Articles about Developer

One of the problems with buying an Android smartphone is that there is usually no way to tell just how long it will be supported and how long you'll get Android updates. Unless you have a Google-branded device, it's hit-and-miss when, or indeed if, you'll receive an upgrade to the latest and greatest version of the mobile OS.

With the impending release of Android O, however, Google is trying out a solution to the problem which has led to endless fragmentation of the Android market. Going by the name of Project Treble, the solution sees Google introducing a modular base to Android. It's described as "the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date" and it should make it quicker, easier and cheaper for device-makers to roll out updates to handsets in future.

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Google is preparing to launch the Android O beta, and ahead of this the company has officially closed the Android Nougat beta program. We've already seen a developer preview of Android O, and a second release is due later this month.

But many Pixel and Nexus users are waiting for the Android O beta as the developer preview is not really intended for public consumption. While we're not really any closer to knowing for sure when the new beta program will begin, we're clearly nearing the time that Google will make an announcement.

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Businesses in the UK will waste £37 billion on failed agile IT projects in the next 12 months, according to a new report from 6point6. The report is based on a poll of 300 UK and US CIOs. They were asked about their experiences with agile, and how its principles are being applied and executed.

More than half of CIOs (53 percent) see agile development as "discredited," and three quarters (75 percent) don’t even want to defend it any more. Seventy-three percent of CIOs think agile IT is its own industry now, and 50 percent consider it an "IT fad."

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Just 40 hours of engineering work to go live with a state-of-the-art smartphone application? It’s only possible if you have the right framework and if you forget perfectionism in favor of real user feedback. At Spreadshirt, we want it to be easy for our users to buy, sell, create and share ideas on over 200 products on our ecommerce platform. Whether they use a desktop, tablet or smartphone, we want our users to have a great experience.

Back in 2014 we had created a t-shirt designer for tablets, to reflect the rise of the touch screen. It worked on smartphones, but that was a rare use case back then. This web app has been perfected through many iterations. But the mobile times changed. And exactly as we had already envisioned in 2016 smartphone traffic was up 22 percent and tablet traffic was down at less than 10 percent. We needed a new design tool to focus on the experience for our visitors from smartphones and find out what their specific needs and issues were. Watching users fail holds the greatest learnings when you develop complex applications, such as our smartphone t-shirt designer.

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The promise of microservices is that you can divide and conquer the problem of a large application by breaking it down into its constituent services and what each one actually accomplishes. Each can be supported by an independent team. You get to the point where you can break the limits on productivity that Fred Brooks described in his book, The Mythical Man-month.

Aside from being able to throw more people at the problem and -- unlike what Brooks observed -- actually become more efficient once you get a microservices-based application into production, you can quickly start thinking about how to scale it. Think resiliency and high-availability. And you can easily determine what services don’t need scaling, or high availability.

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Research carried out by Gartner, which predicted that the demand for mobile applications would outstrip the number of app developers by 2019, still looms large over the mobile app industry. The way CTOs and CIOs cope with the developer shortage could make or break their company’s technological expansion.

To face this shortage, IT departments have two options:

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The build versus buy conundrum is without doubt a big decision for any company looking to adopt a new piece of software; each route has its own merits and both will be a costly exercise so it’s very important to make the right decision.

Although packaged software has now been used for decades there are still many systems developed in-house, perhaps increasingly so now that development skills are on the increase and coding is getting easier and even being taught to children in schools. In fact, IT analyst IDC recently predicted that most of 2017’s IT spending will go on "application development and deployment." However, by 2020 it expects software purchases to "edge out" app development costs as the largest spend. Clearly the balance is starting to shift with more skilled developers available to bolster in-house teams, but for the more complex applications such as the procurement arena, the jury is still out over the decision of whether to develop or buy.

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The app-economy competition is fierce. Facebook owns four out of the five most downloaded apps worldwide, but startups are still leaping into the fight to claim new and old markets. For these startups, Facebook is often the least of their worries as, according to research from Gartner, we only actually use between six and ten apps on average and end up neglecting or deleting the rest. It’s tough for app developers to break through the noise, let alone get into that top ten.

So what does this mean for startups trying to break into the space? You have to put your best foot forward to make sure users will not only find your app, but keep it.

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Mozilla has announced plans to eliminate one of its release channels for not only Firefox but also Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Starting today, the Aurora release channel will no longer be updated, and the Developer Edition of the web browser will be based on the Beta build.

The change is part of a drive to streamline the release process, and to make sure that stable new features make their way out to not only developers, but also normal users faster than before. Mozilla says: "Developer Edition users will maintain their Developer Edition themes, tools, and preferences, will keep their existing profile, and should not experience any disruption."

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Picture yourself as the head of a product development division at a Fortune 500 company. You and your team are tackling a new project that fits hand in glove with corporate’s new strategic vision.

Unfortunately, your team’s deadlines and goals -- as well as the product’s features -- are all determined by the visionaries. You lack any meaningful control over the process, and the team’s only motivation comes from meeting arbitrary progress points passed down from above.

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Google has announced that it is to retire the Octane JavaScript benchmark. The company says that while the benchmark was useful when it was introduced back in 2012, "over-optimization" by developers means that it is far less meaningful.

Google goes as far as saying that developers were essentially cheating the system. It says that compiler optimizations needed to achieve high benchmark scores have become common and, in the real world, these optimizations translate into only very small improvements in webpage performance.

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There are many benefits to the "monolithic" application model -- especially at the beginning of a project -- but monoliths can become unwieldy over time, limiting companies’ ability to move quickly and flexibly in today’s dynamic business environment.

To overcome this and other issues, companies like Amazon, eBay and Netflix are leveraging microservice architectures. The microservices model has been defined by Martin Fowler, author, software developer and an early supporter of microservices as "an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API."

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How often do you use apps? You probably open a handful on a daily or even hourly basis. You probably ignore the rest.

You’re not alone. Gartner research shows that users from the US, UK and China used just six to 10 apps each month in 2016. This represents a six percent year-on-year decrease and has led Gartner to declare the "post-app era."

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There has been something of a trend in recent years for phones to grow taller and slimmer. Aspect ratios are changing, and the familiar 16:9 is being met by the LG G6's 18:9 (oh, ok, 2:1) and, in the case of the Samsung Galaxy S8, 18.5:9.

Google sees these emerging aspect ratios as the start of a trend rather than obscure rarities, and it's encouraging developers to embrace them fully.

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With the launch of iOS 10.3 and macOS 10.12.4, there was great excitement about the arrival of a new file system as well as improvements to performance -- even if they were only perceived improvements. Something that didn’t get a great deal of attention, however, is the introduction of replies to reviews.

Just as has been an option in Google Play for years, developers can now respond to the reviews that people leave about their apps and games. It's something that has been a very long time coming, and finally brings a dialog to the App Store, meaning that users and developers have a two-way channel of communication.

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