Articles about Developer

In the aftermath of the big App Store security breach, today Apple reminds developers where they should obtain Xcode. It's not rocket science—from sanctioned distribution sources. I received an email this morning from the company, dispatched to members of its developer program.

To recap: As the new week dawned, Apple rushed to remove content from its Chinese App Store loaded with XcodeGhost malware. Developers using a counterfeit version of Xcode caused the first, major, widespread security crisis for the seven year-old App Store.

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Windows 10 is a major departure from the norm for Microsoft. This is not only the first time Windows has been made available as a free upgrade, but the first time that users have been able to get actively involved in the development process. The existence of the public previews for Windows Insiders has made this one of the most transparent development programs to come out of Redmond.

Broken down into the Fast Ring and the Slow Ring, Microsoft has explained how the Windows 10 development process works, saying that the former is for those who want to be on the bleeding edge, the latter for those who want to play it safer. Ultimately, however, you should be either in or out, and this leads us to the question: what's the point of the Windows 10 Slow Ring?

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Apple has started a clean-up operation of the Chinese version of its App Store after it was flooded with apps infected with XcodeGhost malware. The problem was not detected by Apple, but a number of security firms who discovered various malicious iPhone and iPad apps littering the Store.

The apps made their way past Apple's usually-rigorous vetting process after developers were tricked into using a counterfeit version of the Xcode tool to create them. The attack has been described as "a pretty big deal" although at this stage there are no reported instances of data theft or attacks on victims.

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Buy buttons are not exactly new to Twitter, but until now they have only been available to a limited number of users. Now, thanks to San Francisco-based Stripe, anyone is able to use a tweet to sell a product.

Stripe has launched a new service called Relay. It is a set of tools that can be used to sell through any app that makes use of Stripe -- and that includes Twitter. Relay can be used to allow for instant purchases, and address what Stripe perceives to be a problem with mobile e-commerce sites.

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Fujitsu has revealed details of a new wireless receiver capable of data transfer rates of "several tens of Gigabits per second". Operating on the terahertz band, the receiver is over 100 times faster than current devices that use the 0.8-2.0 GHz range.

Described as "the world's first 300 GHz band compact receiver", the receiver is ten times smaller than previous models, opening up the possibility of use in mobile devices. Shrinking the unit has reduced its size to under one cubic centimeter and Fujitsu says that it "enables mobile devices to instantly transfer 4K or 8K HD video".

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DevOps. It’s the buzzword of the moment. According to Gartner, it’s growing so fast in popularity that a quarter of Global 2000 organizations will deploy it by 2016.

So what exactly is it? And why is everyone talking about it?

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There is a growing skills gap in the apps economy. As businesses become increasingly software-driven, this gap becomes more obvious than ever, and hiring managers are faced with a constant struggle to find the skilled developers they need.

Yet a new survey by freelance work marketplace Upwork suggests that there are developers around the world who have time available and are actively seeking work to fill it.

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The writing has been on the wall for Flash for some time now. A web technology loathed for countless reasons -- not least the security issues -- the death knell is now tolling loudly as HTML5 is more widely embraced.

Back in June, Google announced that Chrome would pause Flash ads in its browser by default, helping to eliminate a major online annoyance. Now the company has outlined when this will happen -- and there are only a few days to wait.

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If you were hoping to see Chrome notifications integrated into Windows 10, prepare to be disappointed: it's not going to happen. While the Action Center might seem the natural home for Google's web browser to display messages, developers have a different opinion.

In short, Chrome's notifications are staying as they are. Despite a campaign for Action Center support, the request has been labeled Won'tFix and there's no sign that this will change for some years to come. Chrome and Windows 10 have already clashed heads once, but this time Google seems unlikely to back down.

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Even though the world is increasingly mobile, more than half of developers have never built a mobile app, a new survey, called Telerik State of Mobile Development, shows.

Telerik, the company who conducted the survey, asked 3,000 IT professionals about mobile development. Among the biggest issues developers have with building mobile apps is the fact that a lot of them are still new to mobile development or have never built a mobile app (57 percent), while others develop just one functional mobile app a year (47 percent).

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Bcache was first announced by ex-Google engineer Kent Overstreet a little over five years ago. Now the Linux kernel block layer cache is being used as the basis for a new open source filesystem. The focus is on speed, but it is also hoped that the file system could be used for servers and storage arrays because of its reliability.

At this stage, Overstreet describes Bcachefs as "more or less feature complete" and says that even at this early stage performance numbers are "good enough to be interesting". At the moment, features such as replication, caching, and compression are supported, and there is the promise of snapshotting in future releases.

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Mozilla today announces a series of important changes that affect Firefox add-ons. The good news? Add-ons should be reviewed faster, they will be more secure, and a new API means that Chrome extensions can be more easily ported across. But, of course, there is also bad news.

The bad news for developers is that Mozilla is switching to new technologies -- Electrolysis and Servo -- and this means that work will have to be done on existing extensions to ensure compatibility. In the switchover, it is likely that a large number of older add-ons will simply not be updated, but with a 12 to 18 month timescale for phasing out XPCOM and XUL means there is plenty of time for other developers to come up with alternatives to projects that have been abandoned and will no longer work.

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Google might have a greater market share when it comes to mobile operating systems, but it is behind Apple on some of the essentials, and it shows.

That is the opinion of Wall Street Journal’s Dan Gallagher, who reflected on the Google vs Apple, Android vs iOS battle, as Google prepares the launch of Android 6.0, named Marshmallow.

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Six years and six updates later, Google's own programming language, Go, has reached version 1.5. Go 1.5 sees Google "removing the last vestiges of C code" from the code base, and the runtime, compiler and linker are now all written in Go rather than C.

Despite a massive overhaul to the code base, Google assures users that Go 1.5 maintains the promise that Go programs will continue to be supported by all subsequent releases. There is also a move towards mobile devices, with ports of the iPhone and iPad architectures and linking to the Go mobile project opening up the possibility of developing for Android and iOS.

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As promised by Gabe Aul just over a week ago, Microsoft today releases Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3. One of the biggest new additions to this build is native support for Windows Server Containers, Microsoft's take on Linux containers.

Developers have been begging for container support in Windows Server for some time now, and the introduction of this feature could be the start of Microsoft offering up some serious competition to Linux server software. This is not the only new feature to be found in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3, there's also software-defined datacenter enhancements and new Nano Server functionality.

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