Developer

Every company worth its salt is keen to get aboard the Internet of Things bandwagon, and Samsung is no different. Today the company announces its ARTIK platform which it hopes will accelerate the development of IoT apps and hardware for both consumers and the enterprise.

This is more than just a platform announcement, however; Samsung has produced three modules with a variety of integrated features ready to power the next generation of connected devices. The modules are backed up with embedded hardware security and can be tailored to a range of tasks.

To be first in line to download a new app, you need to be quick off the mark. You might hear about a game or app weeks ahead of launch, and it's all too easy to miss the launch date. You might be wondering why it has taken Google so long to do something about it.

For Android users this is now a thing of the past thanks to the introduction of pre-registration. The first title in Google Play to offer this is Terminator Genisys: Revolution. You can now register your interest in the game and you'll be notified when it is released and is ready for download.

The aim behind Facebook's Internet.org program is to bring internet access to the wider world. While an undeniably praise-worthy venture, it came in for criticism for going against the principles of net neutrality.

Today the company launches the Internet.org Platform with a view to countering this criticism. The platform opens up Internet.org to more developers, giving them the chance to bring "free basic services" to people around the world. There's also the promise of greater transparency.

In the world of wearables, Microsoft Band may not hold the same gravitas as Apple Watch or the various Android Wear devices, but the company is still trying to get more developers on board -- today launching the Microsoft Band SDK, following on from February's preview release.

With support for Windows Phone, Android, iOS, and full-blown Windows, Microsoft is clearly keen to appeal to as many developers as possible. This full SDK release offers access to all of Band's sensors -- as part of a push to get more third-party apps on the device.

Google often decides to go about things in its own way, and is frequently found approaching common problems from a unique angle. The latest candidate to receive the Google treatment is the humble address. Not web addresses or email addresses, but regular postal addresses. So what's the deal?

While street names and numbers usually get you to where you want to go, that's not always the case. You could opt to use longitude and latitude instead, but what sane person wants to do that? This is the very question Google asked before it came up with Open Location Code, an open source addressing system the company hopes developers will latch onto.

Add-ons are a common feature of traditional, offline applications, but they're becoming increasingly popular in online services. Microsoft is the latest to get in on the action, announcing a batch of new add-ons for Outlook.com, including one from PayPal that makes it easy to make payments via email.

The add-ons were made possible when Microsoft launched the Outlook APIs at Build. They can be used by developers to create plugins with HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript. Microsoft is pushing the "write once, run anywhere" nature of the API that means the same plugin can run in Outlook.com, Outlook Web App and the desktop version of Outlook.

When Microsoft unveiled HoloLens a few months ago, it came as something of a surprise. It's essentially Google Glass meets virtual reality on steroids, throwing the users into a 3D world filled with holograms, all powered by Windows 10. Today at build 2015, Microsoft showed off some of HoleLens' capabilities.

Something that had been talked about when HoloLens first came to light was the possibility of running regular Windows 10 apps in HoloLens. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how Windows 10 Universal apps can be used in 3D space, 'projected' onto floors, walls and other surfaces.

Today at Build 2015, Microsoft revealed some exciting changes to the Windows Store -- not least that it will soon be much, much easier for iOS and Android app developers to convert their creations into Windows 10 apps. But this is far from the end of the story, and there are also important payment and subscription options on the horizon.

Microsoft is introducing support for in-app purchasing of subscriptions, providing developers with new ways to monetize their apps. To help make it easier for devs to get money from customers, the ability to pay for purchases with a mobile phone is also to be added.

Microsoft has a four-fold plan to close Windows Phone’s infamous 'app-gap' problem. At its ongoing developer conference, Build 2015, the Redmond-based company announces that it is making it easier for developers to bring their apps to the Windows Phone platform.

The first way is to entice Web developers to wrap their sites into apps and release them on the Windows Store. The second -- arguably, the least exciting -- is to make Windows apps the traditional way -- using existing Win32, .NET WinForms and other Windows development technologies.

A new study by website security specialist Incapsula and community site DevOps.com shows that DevOps is rapidly becoming one of the hottest technology career paths.

DevOps -- a hybrid of development and operations -- is a recent field, recognizing that software development, quality assurance, and IT operations all depend on each other. It aims to help organizations rapidly produce software products and services and to improve operational performance.

Google is revamping the way URLs appear in search results on mobile devices. Smaller screens have a tendency to truncate lengthier URLs, and even when this doesn’t happen diminutive screen size can make addresses difficult to read.

To combat this problem, the search giant is introducing a new breadcrumb trail presentation with a view to making the information easy to absorb at a glance. But what does this change actually mean?

A serious security hole leaves millions of Windows users open to attack, making it possible to extract encrypted credentials from a target machine. Researchers at Cylance say the problem affects "any Windows PC, tablet or server" (including Windows 10) and is a slight progression of the Redirect to SMB attack discovered by Aaron Spangler way back in 1997.

Redirect to SMB is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack which involves taking control of a network connection. As the name suggests, victims are then redirected to a malicious SMB server which can extract usernames, domains and passwords. Cylance also reports that software from companies such as Adobe, Oracle and Symantec -- including security and antivirus tools -- are affected.

With businesses becoming increasingly reliant on applications to generate revenue, it’s essential that downtime and glitches are kept to a minimum.

Research from IDC and AppDynamics has shown that infrastructure failure costs $100,000 per hour on average in this 24 hour service environment. Although it’s practically impossible for businesses to prevent application failures completely, the time taken both to predict and fix them is one factor that can be improved.

GitHub is still in the throes of a massive DDoS attack which has blighted the site since Thursday. While the origins of and reasons for the attack is not yet fully known, the fact that two projects relating to Chinese anti-censorship have been targeted speaks volumes.

Now into its fifth day, the attack turned into something of a tug-of-war. Just as GitHub thought it had managed to wrestle back control of the site, a fresh wave was unleashed. The evolving attack is the largest in GitHub's history and engineers "remain on high alert".

It is now a couple of months since Microsoft started talking about Project Spartan, the Internet Explorer successor that's set to become Windows 10's default web browser. Some have suggested that this will lead to the death of Internet Explorer, but today Microsoft confirmed that the two browsers will live on side by side in Windows 10.

At the Project Spartan Developer Workshop, Microsoft went into more detail about the future of the two web browsers. In particular, there is the revelation that previous plans to use a new rendering engine in both Internet Explorer 11 and Project Spartan have been ditched. Internet Explorer will live on in Windows 10, providing legacy support for those who need it, and it will be virtually identical to the version found in Windows 8.1.