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DesignNews

  • GitHub’s Atom Reaches A Million Users

    GitHub announced on Monday that Atom, its hackable text editor, has reached a million active users.

    “That’s three times the number of active users we had under a year ago at the one-year anniversary of Atom becoming completely open source,” a GitHub spokesperson tells us.

    “Atom has been successful because of the community that has grown around it,” GitHub’s Lee Dohm says in a blog post. “The people that have contributed to Atom—that have given their time, expertise, feedback, suggestions, and insight—have helped Atom improve by leaps and bounds. We also hear of exciting or just plain cool things that people are doing with Atom all of the time—like MuleSoft’s API Workbench, Jibo Robot’s SDK tools, and Facebook’s Nuclide.”

    He notes that individuals also come up with some interesting packages. He names Atomic Chrome, Git Time Machine, and Activate Power Mode as some that have caught GitHub’s attention.

    Last week, GitHub launched a new podcast for community projects. Earlier this month, they announced new code review tools.

    Image via GitHub

  • Oculus Rift Ships, SDK Updated

    Oculus Rift Ships, SDK Updated

    Facebook’s Oculus announced pre-orders for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device in January for $599. The company just announced that shipping to over 20 countries and regions is now underway. Kickstarter units are shipping today while the first pre-ordered Rifts will start shipping mid-week, and arrive shortly thereafter.

    There are already over 30 games available on the Oculus Store, which can be played immediately. They’re also launching Oculus Video for Rift today. This features thousands of Facebook 360 videos and “the best of” Vimeo and Twitch livestreams.

    “We’ll be adding feature-length movies, new partners, and lots more content to Oculus Video soon,” a spokesperson for the company tells us in an email.

    Oculus 360 Photos lets users explore 200,000 places.

    The device also comes with Farlands, which is described as an alien world and a “new kind of VR experience”. This was created by Oculus and built with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. It was designed specifically for the Rift.

    Developers will be pleased to know that the Oculus PC SDK 1.3 is now available on the Oculus Developer Center. It includes new features, including support for the consumer Rift, app lifecycle support, native integrations with the latest releases of Unity and Unreal Engine, and Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW). You can learn more about that here.

    Oculus discusses the SDK update in more detail here.

    Images via Oculus

  • Google API Console Launched, Separate From Cloud Console

    Google API Console Launched, Separate From Cloud Console

    Google announced the introduction of the Google API Console to give developers a better and more streamlined experience compared to existing Cloud Console.

    Console.cloud.google.com will stay the same, pointing to Cloud Console, which includes all Google Cloud Platform services. The new API Console is at console.developers.google.com, and focuses completely on the Google API experience.

    “There, you’ll find a significantly cleaner, simpler interface: instead of 20+ sections in the navigation bar, you’ll see API Manager, Billing and Permissions only, says product manager Israel Shalom.

    “The purpose of the new API Console is to let you complete common API-related tasks quickly,” he says. “For instance, we know that once you enable an API in a new project, the next step is usually to create credentials. That’s why we’ve built the credentials wizard: a quick and convenient way for you to figure out what kind of credentials you need, and add them right after enabling an API.”

    Google will make tweaks to the experience as time goes on, and encourages developers not to be shy about feedback for that purpose.

    Image via Google

  • Twitter’s Crashlytics Gets Velocity Alerts

    Twitter’s Crashlytics Gets Velocity Alerts

    Twitter’s Crashlytics announced the launch of Velocity Alerts, which are designed to alert app developers about the most critical issues happening in their apps so they know when they really need to take action ASAP.

    For the alerts, they combine your app’s crash data with usage analytics from Answers, the mobile analytics tool added to Crashlytics a couple years ago.

    “Now, once you’ve enabled Answers as part of Crashlytics, our system will proactively check to see if there is a statistically significant number of sessions that have ended due to a crash related to one issue on a particular build,” writes Jason St. Pierre on the Crashlytics blog. “If so, we’ll let you know if that issue is a hot patch candidate and needs your attention immediately right on your dashboard. You’ll also get an email alert in your inbox as well as a push notification if you’re using the Fabric mobile app (Android support coming soon). With Crashlytics, you’ll never miss a critical bug!”

    Notification emails have also been redesigned to make important information more clear and actionable.

    Images via Crashlytics

  • GitHub Launches Podcast for Community Projects

    GitHub announced a new podcast called the GitHub Community Cast to give developers a chance to learn more about various projects.

    The first one, for example, features an interview with Andy Miller from CMS the Grav project as well as updates on new GitHub features and events.

    “At the heart of what makes GitHub great are the thousands of open source communities that build incredible things every day,” says GitHub’s Jono Bacon. “The brand new GitHub Community Cast shines a light on these awesome projects and the people that make them.”

    “Take a look inside a project, learn about their tools and workflow, discover where you can get involved, and get inspired for your own work,” he adds. “In addition to seeing behind the curtain on a great open source project, you’ll also get news and updates from around the GitHub community.”

    You can check out the first episode here:

    Last week, GitHub announced new code reviews tools. More on that here.

    Image via GitHub

  • Adobe Releases Dreamweaver Update

    Adobe Releases Dreamweaver Update

    Adobe announced the release of a new Dreamweaver update: Dreamweaver CC 2015.2, which includes a bunch of new features, including enhancements to creative workflows.

    Enhancements have been made to the DOM panel, which let users layout their site using just the panel. You can manipulate multiple elements simultaneously, including selecting, copying, pasting, moving, wrapping, and deleting groups of elements. You can also edit tags, classes, and IDs, with support for code hints as you begin typing a class name. You can also insert elements to your web page using DOM panel.

    There’s also an updated Chromium embedded framework and web-optimized SVG via CC libraries, security updates (to prevent potential gatekeeper exploit), and email templates, as well as REMs and EMs. When adding a visual media query, in Live View, you can now choose relative measuring units.

    You can see the full feature list here.

    Images via Adobe

  • Bing Previews New Search APIs

    Bing Previews New Search APIs

    Microsoft announced a preview of its new Bing Search APIs, and invited developers to test them out.

    The APIs can be used to search across hundreds of billions of web pages, images, videos, and news results. They also provide autosuggest services, assistive services like spell check and adult intent signal, access to trending topics (including news, images, and videos), and the ability to filter image and video results by size, license, style, and price.

    “The new Bing Search APIs use the same core Bing platform and features that hundreds of millions of monthly users rely on for search across Bing, Cortana, Office, and trusted external partners,” says Gurpreet S Pall, Director of Program Management for Bing for Partners. “Developers at any level—startups looking to stand out with the ‘next big thing,’ enterprise teams making existing applications easier and smarter, or search leaders seeking a best-in-class platform— have instant access to our new search APIs.”

    “The new APIs are REST APIs that follow the latest structured data standards (Schema.org, JSON-LD), making them easy to implement, with the same reliability and support that has made Bing a trusted search service for many industry leaders,” Pall adds.

    All you have to do to get access to the new APIs is email Bing at partnerwithbing@microsoft.com.

    Image via Bing

  • GitHub Announces New Code Review Tools

    GitHub announced the addition of new features to make code review faster and more flexible. These include ways to find what you’re looking for more quickly, the ability to view comments with more context, and the ability to pick up where you left off.

    “Pull requests with many changes sometimes require review from several people with different areas of expertise,” says Fabian Perez on the GitHub blog. “If you’re a Ruby expert, for example, you might want to focus just on the Ruby code and ignore any changes made to HTML and CSS files. You can use the new files list to search by extensions like .rb, .html, etc. You can also filter by filename if you know what you’re looking for.”

    “Not all teams review code the same way. The most popular style on GitHub is reviewing all changes in a pull request at once, making the pull request the unit of change,” Perez adds. “Some teams choose to use a commit-by-commit workflow where each commit is treated as the unit of change and is isolated for review.”

    You’ll be able to access the new commits list in the review bar to find the commit you want to review, and GitHub also added pagination and new keyboard shortcuts. You can use the ? key to view the list when viewing pull request.

    For picking up where you left off, there’s a new timeline indicator.

    You can read up more on all the updates here.

    Images via GitHub

  • Google Gives Game App Developers New Ad Formats, Targeting

    Google Gives Game App Developers New Ad Formats, Targeting

    At the Games Developers Conference, Google announced some new features for AdWords and AdMob to make it easier for developers to reach the right users and do so at scale. These include the ability to let users try apps before downloading (right from Google Search) as well as portrait videos, a new type of targeting, and a new monetization option.

    In December, Google introduced Trial Run Ads for the Display Network. These ads are now being extended to Google search results in beta for select advertisers in the United States. When someone searches for a game, they can hit “Try Now” from within a search ad and try it out before installing it.

    Only smartphone users on WiFi will see the ads, and they’ll be able to play a game for up to 10 minutes before deciding if they want to download it. The goal is for users who are most likely to spend more time using the app to be the ones downloading.

    Google will also launch Portrait Video Ads in the coming weeks. These give users a full-screen experience in portrait without them having to re-position their device. Google says it has already seen these ads improve click-through and conversion rates.

    “Advertisers have long been able to control who sees their AdWords ads, and in the coming weeks we’ll be launching even finer options to reach high-quality users with Active User Targeting for Games,” says Sissie Hsiao, Product Management Director of Mobile Display Ads. “This new type of targeting for Android apps can show ads to users who have spent more than 30 minutes playing games, or who have played a Google Play Games integrated game in the last 30 days. Game developers can show their ads to game lovers, and combined with other types of targeting, such as a particular game category (e.g., Adventure), they can reach a very precise audience.”

    “AdMob helps app developers around the world earn through in-app advertising with best-in-class formats and smart tools to maximize revenue,” Hsiao adds. “Increasingly, rewarded advertising is becoming a popular form of game monetization: users are given the choice to engage with ads in exchange for in-app rewards. Today, we’re introducing a way for developers to easily monetize apps with rewarded video ads from a number of ad providers in AdMob Mediation. Supported networks and platforms include AdColony, AppLovin, Chartboost, Fyber, Upsight, and Vungle, with more being added all the time. So if you’re a developer monetizing with these providers, you can easily manage and optimize them through the AdMob interface. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to provide app developers with a first-class mediation solution, and follows our recent launch enabling SDK-less mediation.”

    Google is hosting talks and each day of the conference, and will be part of its main sessions on Thursday.

    Images via Google

  • Facebook Launches Parse Server Dashboard

    Facebook Launches Parse Server Dashboard

    As you know, Facebook announced in January that it’s shutting down Parse, its cloud-based platform for cross-platform apps, which lets developers create rich social apps integrated with Facebook across platforms like iOS, Android, HTML5, etc.

    Parse is to be fully retired by January 28, 2017. The company and others have been giving developers tools to help the migration process, and the latest comes today with the announcement of the open source Parse Server Dashboard.

    “The dashboard is one of the top requested features by developers, and is a tool to use during all phases of the migration of apps: whether they are already on the Parse server, still on Parse.com, or planning to migrate soon, they will be able to manage them all from the same dashboard,” a spokesperson told us in an email.

    “The Parse Dashboard is adapted from the same dashboard we launched in December, and running it will feel very familiar to any Node.js or web developers,” writes software engineer Drew Gross on the Parse blog. “If you already have Node.js, all it takes to get started is four simple commands to clone the source code, and a little bit of info in a config file.”

    Gross talks about getting started, staying up to date, and contributing on the Parse blog here.

    Image via Parse

  • Google Launches Analytics for Cast App Developers

    Google Launches Analytics for Cast App Developers

    Google announced the launch of analytics for Google Cast applications, enabling developers of such apps to see how many devices have access to them, how many sessions said devices initiate, and how long those sessions play media.

    This can all be accessed via the Google Cast Developer Console. Log in with a developer account, and click “View” in the Statistics column of the “Application” table.

    “The analytics page contains a tab for each metric, an interactive graph of the metric’s values over time, and tables containing the most recent day’s data,” explains Google’s Chris Dolan. “The devices tab shows the number of Cast devices that have launched your application, the sessions tab shows the number of Cast sessions of your application, and the average playback tab shows the average length of media playback time per session for your application.”

    “Each tab’s data can be viewed in total, by country, or by sender platform,” explains Dolan. “To see data for a particular country or platform, simply click the appropriate row in the table. Each tab’s data is available on a per-day basis, as well as in seven, fourteen, and twenty-eight day rolling totals. To change the aggregation range, select the desired range from the range picker at the top right.

    This will all no doubt be quite welcome to Cast app developers as in the past, they would have had to set up their own way of tracking this stuff.

    Cast apps work with Google’s Chromecast, Cast for Audio, and Android TV devices. More information about making apps Cast-ready is available here.

    Images via Google

  • Google Releases Keyword Optimizer Sample App

    Google Releases Keyword Optimizer Sample App

    Google announced the release of the Keyword Optimizer sample app for the AdWords API, which combines functionalities of Keyword Planner and the API services for keyword suggestion and traffic estimation.

    Timo Bozsolik from the AdWords API team explains in a post on the Google Ads Developer blog:

    Starting from an initial set of seed keywords (obtained using a sample URL, business category etc.), the iterative process repeatedly discards low-quality keywords and “reproduces” high-quality ones. With each step, the average quality across all keywords increases, just like evolution!

    KeywordOptimizer is designed to provide guidance on how to use the TargetingIdeaService and TrafficEstimatorService. Simply run it from the command-line to get a CSV file with keywords and estimation with minimal effort. Advanced users can easily extend the tool with custom implementations. For example, you can change the calculation for the keyword quality score to combine clicks with impressions, or your own metrics in a way that works best for you.

    You can find the Keyword Optimizer GitHhub repository here.

  • LinkedIn Open Sources Data Discovery Portal WhereHows

    LinkedIn announced that it is open sourcing its WhereHows data discovery and lineage portal.

    WhereHows is made up of a data repository to store metadata content, a web server that surfaces the data through a UI and an API, and a backend server that periodically fetches metadata from other systems.

    As far as the metadata it collects, this includes the catalog info of datasets (like schema structure, dtasets physical location, timestamp of create/modify, ownership, etc.), operational metadata (like jobs, flows, and execution info), and lineage info metadata (the connection between jobs and datasets).

    “At LinkedIn, WhereHows integrates with all our data processing environments and extracts coarse and fine grain metadata from them,” explains LinkedIn’s Eric Sun. “Then, it surfaces this information through two interfaces: (1) a web application that enables navigation, search, lineage visualization, annotation, discussion, and community participation and (2) an API endpoint that empowers automation of other data processes and applications.”

    “This enables us to solve problems around data and process lineage, data and process ownership, schema discovery and evolution history, User Defined Function (UDF) and script discovery, operational metadata mashup, and data profiling and cross-cluster comparison,” Sun continues. “In addition to machine-based pattern detection and association between business glossary and dataset, the community participation and collaboration aspect enables us to create a self-maintaining repository of documentation on the entities by encouraging conversations and pride in ownership.”

    Read LinkedIn’s full post on the news here for more on how to use the metadata and much more.

    There is detailed documentation for each of WhereHows’s components available on Github.

    Images via LinkedIn

  • Drupal 8 Module For AMP Released in Beta

    Drupal 8 Module For AMP Released in Beta

    Google and the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project announced a new Drupal 8 module that provides support for AMP. Google has been working with Lullabot to create the module, and the beta version is now available.

    The two are starting to work on a Drupal 7 version of the module as well, which will be available later this month if everything goes according to plan.

    “One of the most touted features of Drupal is its flexibility, so making Drupal produce AMP HTML has required a lot of careful consideration of the design approach,” says Lullabot’s Matthew Tift. “To make Drupal output AMP HTML, we have created an AMP module, AMP theme, and a PHP Library.”

    “When the AMP module is installed, AMP can be enabled for any content type,’ Tift adds. “At that point, a new AMP view mode is created for that content type, and AMP content becomes available on URLs such as node/1/amp or node/article-title/amp. We also created special AMP formatters for text, image, and video fields.”

    With the module, the AMP theme is triggered for any node delivered on an /amp path, and can be extended using a subtheme to give publishers more flexibility. This enables them to place AMP ad blocks on the AMP page with Drupal’s block system.

    Tift discusses the module more in this post on the AMP blog.

    For WordPress publishers, an AMP plugin was also recently made available.

    Google began sending search traffic to AMP pages last month. For now, it is only showing AMP results in the news carousel on mobile devices.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Facebook Announces Nearly 30 F8 Developer Meetups Around the World

    Facebook Announces Nearly 30 F8 Developer Meetups Around the World

    Facebook announced 27 F8 meetups around the world to coincide with F8, its annual developer event, which will take place on April 12 and 13. These will feature a live streams of the opening day keynote and time for developers to connect with their local developer communities.

    According to Facebook, over 70% of developers building on its platform are outside of the U.S., so the meetups are designed to get key content from the event in front of them.

    There are 18 meetups scheduled for April 12 in the following cities:

    Amsterdam, Netherlands
    Bangalore, India
    Berlin, Germany
    Bogota, Colombia
    Buenos Aires, Argentina
    Cape Town, South Africa
    Casablanca, Morocco
    Lagos, Nigeria
    London, United Kingdom
    Los Angeles, U.S.
    Mexico City, Mexico
    Nairobi, Kenya
    Paris, France
    Sao Paulo, Brazil
    Seattle, U.S.
    Stockholm, Sweden
    Tel Aviv, Israel
    Warsaw, Poland

    The following day will have meetups in the following locations:

    Delhi, India
    Dhaka, Bangladesh
    Jakarta, Indonesia
    Lahore, Pakistan
    Manila, Philippines
    Seoul, Korea
    Singapore, Singapore
    Taipei, Taiwan
    Tokyo, Japan

    Developers can register to attend one of the meetups here. If you’re interested, you better do it quickly because space is limited.

    The F8 keynote speech and selected sessions will be streamed live online.

    Image via Facebook