Apple is giving app developers more breathing room for their apps by increasing the maximum size of binaries from 2GB to 4GB. The move comes as devices' resolutions have grown, placing greater demands on developers' abilities to stick to the upper size limit.

Increasing the maximum size to 4GB gives greater scope for including high resolution images and video, as well as creating larger, more immersive games. While this is news that will be welcomed by developers and some iOS users, not everyone will be as pleased. Many people with 16GB devices are already struggling to find room for apps.

Continue reading →

For both software and data, there is a relentless move to the cloud. But with so many different cloud services to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which one is best. To help make things a little easier, Google today launches PerfKit Benchmarker.

The open-source tool makes it possible to run benchmarks across a variety of cloud platforms, and a dedicated visualization tool, Perfkit Explorer, has been created to help with the interpretation of results. The tool provides essential data to developers who are creating applications in the cloud.

Continue reading →

No matter how much Windows Phone has progressed, it feels like it will always be held back by its app store. Lots of nice titles continue to be unavailable, despite claims of the so-called "app-gap" closing. It is not, clearly. When top developers eventually release their apps on the platform, they usually come long after their Android and iOS counterparts and are rarely updated. Let's not even talk about feature parity, which is a huge issue on its own. Of course, that is if those top developers can be convinced to support Windows Phone in the first place, which isn't always the case. It's not an easy thing to do.

Windows Phone Store is also not helped by the developers who decide to abandon or leave the platform altogether. The latest blow is dealt by Chase Bank, which has supported Windows Phone for more than two years. It just announced that it will take the latter route, packing its bags and leaving the platform in just a few days.

Continue reading →

Whenever I see contests and sweepstakes, I am usually dubious. Why? I just don't see the fun in a random drawing. Sure, winning a prize is fun, but if you win it for doing nothing other than signing up, where is the sport? I prefer a contest where the winner earns a prize.

Today, Microsoft announces a rather sweet contest aimed at developers (developers, developers...). Well, not just any developers, but game developers in particular. If you can create a really great Windows game, the company may fly you to the 2015 Game Developer Conference.

Continue reading →

Facebook wants to talk your language. The latest step to achieving this sees Mark Zuckerberg's social networking acquiring speech recognition startup Wit.ai. The startup describes itself as providing "Natural Language for the Internet of Things" and has been doing so for just 18 months.

No details have been released about any money that has changed hands, but the plan is for the Wit.ai platform to remain open for developers to work with. The company is heavily involved in the Internet of Things, and was in line to work with Nest before Google took over.

Continue reading →

Consumerization of IT is gaining hold and customers are looking to deliver user-friendly enterprise applications to employees who are accustomed to a "there’s an app for that" mentality.

So application producers are realizing the need to alter their monetization models so that they can cater to an "appified" enterprise -- capturing revenue from customers who want task-specific applications and the flexibility to pay based on how they are actually using an application.

Continue reading →

Small is beautiful, and this is something that the Raspberry Pi demonstrates perfectly. But now there's a little competition. The Creator CI20 is a new diminutive micro-computer which offers more power than an existing Raspberry Pi, as well as a choice of operating systems -- Android or Linux.

The company behind the barebones computer is another UK chip manufacturer, Imagination, and at just $65, it's a perfect stocking stuffer. Or at least it would be if units were going to ship before January 2015. Like the Raspberry Pi, the Creator CI20 is a fully loaded board designed for use in all manner of DIY computing projects.

Continue reading →

As if giving Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage was not enough, Microsoft today has some more news relating to its office suite. Previously only available as previews, a batch of new Office 365 APIs open up new opportunities for developers to tap into Office with their own apps. With APIs available for mail, files, calendar and contacts, there's lots of potential for the future.

One of the first big names to take advantages of the new APIs is IFTTT, the online automation service. The new APIs mean that it is possible for IFTTT to react to things that happen in Office applications -- so it is possible to set up an alert when an email matching certain criteria arrives. There are also updates to the Android and iOS SDKs for developers to work with.

Continue reading →

Kinect has moved on. Once a peripheral that encouraged gamers to dance manically in front of their consoles, it has now evolved into something rather more sophisticated. As part of Kinect's on-going development Microsoft today released Kinect SDK 2.0 following the developer preview program from last November. Developers not only have scores of improvements to enjoy, but they now have the ability to deploy Kinect apps to the Windows Store.

This news goes hand in hand with the release of a new Kinect adaptor. The adaptor makes it possible to take an Xbox One Kinect and connect it to a PC or tablet. There's no need to choose between a Kinect for Windows v2 and Kinect for Xbox One as they both now perform identically.

Continue reading →

Google's security team has discovered a vulnerability in SSL 3.0 which can be exploited to steal secure cookies and other data. The 15 year old technology is still used as a fallback when connection problems occur as it helps maintain backward compatibility, but the security problems mean that Google will start to phase out support. Details of the exploit have been published and Chrome has today been tweaked to disable SSL 3.0 fallback.

Bodo Möller from Google's security team points out that this move will "break some sites" and that they will need to be updated. This does present some compatibility issues, and the advice is to support TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV instead, at least for the time being.

Continue reading →

Recently, LV=, a UK insurer, built a broker workflow app that combined three processes on three systems into one application with an automated tracking and reporting feature. Given the complexity, you might guess that the project took a large team of highly skilled developers months to complete. But here's the thing: two developers built the production-ready app in just one week -- without writing a single line of code!

Enter the power of a low-code development platform. The term has been gaining traction in the market to categorize platforms for rapidly building and deploying custom apps without the need for low-level coding. This is made possible through visual development tools where users can easily define the various elements of an application (database, application and process logic, user interface, security, etc.). Other common features include an App Store with reusable templates, widgets and components to further accelerate productivity, as well as social collaboration, enterprise integration and one-click deployment.

Continue reading →