Category: SoftwareEngineerNews

SoftwareEngineerNews

Highlights from Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference

At this year’s Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference in San Jose California, the company announced their short and long term plans. The announcements ranged from updates to existing offerings in the short term and long term plans bordering on science fiction.

Facebook Wants to Read Your Mind

In a surprising announcement, Regina Dugan told the F8 audience about a project with two goals, typing with your brain and hearing with your skin. In a Facebook Post Dugan says, “Over the next 2 years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm by decoding neural activity devoted to speech… We also described a system that may one day allow you to hear through your skin.”

360-degree cameras

Wednesday’s keynote from CTO Mark Schroepfer announced the second generation of its Surround 360 camera design. The Street reports, “The new cameras are called the x24, featuring 24 cameras on an orb, and the smaller x6, which features six cameras on an orb. Unlike the original Surround 360 camera announced at last year’s F8 event, these cameras use six degrees of freedom (SDOF) to allow a VR headset wearer to move around in about a meter and a half of space to observe an object closer or to simply walk around a space. This effect allows users to feel more immersed in a scene. In addition, while last year’s camera became an open-source project on GitHub, Facebook is planning to work with partners to manufacture the x6 and x24 to bring them to market later this year.”

Beam the Internet from helicopter

CNN Tech reports: “Facebook said it’s created something called a Tether-tenna, a small helicopter connected to an internet cable and a power source. In an emergency, the Tether-tenna would connect to an existing piece of fiber line and fly above the ground, becoming a tower that people can use to get online

This disaster zone tech is still a long-term plan. But Facebook says it could eventually be deployed for months at a time, providing connectivity while a community rebuilds itself.”

Updates to Workplace by Facebook

TechCrunch reports: “Facebook announced updates to its Workplace by Facebook team communications tool, including a slew of new partnerships and new bot integrations, which all show a product that’s maturing to meet the needs of larger enterprise customers.”

Updates to Facebook Analytics

Facebook’s VP of Partnerships, Ime Archibong, announced updates to Facebook Analytics as well as Facebook Login and Account Kit during his F8 keynote address. TechCrunch: “Analytics is getting greater customizability and a machine learning boost while Login and Account Kit are benefiting from additional transparency and accessibility.”

Facebook Spaces Announcement | F8 in Under 10 Minutes from Engadget:

April 20, 2017
Apple App Store Growing Fast, Paid $20 Billion to App Developers in 2016

The Apple App Store has paid out over $20 billion to developers in 2016, which is an increase of over 40% over 2015, according to Apple. They also said that January 1, 2017 had the highest dollar volume of app purchases of any single day in the Apple App Store’s history, with over $240 million in sales. Since the App Store launched in 2008, developers have earned over $60 billion.

“2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people’s lives.”

Apple also noted that December 2016 was an amazing month for App purchases, hitting over $3 billion in sales.

Subscription billings, which became available just this Fall in all categories, are one of the fastest growing segments of app sales. There are over 20,000 apps that can be subscribed to for a monthly fee including popular services such as Netflix, HBO Now, Line, Tinder and MLB.com At Bat. Subscription based apps generated $2.7 billion in billings in 2016, up 74% over 2015.

Apple also recently announced a Best of 2016 Music list:

January 5, 2017
Amazon Kinesis Analytics Announced for AWS Developers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making available Amazon Kinesis Analytics, enabling continuous querying of streaming data using standard SQL. This allows developers to create SQL queries on live and continuous data for real-time analysis. No new programming skills are needed.

“AWS’s functionality across big data stores, data warehousing, distributed analytics, real-time streaming, machine learning, and business intelligence allows our customers to readily extract and deploy insights from the significant amount of data they’re storing in AWS,” said Roger Barga, General Manager, Amazon Kinesis. “With the addition of Amazon Kinesis Analytics, we’ve expanded what’s already the broadest portfolio of analytics services available and made it easy to use SQL to do analytics on real-time streaming data so that customers can deliver actionable insights to their business faster than ever before.”

Amazon Kinesis Analytics processes streaming data with less than 1-second processing latencies, enabling you to analyze and respond in real time. According to Amazon it provides built-in functions that are optimized for stream processing, like anomaly detection and top-K analysis, so that you can easily perform advanced analytics.

“You can now run continuous SQL queries against your streaming data, filtering, transforming, and summarizing the data as it arrives,” said AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr. “You can focus on processing the data and extracting business value from it instead of wasting your time on infrastructure. You can build a powerful, end-to-end stream processing pipeline in 5 minutes without having to write anything more complex than a SQL query.”

“When I think of running a series of SQL queries against a database table, I generally think of the data as staying more or less static while the queries come and go pretty quickly,” Barr explained. “Rows are added, changed, and deleted all the time, but this does not generally matter when considering a single query that runs at a particular point in time. Running a Kinesis Analytics query against streaming data turns this model sideways. The queries are long-running and the data changes many times per second as new records, observations, or log entries arrive. Once you wrap your head around this, you will see that the query processing model is very easy to understand: You build persistent queries that process records as they arrive.”

AWS customers can employ Amazon Kinesis Analytics in minutes by going to the AWS Management Console and selecting a Kinesis Streams or Kinesis Firehose data stream. Amazon says that Kinesis Analytics takes care of everything required to continuously query streaming data, automatically scaling to match the volume and throughput rate of incoming data while delivering sub-second processing latencies.

August 15, 2016
Twitter Has A New Dashboard for Developers

Twitter’s Fabric developer kits have been around for about a year and a half at this point, but in the early months of 2016, Twitter is giving developers some helpful components for using Fabric.

In February, the company introduced the Fabric mobile app. This lets you keep an eye on what’s happening with your apps and get notifications when something important happens. This week, the company unveiled the Fabric Mission Control dashboard, which it dubs “the pulse of all your apps on a single, intuitive dashboard.”

“When key information about your apps lives across different dashboards, it’s hard for the team to have the context they need to make the best decisions,” says product manager Meekal Bajaj. “While Fabric today gives you the #1 crash reporting and mobile analytics tools that show you the pulse of your apps, those insights live on different dashboards on fabric.io. We wanted to take that experience to a whole new level.”

With the dashboard, you can jump right to critical issues or see a summary of how your top app is performing. You can see how well-tested your beta i as soon as you open the dashboard.

“Fabric lets you decide which apps you want to focus on, and in which order on mission control. Simply favorite an app to pin it to the top or reorder your apps so that the most important ones are the first you see,” says Bajaj. “You can also easily locate an app or a number of apps via the search bar built right into your mission control. When searching, we filter the list in real-time to only show the apps that match what you are looking for. Clicking on each metric takes you directly to the details you need.”

Twitter said on Wednesday it would roll out to access to Mission Control over the coming days. It will be automatically set as your default starting page from fabric.io once you enable it.

Images via Twitter

April 22, 2016
Facebook Gives Developers Tools To Build Messenger Chatbots, Should Change How Businesses Is Done on Facebook

Well, we knew it was bound to be a big day for Messenger news with Facebook’s developer conference F8 kicking off, and it has so far been just that. Within its first hour, Facebook made a slew of announcements about Messenger and otherwise.

In short, Messenger is about to become a lot more than most people are used to. It’s going to be a communication path for many more businesses and people are going to be interacting with artificial intelligence a whole lot more. Both of these scenarios will often be simultaneous.

At last year’s event, Facebook announced Messenger Platform, but now it’s getting a full beta launch, and with it, businesses and developers get tools to build their own chatbots to interact with people.

You can use bots and live-messaging tools to create custom experiences for customer service, e-commerce or whatever you come up with. These experiences can be integrated with Messenger plugins (buttons for your site, emails, etc.), or Messenger codes and links introduced last week.

Facebook is allowing for customer matching so what you’ve been sending through SMS can now be sent through Messenger. There’s a tool that lets you match optex in customer phone numbers to a messenger account.

Soon, there will be the ability to buy News Feed ads that will take people directly to your bot in Messenger. According to the company this will help with new users acquisition as well as retention.

The company showed off three bots from early partners including Spring, Poncho, and CNN.

Messenger lead David Marcus demonstrated buying a pair of shoes through Messenger with Spring. He specified what kind of shoe he wanted, his price range, and was presented with a carousel of results to choose from. This is a clear illustration of how this could be a game changer for ecommerce.

“I can guarantee you you’re going to spend way more than you want with this,” Marcus said. “It’s really addictive.”

He demonstrated Poncho the weather cat, a bot that has a “dry and witty” sense of humor that it uses to give you weather info in a fun way. He says it feels like a real conversation.

They’re experimenting with ways businesses can reconnect with people, but are giving users the ability to block businesses as well.

The company launched a new Send/Receive API that’s available today to help you build bots. For more complex bots, they’re opening up a tool called Bot Engine based on what it has learned from “M” to enable you to build high-end self-learning bots.

Some companies are already announcing their new offerings resulting from all of this. SparkCentral announced a customer care agent, for example. Salesforce announced the Salesforce for Messenger Platform.

“Together, the companies are empowering companies to engage their customers through dynamic experiences around products, brands and moments—all connected to their business,” the company said. “Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the proven platform for more than 150,000 companies and millions of users, Salesforce for Messenger will deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data.”

You can get started building your bot with the documentation and resources available here. There will of course be sessions on all of this at the conference, and Facebook is making some sessions available online at the F8 site.

Facebook also discusses the news more in a blog post here.

April 12, 2016
Facebook Opens Live API To Let Developers Build Ability To Stream to FB Live From Any Device [F8]

At F8, Facebook announced that it is opening up the Live API, which will let developers build the ability to stream to Facebook Live from any device.

As part of the announcement, which came from Mark Zuckerberg himself, a drone floated above the stage. It’s using the API to stream from the conference to Facebook Live as the event goes on.

Facebook has already announced a ton of new Facebook Live-related features over the past week, and as the streaming service becomes integrated with more and more apps and devices, these (particularly the discoverability features) will become significantly more important.

Kurt Wagner makes a great point in that the API could “help entice bigger media players to go live, those that are used to producing video with a little more production power than a smartphone can capture.”

Product manager Daniel Danker discusses the API in a blog post:

Publishers with verified pages can get started with the Live API via Publishing Tools or by contacting one of our Media Solutions partners. These partners have built video production, editing, and streaming products that publish directly to Facebook Live and bring live video to life with features like camera switching, instant replay, on-screen graphics and special effects.

Developers can learn how to integrate directly with Facebook Live using the Live API Documentation. The Go Live Dialog makes it particularly easy to get started. If you’re a developer and would like to integrate Facebook Live directly with your app or device, sign up to request access.

The API can be used to build video streams that mix multiple video and audio sources and special effects. These can include programmatic sources including games and screencasts.

The API can also be used in combination with Facebook’s Graph API to reflect viewer engagement in real time and create on-screen graphics that show poll results, analyze comments, or enable comment moderation.

More here.

April 12, 2016
Amazon Launches Payments Partner Program For Ecommerce Platforms, Developers

Amazon announced the launch of the Amazon Payments Partner Program on Monday, aimed at helping ecommerce platform providers and developers extend Amazon Payments to their merchants. The program provides these platforms with tools and services to help them enable merchants to easily integrate with Amazon Payments.

The program includes “solution pre-integration” and best practices to help merchants maximize effectiveness. Merchants themselves will be able to get knowledge-sharing and white glove integration service benefits that are exclusive to the program.

“The Amazon Payments Partner Program provides Partners with the tools and resources needed to extend the trust and convenience of the Amazon experience to their merchant customers,” said Patrick Gauthier, VP, Amazon Payments. “We are working together across geographies and industries to help merchants grow and create experiences that delight customers throughout the shopping journey.”

The program features 3 levels: Premier Partner, Certified Partner, and Certified Developer. Partners are eligible to receive account management, planning support, technical resources and training, Partner directory listing, and Partner designation with exclusive logos. Some will eligible for co-marketing activities.

The partner program is free, and available on an invitation-only basis in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. More info is available here.

April 4, 2016
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

March 14, 2016
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

March 4, 2016
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

March 1, 2016
Microsoft Buys Xamarin To Help Developers Build Apps On Any Device

Microsoft announced that it will acquire Xamarin to “empower more developers to build apps on any device.”

Xamarin is a mobile app development and creation software provider that is already in use by over 15,000 companies including Microsoft, Foursquare, Kellogg’s, Johnson Controls, Dow Jones, and jetBlue to name a few.

Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie wrote a blog post about the acquisition, saying:

In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image via Xamarin

February 24, 2016
Microsoft And Others Work on IoT Standards For Companies And Developers

Tech heavyweights including Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, ARRIS, Electrolux, CableLabs, and GE Digital announced the formation of the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) aimed at helping to unify Internet of Things (IoT) standards so businesses and developers can create IoT solutions and devices that cooperate with one another.

According to the announcement, the OCF, which unifies the former Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) with various companies, will work to accelerate industry innovation and collaborate on specifications, protocols, and open source projects so that a wide range of consumer, enterprise, and embedded devices and sensors from a variety of makers can seamlessly (and securely) work together.

The goal is to make it so that billions of connected devices, appliances, phones, computers, and industrial machines can communicate with one another regardless of manufacturer, operating system, chipset, or transport.

Terry Myerson, EVP, Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft said, “The OCF will help consolidate industry attention and create opportunity, via an agreed upon set of protocols that move the world forward. We are designing Windows 10 to be the ideal operating system and Azure to be the best cloud companion for Things, and for both of them to interoperate with all Things. Windows 10 devices will natively support the new OCF standard, making it easy for Windows to discover, communicate, and orchestrate multiple IoT devices in the home, in business, and beyond. We look forward to seeing the innovation this new standard will enable for all customers and the endless opportunities it will create for developers.”

“OIC has been working to develop a standard specification for IoT devices, and at the same time developing IoTivity as an open source reference implementation,” said SeungHwan Cho, Executive Vice President and Deputy Head of Software R&D Center at Samsung. “We welcome these leaders in their fields to OCF, which we believe will become the most diverse global organization developing IoT standards and code.”

You can learn more about the Foundation and peruse various resources here.

Image via OCF (Twitter)

February 19, 2016
This Mac App Developer Platform is Now Free

OS X app development and distribution platform DevMate is now free, makers MacPaw announced. The suite gives indie developers and Mac software vendors tools to sell apps outside the Mac App store.

The suite includes tools for licensing, crash reporting, update delivery, and feedback collection.

MacPaw CEO says, “Lots of developers understand that there is a huge market opportunity outside the Mac App Store. A developer faces a tough road ahead when developing an app. It takes money and time to code from scratch the separate frameworks for licensing, updates, crash reports and user feedback. DevMate offers a developer everything one needs to prepare an app for release, including hosting and a CDN to provide app availability, version management, and an e-commerce solution for selling. Here at MacPaw we’d like to help other Mac app developers and give them what they need —for free. Moreover, that’s what we use ourselves as a backbone for our products.”

“With over 8 years of experience in app development and a heavy focus on OS X utilities, MacPaw has achieved significant results in delivering the best experience to Mac users,” the company says. “Initially driven by the Mac App Store restrictions, DevMate was developed for the in-house needs of MacPaw (to develop and distribute CleanMyMac outside the Mac App Store) and in 4 years it evolved into a reliable and advanced tool. Well-established companies like Realmac Software, DigiDNA, Smile, Readdle are already on board.”

The free pricing comes without limitations on the number of customers.

H/T: TheNextWeb

Image via DevMate

February 15, 2016
Google Gives Developers Users’ Private Addresses, Phone Numbers, Etc. With New People API

Google announced the new People API, which lets developers retrieve data about authenticated users’ connections from their Contacts.

Whereas in the past, developers had to make multiple calls to the Google+ API for user profiles and the Contacts API for contacts, they can now get the best of both worlds with a single API.

Google says the People API utilizes the newest protocols and technologies and will eventually replace the Contacts API (which uses the GData protocol). The company says in a post on its developer blog:

For example, if your user has contacts in her private contact list, a call to the API (if she provides consent to do so) will retrieve a list containing the contacts merged with any linked profiles. If the user grants the relevant scopes, the results are returned as a people.connections.list object. Each person object in this list will have a resourceName property, which can be used to get additional data about that person with a call to people.get.

The API is built on HTTP and JSON, so any standard HTTP client can send requests to it and parse the response. However, applications need to be authorized to access the APIs so you will need to create a project on the Google Developers Console in order to get the credentials you need to access the service. All the steps to do so are here. If you’re new to the Google APIs and/or the Developers Console, check out this first in a series of videos to help you get up-to-speed.

Not only does the new API combine the purposes of two others, it includes additional data that wasn’t available before, including private addresses, phone numbers, emails, and birthdays. This of course is only for users who have given permission.

You can find the People API documentation here. Additional details are available here.

Image via Google

February 11, 2016
Yahoo Reveals Agenda For Mobile Developer Conference

About a year ago, Yahoo held its first ever developer conference in San Francisco. In December, the company announced the next one.

The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference will be held on February 18 at The Masonic in San Francisco. Today, they announced the agenda.

There will be an opening keynote from CEO Marissa Mayer as well as a presentation on the State of Mobile by SVP of Publisher Products Simon Khalaf. There will also be a a variety of “deep dive” presentations on advancements to the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite.

“Attendees will also have the opportunity to learn from industry executives on a variety of topics to help them grow, retain and monetize users on mobile,” a spokesperson for Yahoo said in an email.

These include the state of native ads and why the format is important for developers, hacks for “time-strapped” developers looking to leverage Tumblr for content marketing, and findings from Yahoo’s recent app lifecycle study.

“In 2015, Yahoo supported hundreds of thousands of mobile developers in creating, growing and monetizing apps through our mobile developer suite,” said Khalaf. “This year, we’re excited to gather together once again with our developer community, where we’ll deliver fresh content and new tools to help them succeed even more.”

You can check out the official Tumblr for the event here. You can apply for an invite from there.

Image via Yahoo

February 8, 2016
Amazon Has A New Training Course For AWS Developers

Amazon announced that a new, improved training course is now available for Amazon Web Services developers.

New to the Developing on AWS course are: additional programming language support, a balance of concepts and code, AWS SDK labs, relevant to more developers, and expanded coverage of developer-oriented AWS services.

“Whether you’re moving applications to AWS or developing specifically for the cloud, this course can show you how to use the AWS SDK to create secure, scalable cloud applications that tap the full power of the platform,” says Amazon’s Jeff Barr.

As far as the new programming language support, the practice labs now support Java, .Net, Python, JavaScript (for Node.js and browser) as well as Windows and Linux.

Barr notes that the additional support makes the course more useful to startup and enterprise developers alike.

“The updated course expands coverage of key concepts, best practices, and troubleshooting tips for AWS services to help students build a mental model before diving into code,” says Barr. “Students then use an AWS SDK to develop apps that apply these concepts in hands-on labs. Practice labs are designed to emphasize the AWS SDK, reflecting how developers actually work and create solutions. Lab environments now include EC2 instances preloaded with all required programming language SDKs, developer tools, and IDEs.”

The course also now puts more focus on AWS services like Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS CloudFormation, etc.

To enroll, you can look over the syllabus, and find a class.

Image via Amazon

January 29, 2016
Twitter Gives Developers New ‘Playbook’

Twitter announced the launch of a new “playbook” for app developers with the first installment being published so far.

The playbook includes what Twitter describes as a series of how-to guides that walk developers through the process of building an app.

A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews, “We know firsthand that it’s hard to build successful iOS and Android apps. We’ve built quite a few and we’ve learned a lot about how our partners build apps and tackle problems. At this year’s Flight conference, we showed off the power of some of the new features from Fabric with two apps that we created and open-sourced on GitHub: Cannonball, a magnetic poetry game, and Furni, a mobile-first furniture store.”

“Based on our experience building Cannonball and Furni, we’ve organized what we’ve learned into a playbook,” the spokesperson adds. “Part one published today covers prototyping, design and stability, and a new guide will be published roughly every week.”

You can check out the first entry of the series here.

You can find a schedule of upcoming Twitter developer events here.

Image via Twitter

January 6, 2016
Apple Has Paid Developers $40 Billion, Company Touts Role In Job Creation

Not that it will come as much of a surprise, but Apple announced that it had a record-breaking holiday season for its App Store.

According to the company, in the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases. January 1 was the biggest day in App Store history. People spent over $144 million that day.

“The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re grateful to all the developers who have created the most innovative and exciting apps in the world for our customers. We can’t wait for what’s to come in 2016.”

In the announcement, the company also said it has now paid developers nearly $40 billion since 2008, adding that it continues to drive “incredible” job growth. Over a third of that money was paid in just the last year.

“Largely as a result of the App Store’s success, Apple is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone,” Apple said. “Nearly three-quarters of those jobs — over 1.4 million — are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy. Apple has previously reported that the iOS app economy has created 1.2 million jobs in Europe and 1.4 million jobs in China.”

Gaming, Social Networking, and Entertainment were the most popular App Store categories in 2015.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

January 6, 2016