[ Developer] Early last year, Amazon Web Services made Redshift available to the sector. The service promised a “fast and strong, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse within the cloud.” AWS fulfilled that promise, and it’s now making it even better. Amazon Web Services announced this morning that Redshift customers now have access to what it calls Dense Compute nodes. These new solid state drive-based nodes “enable customers to create even faster, lower price data warehouse with Amazon Redshift.” When AWS says Dense Compute will lower costs, they certainly mean it as 160GB datasets will only cost $0.10 an hour. “Amazon Redshift has become the fastest-growing service inside the history of AWS by providing customers with a quick, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehousing service for a 10th the cost of traditional solutions,” said Raju Gulabani, Vp of Database Services, AWS. “We were actively engaging with our customers using Amazon Redshift and watching them tap into insights that were previously out of reach to assist grow their... Read More »

[ Developer] It’s no secret that Valve sees Linux because the way forward for PC gaming. In fact, the corporate is building SteamOS on top of Linux. Now the sport developer has cemented its commitment to the platform by joining The Linux Foundation. So, what does Valve joining The Linux Foundation mean for both? For Valve, it allows the corporate to have a say behind the construction of Linux. In other words, Valve will now have the ability to influence the direction that Linux heads in, including better support for games. “Joining the Linux Foundation is among the ways Valve is investing within the advancement of Linux gaming,” said Valve’s Mike Sartain. “Through these efforts, we are hoping to contribute tools for developers building new experiences on Linux, compel hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux, and ultimately deliver a chic and open platform for Linux users.” As for Linux, it’ll now gain much more credibility among gamers. Linux hasn’t ever been all that popular... Read More »

Adobe Flash and AIR are nigh inseparable nowadays. Developers desperate to create good quality Flash games for mobile devices use AIR to milk an analogous technologies, and every update brings several enhancements to the platform. Adobe announced in July that Flash and AIR had both been updated with a variety of new features and improvements that are supposed to help out developers eager to get essentially the mostsome of the most out in their Flash/AIR-developed games. The big addition to Flash and AIR this time around is support for the GameInput API. With this latest addition, Flash and AIR-based desktop apps can now support lots of game controllers. Here’s what Adobe says about it: The GameInput API provides an interface for applications to speak with the input devices attached for your platform. The API design makes it easy to feature support for brand spanking new controller types once you want to accomplish that. The GameInput API includes classes and techniques to interface both on the... Read More »

[ Developer] Last year, Google unveiled Compute Engine at Google I/O, apparently looking to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the cloud computing needs of companies. In May, Google made it available for every person, and added sub-hour billing charges for instances in a single-minute increments, shared-core instances, advanced routing features and disk support for as much as 10 terabytes per volume. Today, Google announced general availability with a 99.95% monthly SLA and 24/7 support, and has launched support for Red Hat, SUSE, FreeBSD, and all other Linux variants. They’ve also added three new 16-core instance types in limited preview. Google has also lowered prices for normal instances by 10% in all regions. “You now have virtual machines that experience the performance, reliability, security and scale of Google’s own infrastructure,” says Greg DeMichillie, director of product management. “At Google, we’ve found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is significant to operating with a high level of reliability, security and function,”... Read More »

[ Developer] For the past few years, Facebook app developers have trusted App Insights to profit how consumers use their app. While it’s certainly already a terrific tool, Facebook thinks it’s going to improve it to make it even better for developers. Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s going to be rolling out App Insights 2.0 in beta form today. The newly updated toolset allows developers to collect much more information on how their app is getting used alongside plenty of other useful information, including traffic sources. To start us off, Facebook says that it has completely redesigned the interface to be easier to navigate. Furthermore, the recent interface was “designed around how your apps integrate with Facebook instead of how users interact with Facebook.” What all this implies is that Facebook will now show you metrics like New Logins, Stories and Referrals at the front page. Check it out: Facebook has also re-organized metric data so developers can easily compare data across their very... Read More »