Developer

Gmail was designed to be a cross-platform email tool, but even Google recognizes the fact that it is far from perfect. With this in mind, Gmail -- and Inbox by Google -- are undergoing a redesign to improve things.

With the redesign, Google says that it is focusing on adjusting the formatting and general look so that it better suits the device emails are being viewed on. You may well have thought that this should have been the case from the beginning, but it seems that an update is in order.

Not everyone is in a position to pay for their office software and this led to a market for free Microsoft Office competitors. One of the best known and most popular is OpenOffice, but the open source project is in trouble.

Volunteer vice president Dennis E. Hamilton has warned that retirement of the project "is a serious possibility". The problem is a combination of a lack of volunteers willingness to work on the project, and the increasing popularity of LibreOffice. The lack of developers means that important security updates are at risk.

Starting next week -- September 7 specifically -- Apple is starting to clear the crap out of the App Store. What does this mean? It means removing what Apple describes as "problematic and abandoned apps", as well as changing the way apps can be named to prevent developers using SEO'd titles for their creations.

Moving forward, app titles will be limited to just 50 characters, reducing the chance of naming them in a deceptive way. Apple appears to have quite a task ahead of it as it plans to review every app currently featured in the App Store, before contacting developers about those with problems.

Yeah, OK... it's only August, but we're going to start talking about Christmas. Well... Google is, anyway. As it has done for a few years now, the company is planning to run its Santa Tracker tool in December and it has a few updates to share.

The web and mobile based versions of the tool are open source, meaning that developers are free to work their Christmassy magic and come up with new and innovative ideas for kids.

It could be argued that with Android and Chrome OS, Google already has more than its fair share of operating systems; but there's another one in the pipeline.

Very little is known about it at the moment, but Google has a new operating system project underway called Fuchsia. There's a GitHub page up and running, where you can find out about the Fuchsia kernel -- a kernel that is designed with scalability and multi-device, cross-platform compatibility in mind.

Many IT teams are looking for a way out of the quagmire of delayed projects, questionable quality, and missed deliveries in which they often find themselves without writing blank cheques. The concept of DevOps has taken the IT world by storm, but has the day-to-day practice caught up?

Brian Dawson, DevOps expert, CloudBees discusses how this new approach can help these IT projects can progress and transform businesses.

Mobile apps, particularly games, are not just about providing functionality or entertainment to users, they are about making money for developers. This has been the case for some time, and people's reliance on free apps has seen a huge surge in alternative income streams, such as advertising and in-app purchases.

But it's not just developers that reap the financial rewards of micro transactions within apps and games, as Google takes something of a cut. To help improve the flow of money for both parties, Google has shared a number of tips with Android developers that reveal how to "improve game-as-a-service monetization".

Windows 10 will not load unsigned kernel mode drivers, starting with version 1607 of the operating system. This is something that had been announced back in 2015, but is only just being implemented.

The decision was taken in order to improve the security of Windows 10, but Microsoft says that "due to technical and ecosystem readiness issues, this was not enforced by Windows Code Integrity and remained only a policy statement". Now it is a reality, and it's something developers and users need to keep in mind.

With a desktop word processor and spreadsheet, you have great power to create a range of documents. The move to the cloud and mobile means that popular Office suites have been ported to mobile platforms, and this usually means missing out on key features -- like add-ons.

Today, this changes as Google has announced that Android add-ons for Docs and Sheets are now available. This means that Google's mobile office tools can be extended with add-ons like DocuSign, Scanbot and Zoho CRM.

Microsoft is on a mission to destroy Steam with Windows 10. At least that is what Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games believes. He says that Microsoft's love of UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps means that Win32 apps are gradually being driven to extinction.

In an interview with Edge magazine, Sweeney says that he predicts Microsoft will release patches for Windows 10 over the next few years that will render Steam "progressively worse and more broken".

Cyanogen Inc -- the cheeky little upstart behind Android-based CyanogenMod -- is reportedly laying off 20 percent of its workforce. The company is a fairly small operation with just 136 employees, but the lay-offs are significant as they are mostly from the OS side of things.

It seems that the open source Android-inspired operating system has failed to generate quite as much interest as hoped, although it does have a very dedicated cult following. It is not clear quite what the future holds for CyanogenMod, but things are not looking good at the moment.

For many mobile users, it's important to keep an eye on data usage to ensure tariff limits are not exceeded. A major contributor to gobbling up monthly bandwidth allowances is the updating of apps, and Google is taking steps to reduce the size of APK updates.

In a post on the Android Developers Blog, Google speaks directly to developers, pointing out the various steps they can take to optimize the size of updates. The company also calls for greater transparency so users know the size of updates before committing to a download.

Having an example to go by can make a huge difference when you are dealing with something new, no matter how far you have progressed as a developer. Seeing how someone else has tackled the problem that you are dealing with, or one close to it, may help you to avoid running into the same issues as them or repeating their mistakes, get a better picture and, ultimately, find the path forward sooner than you would on your own.

Stack Overflow seems to agree, as today the famous website that provides answers to the toughest questions in coding launches Documentation. Touted as the biggest improvement to Stack Overflow since its launch, it gives users access to "community-curated, example-focused developer documentation" in a similar fashion to its Q&A platform.

It may only be a few weeks since Google revealed that Android 7.0 will be called Nougat, but there have already been several developer previews of the Marshmallow successor. Today Google launches the fifth and final preview before the official launch.

As this is the final preview, build NPD90G of Nougat can be considered near-final code; this is, near as damn it, what you'll be installing on your Android handset in the not-too-distant future when Android 7.0 is officially launched. At the moment, the preview build can only be installed on Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, and Pixel C devices, as well as General Mobile 4G (Android One) devices, but more will be added further down the line.

Earlier this year Google announced that Family Library -- previously only available in Google Play Music -- was making its way to the Play Store. Now the rollout is underway, meaning that it is now possible to share your purchased apps and games with members of your family.

This new feature means that a family need only buy one copy of an app rather than several if they all want to use it. It also means that there is no longer a need to create a shared 'family account' through which to download apps and games that need to be shared.