly grey user interface of Visual Studio 2012.

Well, now I have good news. You can change the colours back to the VS 2010 scheme or (with a bit of effort) any other colour scheme that takes your fancy. All thanks to the new VS2012 Theme Editor. To install this, use the VS Tools menu, select Extensions and Updates, Online. Then browse, install, restart Visual Studio and pick your preferred colours from the Theme menu.

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RIP PC Plus - oh, the fun we had!

after 26 years the magazine is no more

Monday 3 September 2012

I just heard that PC Plus is ceasing publication. On the one hand, I can’t say it’s a huge surprise. You only have to see how thin the magazine (and many other computer titles) has become when compared with the 400-page monsters of a few years ago. The fact of the matter is that in this Internet-centric world, we now expect to read the latest news on the day it happens rather than weeks later when a magazine finally goes to print. So it must be an increasing struggle for print magazines to retain a loyal readership.

Even so, its end is sad. I spent many years as a writer, reviewer, columnist and video star on the PC Plus cover-disk. For over ten years I was the Delphi columnist, turning out hundreds of programming columns and tutorials. I was, at various times, also the Java and C# columnist. And I wrote the long-running opinion column, Rants and Raves, which I created way back in 1988 for Computer Shopper magazine. The editor of PC Plus was so keen on the column that he made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I jumped ship, left Shopper for Plus, and took my column with me. To be accurate, the PC Plus editor made me two offers I couldn't refuse: 1) he would pay me more money (I've always had a weakness for offers like that!) and 2) he would give me a video column on the cover disk. My response (...)

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Windows Update error 80071A90 – the one that won’t go away!

Well, not without a bit of brute force assistance…

Monday 27 August 2012

Every night for the past week I've watched with mounting frustration as my PC insists on installing eight updates while it shuts down. You might not think that eight updates is particularly excessive and, usually, I would agree with you. But these eight updates are the same eight updates night after night after night. And every morning, after I turn my PC on, I sit and watch it trying to configure its updates only to give up at about the 15% mark. Then it undoes the updates and continues. Until later that evening when I turn the PC off – and the whole routine starts all over again. I've had a few attempts at tracking down and fixing this problem. First I loaded up the Control Panel and clicked the Windows Updates icon. Unsurprisingly, this showed me that my PC had eight (...)

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Xcode or Visual Studio? No contest!

Battle of the IDEs

Monday 30 July 2012

Windows has Visual Studio which is (in my opinion) by far the best IDE available on any platform. The Mac has Xcode…

I've struggled for months to learn to love Xcode but I have finally come to the conclusion that this is never going to happen. At first I wondered if this was just a personal prejudice. However, I am coming to realise that, whereas most Visual Studio users love their IDE, Xcode users tend to be a little less passionate about theirs. Take, for example, Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby – an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime on OSX. Sansonetti has since developed the RubyMotion for deploying MacRuby programs on iOS. You'd think that, with that Mac-centric background, Sansonetti would be able to muster at least a bit of enthusiasm for the Mac's ‘default' IDE. Not so. I've just been reading the RubyMotion FAQ and the section on (...)

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Vue 10.5 Infinite

3D scene designer

Friday 13 July 2012

Vue 10.5 Infinite $995
e-on Software
http://www.e-onsoftware.com

Vue 10.5 Infinite is a 3D graphics package for designing and rendering naturalistic environments such as mountains, oceans, islands, deserts, fantasy landscapes and cityscapes. It can be used by artists and designers for generating still pictures and animations. It can also import and export textures, objects or entire scenes to and from other graphics and 3D modelling or animation applications (see HERE). I first encountered Vue back in 1998. It was called Vue d'Esprit at the time and version 2 had just been released. Vue d'Esprit 2 was a fairly modest landscape designer whose main claim to fame was that, at a price of just $164, it significantly undercut the (at the time) well-established Bryce 3D. Having recently dug my old review of Vue d'Esprit 2 out of the archive, I see that I (...)

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Master Ruby Programming - and save money!

Learn Ruby the easy way

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Ruby programmers are in demand. But if you’ve never programmed in Ruby, what’s the fastest way to learn the skills you need? Read on and find out…

Over 1,200 people have learnt Ruby quickly, simply and interactively with Huw Collingbourne's Beginner's and Expert Courses in Ruby. In a series of graded videos, plus an eBook, course notes and lots of ready-to-run Ruby programs, these courses take you speedily from Ruby newbie to Ruby master. Normally, each course costs $99; so that's $198 for both. Now, in a special offer for Bitwise readers you can subscribe to a special-offer deal that gives you both courses for a one-off cost of just $145 – that's a saving of over 25%. Click here to sign up for this special deal. So what will you learn? The Beginner's Course starts with the basics and then, in ten graded steps, it explains many of the special features of the Ruby language: objects and classes, class hierarchies, arrays (...)

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Camtasia Studio 8 ...and now the bad news.

Zoom goes down the pan!

Tuesday 26 June 2012

As I said in my recent review of Camtasia Studio 8, this is a great update with lots of nice features and a nice new timeline.

Well, up to a point... There is one deficiency. And it's a big one. I didn't notice it at first but as I've continued to use Camtasia 8 it's come to irritate and frustrate me. It's this: I can't copy and paste keyframe markers. It's common, when creating screencasts, to create a video from many small clips. It's also common to zoom and pan in order to focus on a specific area of the screen. When you zoom and pan inside one clip, you generally want to preserve those settings so that a contiguous clip follows with no discernible 'join'. In Camtasia Studio 7 you do this by right-clicking a zoom/pan keyframe marker, copying it, then pasting it onto some other clip. In Camtasia 8, you can't do that. There are various ways of getting around this problem (you can explicitly set the X/Y and (...)

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Camtasia Studio 8

Screen recording and editing on Windows

Friday 22 June 2012

Camtasia Studio 8 £213 (inc VAT) / 287.00€
Upgrade £70.50 (inc VAT)
TechSmith http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html
Overview of new features: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-whats-new.html

I've used a variety of screen recording tools over the years and the one which I choose to use most often is TechSmith's Camtasia Studio. The reason is simple: it is easy to use, it has the functionality I require and it produces great quality output. TechSmith has just released a new version, Camtasia Studio 8 for Windows, which has even more features plus a variety of improvements. But is it really worth upgrading? Here's the short answer: yes! I've only been using Camtasia Studio 8 for a few days but in that time I've already become so accustomed to some of its new capabilities that I would find it hard to go back to version 7. New features include enhanced interactive quizzing, the ability to embed small video clips inside a larger clip, better support for producing and (...)

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Visual Studio 2012 - no longer 50 shades of grey!

Now in Colour

Wednesday 13 June 2012

According to the French language technical site, Developez.com, Microsoft has responded to all the criticism of the depressingly grey user interface in Visual Studio 2012 but giving users the ability to put back the colour!

It was announced at TechEd in Orlando that Visual Studio 2012 would come with an option to use the same colours as Visual Studio 2010. This is only partly good news as, frankly, some of us aren't too keen on the VS 2010 default colours either. Let's hope that VS 2012 supports the full range of colour tweaks available using the VS Color Theme Editor. That just leaves the pesky uppercase menu labels to undo. Fortunately, there is a fix for that too. With luck, it should be possible to make VS 2012 look as though nothing has changed. At least it hasn't got that pesky 'ribbon' thing!

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Learn To Program (even with 4-space indents!)

New interview

Friday 8 June 2012

At the risk of once again igniting the ever-popular "4-space indent versus 2-space indent" arguments so beloved of Ruby programmers, here’s a little video interview I recorded recently.

The interview was done over Skype - so please excuse the somewhat low quality of my webcam. Many thanks to Jayce Broda (and his dog!) of HowToBecomeTV. Be sure to visit his YouTube Channel for interviews with lots of other people on lots of other subjects. Meanwhile, here is the interview he did with me... Watch video on YouTube: Learn Ruby and THE Secret to Programming in any Language

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The Basics Of Digital Forensics

Book review

Tuesday 29 May 2012

The Basics Of Digital Forensics
by John Sammons
$29.95 / £18.99
Syngress
ISBN: 1597496618 / 978-1597496612
http://www.syngress.com
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=226164

Gone are the days when the only evidence that could be used to solve crimes had to be gathered physically ‘at the scene' and popped into plastic bags for further examination. In the digital world, the evidence is often digital too. From incriminating e-mails to web browsing activity, from data files on a hard disk to tweets, Facebook posts and phone-calls: most of us constantly leave a digital trail of our activities – and if those activities are undertaken with criminal or terrorists intent, that trail may attract the attentions of the law enforcement or security services. And that's where digital forensics comes into play. The Basics of Digital Forensics is just what its name suggests – it is an introductory text on the subject, aimed at people (like me) who are (...)

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Learn to program adventure games - part 3

Making the map

Monday 14 May 2012

The pinnacle of the programmer’s art is ( as you must no doubt agree! ) the text adventure....

If you've never written an adventure game, the latest in my series of videos may help you to get started. Here I look at how to create Rooms and maps and ways of saving and loading game data. Examples are shown in Ruby, C#, Objective-C and ActionScript but the same principles apply to other languages such as Python, Java, C++ and Delphi...

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MoviePlus X6

Budget video editing package

Saturday 12 May 2012

£61.27 (inc VAT)
Serif: http://www.serif.com/MoviePlus

Serif's MoviePlus X6 is a video editing program that aims to provide a range of powerful editing tools in a simple-to-use interface. You only have to look at the Serif web site and product packaging to see at once that the target audience for MoviePlus is the amateur or ‘home' user. Mothers and babies feature rather heavily on all the MoviePlus pages and promotional materials. In fact MoviePlus can be used for far more demanding projects than just splicing together a few clips of baby's first steps. In common with much more expensive packages, it has a multi-track timeline onto which you can place numerous video and audio tracks. The clips on each track can be dragged and dropped, cut to length, copied and pasted, panned and zoomed. You can add text and titles, you can blend (...)

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Visual Studio 11, Fifty Shades of Grey

Colours, capitals and a problem that need not exist

Friday 11 May 2012

I must confess that I am baffled about the problems Microsoft is making for itself by tinkering around with the appearance of the forthcoming version of Visual Studio.

User feedback on the beta was overwhelmingly critical of the grey lack-of-colour-scheme. In fact, there was so much criticism that Microsoft relented and, in the new Release Candidate (RC), has added back the odd dash of colour. The software is still rather subdued in tone but there are at least some hints of blue and green to pick out the glyphs and icons from the pervading grey background. The other element of the user interface that was widely attacked in the beta was the curious decision to put all the names of the docked panels into capitals. So whereas we have been used to seeing a Toolbox and a Solution Explorer, Visual Studio 11 was planning to give us a TOOLBOX and a SOLUTION EXPLORER. Microsoft responded to this criticism in a most peculiar way. Realising that people (...)

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Wirth on OOP – Classes, Objects and Extensible Types

Never mind the instances and messages!

Monday 23 April 2012

One of the things that seems to baffle many people when they start learning about Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is the jargon – and the arcane concepts that the jargon attempts to describe: classes, instances, inheritance, polymorphism, message-passing and so on. It could have been all so much simpler… OOP could, for example, have been described as nothing more than data records (or structs) that can be extended. That, in fact, is precisely how Niklaus Wirth – creator of the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon – thought of Object Orientation. I happened to be browsing through an old copy of Wirth and Reiser's book ‘Programming In Oberon' the other day and I came across this very sane explanation: “The ultimate innovation [of OOP] was data type (...)

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Learn to program adventure games - part 2

Planning the class hierarchy

Friday 20 April 2012

Here is the latest video in my new series...

Now pick a language, and write that game!

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The Bitwise Newsletter

Tuesday 17 April 2012

We now have a newsletter...

We've been doing so many thing lately that even I find it hard to keep track of everything. I mean, not only are there all the news and reviews on Bitwise, but there are also the developments (Ruby and Flash/ActionScript tools) from my software company, SapphireSteel Software. Not to mention various online courses I teach on Ruby for Beginners or advanced users and C# Programming for Beginners. On top of that, we also have competitions from time to time and special-offer discounts on courses and software. Well, to help you keep up to date with all this stuff, we now have a newsletter. It's a cooperation between Bitwise and SapphireSteel Software and the first edition includes $100 discount on my C# course, so you can enrol for just $49 instead of the regular $149. Lots more news and (...)

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Learn to program adventure games

The highest calling in programming

Monday 16 April 2012

Long ago and far away (well, London in the early ’80s to be precise) I started programming...

I started with GW-Basic, a horrible language that came free with my PC. Fortunately I then discovered Turbo Pascal, a great compiler from Borland, and I never looked back. In my first year of programming I went from writing "Hello world" to coding a huge, sprawling adventure game with many rooms, a parser that let you enter commands such as "Put the carrot into the slot" or "Kick the potto" and many, many inscrutable puzzles. My game was called The Golden Wombat Of Destiny and it was inspired by what was then known as 'interactive fiction' such as Zork. I still love text adventures - much more, to be honest, than I like fast graphics games. I am a reader. I love books. And adventure games are the nearest you can get to becoming a character in a novel. Writing an adventure game is a (...)

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Learn C# Programming With $100 Discount

On Udemy Now!

Tuesday 3 April 2012

If you’ve ever fancied learning to program on Windows, this is your chance...

If you haven't discovered Udemy yet, you've been missing out. This is a wonderful site where you can learn all kinds of new skills by following video tutorials. For some time now, I've been teaching two of the most successful programming courses on Udemy: Learn To Program with Ruby (for Beginners) and Expert Ruby (for more advanced programmers). Now I've launched a new course: Learn C# Programming (in ten easy steps). This is a video course that teaches programming from the ground up. Step-by-step it explains how to write C# code to develop Windows applications using either the free Visual C# Express or a commercial edition of Microsoft Visual Studio. Normally the course costs $149. If you are quick, however, you can get it for just $49. That's a saving of 67%. Watch the course (...)

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