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Flutter 1.17 includes Metal support for faster iOS performance, new Material components, new Network tracking tooling and is full of fixes - with an unprecedented 6,339 issues closed since the previous stable release. Flutter is Google's open source mobile UI framework for crafting  native interfaces on iOS and Android and this new release is the first stable release of 2020. Recently we announced that Flutter now claims to have 2 million users and is growing in importance among enterprise devs, see Flutter Takes Off so news of an enhanced release is welcome. According to Chris Sells, Product Manager, Flutter developer experience, the major focus of this release has been on performance and memory improvements. He claims: Just by upgrading your app to this release, your users should see faster animations, smaller apps and lower memory utilization. In this release, you’ll see a 20%-37% speedup for the default navigation case (opaque routes...

Research from Veracode suggests that 70 percent of apps have security flaws due to their use of open-source libraries. The application security firm set out to determine the risk one flawed library can pose to software. For its  The State of Software Security (SOSS): Open Source Edition  report, Veracode analysed 351,000 libraries across the Veracode platform database of 85,000 applications. On an initial scan, 70 percent of applications were found to have a security flaw resulting from the use of an open-source library. Chris Eng, Chief Research Officer at Veracode, said: “Open source software has a surprising variety of flaws. An application’s attack surface is not limited to its own code and the code of explicitly included libraries, because those libraries have their own dependencies. In reality, developers are introducing much more code, but if they are aware and apply fixes appropriately, they can reduce risk exposure.” Other key findings in the repor...

A contact-tracing API being developed by Google and Apple will block location access to prevent misuse. The API, called ExposureNotification, is being provided to national health agencies to build contact-tracing functionality into their apps. It’s hoped that contact-tracing apps will help societies to safely return to some degree of normality. An initial version of the API was released last week. This week, new resources – including demo code and example UI assets – have debuted along with updated guidelines. Naturally, the plans have raised privacy concerns that governments – or the US tech giants themselves – will have access to user data that could be used for draconian population tracking. Google and Apple have gone to lengths to assure their solution is decentralised and all data remains in each user’s control. If they’re diagnosed with COVID-19, it’ll be the user’s choice if they want to anonymously alert others they’ve been in contact with. Last week, Apple and ...

Whenever we think of exceptional performer engineering, we are reminded of Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos’  statement , “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” Any company which follows this consumer-focused approach, though in varying capacity and form. The connection is simple. More and more businesses are becoming web-based, so they are interacting with their customers digitally. In such a scenario, if they have to provide exceptional customer experience, they have to build resilient, stable, user-centric and high performing web-systems and applications. And to do that, they need performance engineering. What is Performance Approach? Let us explain performance approach with an example. Suppose, your team is building an online shopping portal. The developers will build a system that allows people to access products and buy them. They will ensure that the entire transaction is smooth, uncomplicated for the user and can be done quickly. Now imagine that to...

The popular perception of software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing is beautifully simple: sign-up, login and start doing your work. Of course, this isn’t quite accurate; it all depends on the application, business needs and goals. Enterprise SaaS entails business requirements gathering, customisations, integrations, and training. In our business, there is an initial phase of onboarding customer IT assets for monitoring, working with stakeholders and setting up dashboards, which can take a few weeks, not days. That doesn’t mean that SaaS users need to sit around for weeks twiddling their thumbs. With proper planning, it’s possible to deliver value to the business sooner. By the second week of an implementation, we can give customers the chance to begin using the product; this might be by delivering a high-level dashboard so users can start understanding new data views that they can leverage. That way, the customer can start integrating the technology into their daily wor...

For a long time the app world was the iOS user’s oyster – all of the best apps were designed for them. In fact, within the US, smartphones and the apps market were essentially synonymous with the iPhone and the App Store. Throughout the rest of the world users preferred Androids, and by 2015 they accounted for 80% of smartphone shipments. It was only a matter of time before this sleeping giant awakened here on our shores. There are lots of reasons to assume that Android will no longer play second fiddle to the iPhone. This has the potential to shake things up in the entire mobile market. Some consumers won’t wait for 5G Apple will launch its 5G phone  sometime later this year or early 2021 , more than a year after  Samsung introduced its 5G enabled devices . This means that consumers who don’t want to wait for a 5G-enabled phone will have little choice but to purchase an Android. This headstart will put Apple at a disadvantage, as Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza...

Atila Neves the Deputy leader for D programming language posted about his  vision for D  and what he would like to do with D lang in the near future. Make D programming language default for web dev and mobile applications D’s static reflection and code generation capabilities make it an ideal candidate to implement a codebase that needs to be called from several different languages and environments (e.g. Python, Java, R). Traditionally this is done by specifying data structures and RPC calls in an Interface Definition Language (IDL) then translating that to the supported languages, with a wire protocol to go along with it. With D, none of that is necessary. One can write the production code in D and have libraries automatically making the code callable from other languages. Hence it will be easy to write D code that runs as fast or faster than the alternatives, and it will be a win on all fronts. Memory Safety for D lang Atila believes that D is a sys...

Recently We looked closely at what it really means when a certain programming language, tool, or trend is declared to be ‘dead’. It seems, We argued, that talking about death in respect of different aspects of the tech industry is as much a signal about one’s identity and values as a developer as it is an accurate description of a particular ‘thing’s’ reality. To focus on how these debates and conversations play out in practice we decided to take a look at 3 programming languages, each of which has been described as dead or dying at some point. What we found might not surprise you, but it nevertheless highlights that the different opinions a certain person or community has about a language reflects their needs and challenges as software engineers. Is Java dead? One of the biggest areas of debate in terms of living, thriving or dying, is Java. There are a number of reasons for this. The biggest is the simple fact that it’s so widely used. With so many developers usi...

If you resort to deleting apps when your phone's storage space is full, researchers have a solution. New software "streams" data and code resources to an app from a cloud server when necessary, allowing the app to use only the space it needs on a phone at any given time. "It's like how Netflix movies aren't actually stored on a computer. They are streamed to you as you are watching them," said Saurabh Bagchi, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, and director of the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems and Processes. "Here the application components, like heavy video or graphics or code paths, are streaming instantly despite the errors and slowdowns that are possible on a cellular network." Bagchi's team showed in a study how the software, called "AppStreamer," cuts down storage requirements by at least 85% for popular gaming apps on an Android. The softwa...