Tech News - Application Development

Yesterday, the team at Twitter announced to test a new feature called “Hide Replies” in the US and Japan after testing it in Canada. Twitter’s Hide Replies feature lets users hide all those unwanted trolls, abuse, bully and replies on their tweet. The company aims towards civilized conversations on Twitter and to give more control to the users. Users can now decide which reply will be hidden from other users but those who choose to view the hidden replies will still be able to see them by clicking on an icon that would bring up all the hidden tweets. Users can hide replies on both the app and desktop versions of the website.  Observations from the Canadian ‘Hide Replies’ feature test In July this year, the The Twitter team tested out the ‘Hide Replies’ feature in Canada and tried to understand how conversations on the platform change when a person (who starts a conversation) hides the replies.  The team observed that users often hide those replies that they think are not relevant, unintelligible or abusive. According to their survey, the ones who used this feature found it helpful. Also, the users were more likely to reconsider their interactions when their tweets were hidden. Around 27% of the users who had their tweets hidden thought of reconsidering their interactions with others in the future. Hiding someone’s replies can also lead to confusion as it could be misunderstood, so Twitter notifies the user if they wish to block the user. The official post reads, “People were concerned hiding someone’s reply could be misunderstood and potentially lead to confusion or frustration. As a result, now if you tap to hide a Tweet, we’ll check in with you to see if you want to also block that account.” According to the team, the Canadian test showed positive results as the feature helped users have better conversations. In an announcement regarding the feature’s Canada launch, the company said, “Everyday, people start important conversations on Twitter, from #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, to discussions around #NBAFinals or their favorite television shows. These conversations bring people together to debate, learn, and laugh. That said we know that distracting, irrelevant, and offensive replies can derail the discussions that people want to have. Ultimately, the success of ‘hide replies’ will depend on how people use it, but it could mean friendlier — and more filtered — conversations.” Twitter’s Hide Replies feature: will it really improve conversations? The Hide Replies feature is a great addition to the list of the block and mute options on Twitter but it could possibly turn into a slight restriction on freedom of speech. In case, the replies weren't abusive or offensive but are strong views about a subject and the author still decides to hide that reply, then the user who replied might not understand the reason behind hiding the reply. But the good thing is that users can opt to still see the hidden replies. So in this case, the hidden responses aren’t being completely silenced but it will now take an extra click to view them. Also, if the platform still shows the hidden replies then the motive of hiding the replies fails there itself. While it is still not clear as to how will Twitter curtail abusive comments or bullies on the Twitter thread with this feature as it doesn’t delete them but simply hide them. Few Twitter users are not happy with this feature and think it is irrelevant if the user first hides the replies and than again it will appear on clicking the option to see the hidden replies. https://twitter.com/QWongSJ/status/1174795321211158528 https://twitter.com/scott_satzer/status/1174890804143374336 https://twitter.com/CartridgeGames/status/1174857548777885697 https://twitter.com/camimosas/status/1174850022694952960 https://twitter.com/KyleTWN/status/1174828502769471488 https://twitter.com/iFireMonkey/status/1174791634736861207 To know more about this news, check out the official post. Other interesting news in programming Dart 2.5 releases with the preview of ML complete, the dart:ffi foreign function interface and improvements in constant expressions Microsoft releases Cascadia Code version 1909.16, the latest monospaced font for Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code DevOps platform for coding, GitLab reached more than double valuation of $2.75 billion than its last funding and way ahead of its IPO in 2020  

The Qt team announced the release of Qt creator 4.8 beta yesterday. It includes generic programming language support and some more C++ experimental features since 4.7. Generic programming languages in Qt creator 4.8 beta In Qt Creator 4.8 Beta experimental support for language server protocol (LSP) is introduced. Many programming languages have a language server, with Go also having plans to include it. An LSP provides features like auto code complete and reference finding in IDEs. Addition of LSP means that by providing a client for the language server protocol, Qt Creator gets some support for many programming languages. Currently the Qt Creator supports code completion, highlighting of the symbol under the cursor, and jumping to the symbol definition. It also integrates diagnostics from the language server. Highlighting and indentation are still provided by the generic highlighter. The client is tested with Python for the most part. Currently, there is no support for language servers requiring special handling. C++ support There are some C++ experimental features add in this release. Editing compilation databases A compilation database is a list of files and compiler flags used to compile them. You can now open a compilation database as a project solely for editing and navigating code. You can try it by enabling the CompilationDatabaseProjectManager plugin. Clang format based indentation Auto-indentation is done via LibFormat which is the backend used by Clang format. To try this, enable the ClangFormat plugin. Cppcheck diagnostics The diagnostics generated by the Cppcheck tool is integrated into the editor. Enable the Cppcheck plugin to use it. In addition to the many fixes, the Clang code model can now jump to the symbol indicated by the auto keyword. This also allows to generate a compilation database from the information the mode model has. This can be done via Build | Generate Compilation Database. Debugging Now there is support for running multiple debuggers on one or more executables simultaneously. When multiple debuggers are running, you can switch between them with a new drop-down menu in Debug mode. More about various improvements and fixes can be found in the changelog. For further details, visit the Qt Blog. Qt creator 4.8 can be downloaded from the Qt website. Qt 3D Studio 2.1 released with new sub-presentations, scene preview, and runtime improvements How to create multithreaded applications in Qt How to Debug an application using Qt Creator

The January 2019 release of Visual Studio code v1.31 is now available. This update brings Tree UI improvements, updated to the main menu, no reload on extension installation and other changes. Features of Visual Studio code v1.31 No more reloads on installing extensions This was one of the most requested features in the VS community. Now you don’t have to reload VS code whenever you install a new extension. Reload is not needed even when you uninstall an unactivated extension. Improvements to the Tree UI There is a new tree widget based on the already existing list widget. This tree UI was adopted in File Explorer, all debug trees, search, and peek references. Tree UI brings features like: Better keyboard navigation for faster access Hierarchical select all in a tree starting from the inner node the cursor is on Customizable indentation for trees Expand/collapse all tree nodes recursively Horizontal scrolling Improvements to menus There are more navigation actions in the Go menu so that they can be discovered easily. The cut command is now available on the Explorer context menu. Changes in the Editor Text selection is smarter. Search history is shown below the search bar in the References view. Long descriptions can be written using string arrays. Semantic selection In HTML, CSS/LESS/SCSS, and JSON semantic selection is now available. Reflow support in integrated terminal The terminal will now automatically wrap and unwrap text whenever it’s resized. New input variable The input variables were introduced in the previous milestone. In Visual Studio code 1.31, there is a new input variable called command. It runs an arbitrary command when an input variable is interpolated. Updated extension API documentation The VS Code API documentation was rewritten and then moved to its own table of contents. For more details on the improvements in Visual Studio code 1.31 January 2019, visit the release notes. Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019 Microsoft Connect(); 2018 Azure updates: Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, GitHub releases and much more! Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio

Yesterday, the team at Facebook released Pythia, a deep learning framework that supports multitasking in the vision and language multimodal research. Pythia is built on the open-source PyTorch framework and enables researchers to easily build, reproduce, and benchmark AI models. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1130888764945907712 It is designed for vision and language tasks, such as answering questions that are related to visual data and automatically generates image captions. This framework also incorporates elements of Facebook’s winning entries in recent AI competitions including the VQA Challenge 2018 and Vizwiz Challenge 2018. Features of Pythia Reference implementations: Pythia references implementations to show how previous state-of-the-art models achieved related benchmark results. Performance gauging: It also helps in gauging the performance of new models. Multitasking: Pythia supports multitasking and distributed training. Datasets: It also includes support for various datasets built-in including VizWiz, VQA,TextVQA and VisualDialog. Customization: Pythia features custom losses, metrics, scheduling, optimizers, tensorboard as per the needs of the customers. Unopinionated: Pythia is unopinionated about the dataset and model implementations that are built on top of it. The goal of the team behind Pythia is to accelerate the AI models and their results and further make it easier for the AI community to build on, and benchmark against, successful systems. The team hopes that Pythia will also help researchers to develop adaptive AI that synthesizes multiple kinds of understanding into a more context-based, multimodal understanding. The team also plans to continue adding tools, data sets, tasks, and reference models. To know more about this news, check out the official Facebook announcement. Facebook tightens rules around live streaming in response to the Christchurch terror attack Facebook again, caught tracking Stack Overflow user activity and data Facebook bans six toxic extremist accounts and a conspiracy theory organization  

A new version of JUnit v5.3 was released last week. There are some changes and new features like parallel test execution, enhancements to AssertThrows, and others in this new version. JUnit is a popular unit testing framework for the Java which has been instrumental to the rise of test-driven development. Below are some of the key highlights of JUnit 5.3. Capturing output from a console It is now possible to capture System.out and System.err output using a TestExecutionListener in Junit 5.3. Capturing console output may not be a frequent need, but can become necessary in some cases such as when working on legacy code bases where statements are being written to console and viewing them can be useful. There are two steps to get this working, implementing a TestExecutionListener and configuring surefire to start capturing console output. Enhancements to AssertThrows The assertThrows assertion is updated to display the value a method returns. This works only if the method runs successfully and returns a value and no exception is thrown. It can be helpful for debugging a failing test case. Parallel test execution Parallel test execution is now enabled and can be configured via build files. This can be a pom.xml, build.gradle etc. The parallel test execution behavior can be changed at both, method and class levels with the annotations: @Execution and @ResourceLock. For detailed information on configuring and using parallel test execution in JUnit 5, check out the user guide. Other changes There are also some libraries and tools updated that are used with JUnit like filtering changes with native support, enhanced mockito dependency injection support, updates to AssertJ Soft Assertions and opentest4J. JUnit 5.3.1 was released on September 9, shortly after JUnit 5.3 and there are some minor fixes. There is another major change where variants of assertThrows() introduced in JUnit 5.3.0 that accepted ThrowingSupplier arguments are now removed. For a full list of bug fixes and changelogs, visit the JUnit website and to learn how to use the features, check out the user guide. Unit testing with Java frameworks: JUnit and TestNG [Tutorial] Unit Testing Apps with Android Studio Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality

Last week, the team at Google asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review their copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of software interfaces. Unless the Supreme Court interferes, the industry will be stuck by the court’s decision, which states that the software interfaces used in creating new programs are not allowed under copyright law. Software interfaces let computer programs interact with each other and push innovations by letting developers build technologies for different platforms. This is going to have a great impact on innovation across the computer industry. Voices from business, technology, academia, and the nonprofit sector have spoken out about the devastating impacts of this case. The questions raised by Google to the Supreme Court are as follows: Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface? Whether, as the jury found, petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use? Google writes, “We support software developers’ ability to develop the applications we all have come to use every day, and we hope that the Supreme Court will give this case the serious and careful consideration it deserves.”   According to the petition, “the Federal Circuit concluded that the merger doctrine does not restrict copyright protection for computer code necessary for interoperability as long as the original author could have written the code in more than one way.” In 2008, Android was released and it helped developers overcome the challenges of limited memory, smaller processors, and short battery life. Android was built by following the practice of reusing software interfaces which provide sets of commands that make it easy to implement common functionality. Android came with a transformative platform while letting Java programmers use their existing skills to create new applications. The team at Sun Microsystems was happy with the release of Android and said, “It had strapped another set of rockets to the [Java] community’s momentum.” After acquiring Java in 2010, Oracle sued Google for using the software interfaces. Oracle’s lawsuit for the right to control software interfaces might affect the community of developers who have invested in learning the free and open Java language. Initially, a court ruled that the software interfaces, in this case, are not copyrightable, but that decision got overruled. A unanimous jury then pointed out that Google’s use of the interfaces was a legal fair use, but that decision got overruled. According to the official blog post by Google, the U.S. Constitution has authorized copyrights to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not to impede creativity or promote lock-in of software platforms. The petition reads, “Under Section 102(b), copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such [original] work.” Though according to a blog post by Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF is in the support of Google and will be supporting the company’s petition. Even in May 2013, EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of many computer scientists to Federal Circuit with the opinion that APIs should not be subject to copyright. This news has become a matter concern for many. In a statement to Ars, James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at Cornell University and former software developer, said, "The Federal Circuit's decision threatens the continued vitality of software innovation." It seems even CCIA (Computer and Communications Industry Association) is in support of Google. CCIA writes, "It is hard to see why programmers who have learned the Java APIs should remain captives of Oracle because of an investment in learning made by the programmers and not by Oracle." Users are agitated by this news and they are not welcoming the idea of restricting the use of interfaces. This news has created a lot of buzz in the developer communities and most of the developers are worried. One of the comments on HackerNews reads, “A reminder that what the law says, and what is a good idea, is not necessarily the same thing. The courts rule on the first point. Given that Oracle has prevailed in court on this before, one has to at least entertain the possibility that our law really allows for API to be copyrighted.” Another comment reads, “If companies can copyright an API and block competitors from implementing it, that would be very detrimental to the industry as a whole, for the sake of a few rent seekers profiting.” Few users are with this new move. A comment reads, “It was not ... intended to permit third party interoperability, since Google had made no substantial efforts to use them for the purpose of third party interoperability. (In fact it found that Google had tried to prevent interoperability with other Java and had previously been refused a license by Sun for that reason.) It was not transformative in the sense of a new platform either, since other Java smartphones predated Android.” Some of the users are with the court and think this battle is about what’s legal and illegal. Another comment reads, “What I'm saying is that all the people who are trying to make the "but it's bad!" argument are missing the point of the courts. Courts are not there to determine whether it's good or bad, only whether it's legal or illegal.” According to some users, Google could have called its resizable array as android.data.ResizableArray<E> but it named it java.util.ArrayList<E> and also copied the method signatures. But the matter of concern for the developers is what if other companies also end up filing such cases. And what if Google is the next one to do so? One of the users commented, “Does anyone believe Google will not be doing the exact same thing with its (moribund) technologies in, say, 5-10 years?” To know more, check out Google’s blog post. Why Google kills its own products Google and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from McKinsey & Company talk about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on circular economy Google is secretly urging National Labor Relations Board to overturn protection for activist workers, Bloomberg reports

Last year, Microsoft had announced about its new revenue split figures at the Build 2018. The new policy was expected to be rolled out by the end of 2018. However, it was actually two days ago that the team at Microsoft Store updated its App Developer Agreement (ADA) which is the revenue sharing agreement. The consumer app developers will now benefit by earning up to 95 percent cut of the revenue on app sales excluding games, and an 85 percent cut on the low end. This 95 percent share can be earned only when a customer uses a deep link (tracked by CID (Connection ID)) to purchase the app. In case the customers are directed by Microsoft to their app through a collection or "any other owned Microsoft properties (tracked by an OCID)," then developers will get an 85 percent share. This policy for the fee structure is effective for purchases on Windows Mixed Reality, Windows phone, Windows 10 PCs, and Surface Hub. The policy excludes purchases made on Xbox consoles. If there is no CID or OCID attributed to purchase, then in the case of a web search, customers will get 95 percent revenue. Few Hacker news users have appreciated this new revenue split policy as according to them the company has made a fair move. One user commented on HackerNews, “It seems like a reasonable shifting of costs. If you rely mostly on Microsoft for acquiring new customers, then Microsoft should get a little bit more of a cut, and if you rely mostly on your own marketing methods, then it should get less.” Another comment reads, “It’s an insanely good deal. MSFT has to be losing money on that.” According to a few others, there is also a benefit of organic search here. As app stores don’t usually have much of organic search going on. This move might result in the company getting a better idea on the organic search being done on their store. Also, the 5%-15% cut is an add on. According to a few users, it is equally beneficial for Microsoft as the company earns a cut as well. A comment reads, “Like all digital goods, the marginal cost of MSFT doing this is zero. I don't think they are losing money on this, in terms of pure margins, it’s probably quite lucrative (though in absolute revenue, maybe not so much).” Another comment reads, “I actually think this is a brilliant insight on the side of Microsoft, by inverting this model they get a non-zero slice of a pie they previously did not have.” This may have an effect on how other tech companies and developers function. Other companies may possibly get pressurized by Microsoft’s move considering the company has significantly gained the confidence of developers. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft @MWC (Mobile World Congress) Day 1: HoloLens 2, Azure-powered Kinect camera and more! Microsoft workers protest the lethal use of Hololens2 in the $480m deal with US military Microsoft adds new features to Microsoft Office 365: Microsoft threat experts, priority notifications, Desktop App Assure, and more

Yesterday, the GNOME Foundation shared that Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC has filed a lawsuit against them stating that their Shotwell photo manager and other similar products infringe its patent. “On information and belief, Defendant sells, offers to sell, and/or uses network storage systems and methods including, without limitation, the Gnome Shotwell platform, and any similar products (“Product”), which infringe at least Claim 4 of the ‘086 Patent,” the lawsuit reads. Shotwell is a digital photo manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It allows you to import photos and videos from a disk or digital camera directly and organize them by keywords and events. It also includes editing features for cropping, rotating, adjusting levels and color balance, straightening, and eliminating red-eye. GNOME has called this lawsuit “baseless” and has decided to fight against this case head-on. In a statement, Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation said, “We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit. Due to the ongoing litigation, we, unfortunately, cannot make any further comments at this time.” The 9,936,086 patent titled "Wireless image distribution system and method” was filed by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC at the US Patent and Trademark Office on 2 June 2017 and got accepted on 3 April 2018. It talks about wirelessly connecting an image capturing device with a receiving device and sharing them based on transfer criteria. This patent is very vague and can be applied to literally any software that transfers images from one device to another. Also, there are quite a few similar technologies that GNOME can present as prior art resulting in the invalidation of the lawsuit. There is Shotwell’s predecessor, F-Shot that was discontinued in 2017. In a discussion on LW.NET, a user shared, “Shotwell's predecessor (F-Spot) had equivalent "wireless" functionality at least two years before this patent was first applied for.” The GNOME Foundation is not the first one who has been sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC. It looks like the company has been on a suing spree adding Cyberlink.com,  QNAP Inc., Pinterest, Inc., Piximity, LLC, Magix Computer Products International Co. on their list. Considering its history, many are saying that Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC is nothing but a patent troll. A user on Hacker News commented, “Rothschild Patent Imaging appears to be the company holding the rights to a number of dubious patents filed by Leigh M. Rothschild, who appears to have a well-deserved reputation as a patent troll.” Many users commented that there should be some kind of “reform” to eliminate patent trolling. A user added, “One reform worth considering is that an entity that can be demonstrated to persistently engage in frivolous patent lawsuits should lose the rights to their entire portfolio. This could be accomplished with a legal mechanism that allows the defendant to counter-sue the plaintiff as a patent troll. In this scope, they could bring in the previous litigation history of the plaintiff (or any related entities, piercing the corporate veil). If the judge rules in the defendant's favor, then all of the plaintiff's patents (and any related entities) are immediately released into the public domain.” Another user suggested, “Another potential reform (from the book "Radical Markets") - charge a (say 1%) property tax on the patent based on self-assessed value, with the caveat that you MUST sell the patent to anyone willing to pay your claimed value. This basically destroys patent trolling, which only works because of the asymmetrical difference in cost between obtaining a patent and defending a patent lawsuit. If the troll prices the patent too low, the person they are suing just buys it, if they charge too much, they have a massive recurring tax bill (and an incentive to settle quickly, not to drag it out in the courts for years).” GNOME 3.34 releases with tab pinning, improved background panel, custom folders and more! GNOME 3.32 released with fractional scaling, improvements to desktop, web and much more Amazon patents AI-powered drones to provide ‘surveillance as a service’ Apple is patenting Swift features like optional chaining Open Invention Network expands its patent non-aggression coverage in Linux system  

Last month, the Fedora team announced the release of Fedora 30 Beta version. Just last week, the Fedora team broke the news of the release of Fedora 30 that serves as the staging environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This release comes with a number of improvements and performance optimizations. What’s new in Fedora 30? GCC 9.0 This release uses GCC 9.0 which brings performance improvements across all applications that have been recompiled with this version. This release also features a flicker-free boot process that hides the GRUB loader/kernel select screen by default and also relies on creative theming to incorporate the bootsplash image into the loading process. GNOME 3.32 This release has been shipped with GNOME 3.32 that includes all-new app icons that use a new visual language reminiscent of Google's Material Design guidelines. GNOME 3.32 provides more robust support for HiDPI displays including experimental non-integer scaling. Performance improvements This release comes with performance improvements including an upgrade to Bash 5.0, Boost 1.69, and glibc to 2.29. In this release, even Python 2 packages have been removed and Ruby 2.6 and PHP 7.3 has been updated. Excessive linking for Fedora-built packages has been removed, which will improve startup times and smaller metadata files. This release also brings UEFI for ARMv7 devices that makes it possible to install Fedora on UEFI-compatible ARM hardware that is similar to installing on an arbitrary computer. New packages for desktop environments This release includes packages for DeepinDE and Pantheon, the desktop environments that are used in Deepin Linux, also known as "the single most beautiful desktop on the market" by TechRepublic's Jack Wallen. These packages require a simple and manual installation process. Most of the users are happy and excited about this news. A user commented on HackerNews, “Love this, switched today! Definitely the most easy to use distro out there and, especially in the case of Silverblue, the most modern by far (containers only!).” Few others are complaining about the bugs in this release. Another user commented, “This is good distro for developers by developers. I wouldn't suggest it for everyday users though. There are too many beta quality bugs since it uses really bleeding edge releases.” To know more about this news, check out the Fedora 30’s official announcement. Fedora 30 Beta released with desktop environment options, GNOME 3.32, and much more Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support Fedora 29 released with Modularity, Silverblue, and more  

A team of students from the Imperial College London developed a new Visual Studio extension called neuron. It is aimed to be an all-inclusive add-on for data science tasks in Visual Studio. Using neuron is pretty simple. You begin with regular Python or R code file in a window. Beside the code is neuron’s windows as shown in the following screenshot. It takes up half of the screen but is a blank page at the start. When you run your code snippets, the output starts showing up as interactive cards. Neuron can display outputs that are plain text, tables, images, graphs, or maps. Source: Microsoft Blog You can find neuron at the Visual Studio Marketplace. On installation, a button will be visible when you have a supported file open. Neuron uses the Jupyter Notebook in the background. Jupyter Notebook would already be installed in your computer considering it popularity, if not you will be prompted. Neron supports more output types than Jupyter Notebook. You can also generate 3D graphs, maps, LaTeX formulas, markdown, HTML, and static images with neuron. The output is displayed in a card on the right-hand side, it can be resized moved around or expanded into a separate window. Neuron also keeps a track of code snippets associated with each card. Why was neuron created? Data scientists come from various backgrounds and use a set of standard tools like Python, libraries, and the Jupyter Notebook. Microsoft approached the students from the Imperial College London to integrate the various set of tools into one single workspace. A single workspace being a Visual Studio extension that could enable users to run data analysis operations without breaking the current workflow. Neuron gets the advantage of an intelligent IDE, Visual Studio along with rapid execution and visualization of Jupyter Notebook all in a single window. It is not a new idea Although neuron is not a new idea. https://twitter.com/jordi_aranda/status/1057712899542654976 Comments on Reddit also suggest there are existing such tools in other IDEs. Reddit user kazi1 stated: “Seems more or less the same as Microsoft's current Jupyter extension (which is pretty meh). This seems like it's trying to reproduce the work already done by Atom's Hydrogen extension, why not contribute there instead." Another Redditor named procedural_ape said: “This looks like an awesome extension but shame on Microsoft for acting like this is their own fresh, new idea. Spyder has had this functionality for a while.” For more details, visit the Microsoft Blog and a demo is available on GitHub. Visual Studio code July 2018 release, version 1.26 is out! MIT plans to invest $1 billion in a new College of computing that will serve as an interdisciplinary hub for computer science, AI, data science Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio

Yesterday, the team behind Qt released the latest version, Qt Creator 4.9.0, a cross-platform software development framework for embedded and desktop applications. This release comes with programming language support, changes to UI, QML support and much more. What’s new in Qt Creator 4.9.0? Language support Qt Creator 4.9 comes with added support for document outline, find usages, and also for code actions that allow the language server to suggest fixes at a specified place in the code. The team has changed the highlighter. It is now based on the KSyntaxHighlighting library, which is used in KDE for this purpose. Changes to UI In this release, the UI for diagnostics from the Clang analyzer tools have been improved as they now are grouped by file now. Diagnostics from the project’s header files are now also included. QML Support The team updated their QML parser to Qt 5.12 that added support for ECMAScript 7. Profiling This release comes with perf, which is a performance profiling tool for software that runs on a Linux system. The integration in Qt Creator is available for applications that run on a local Linux system, and for applications that run on a remote Linux system from a Linux or Windows host. Generic Projects Users can now add a QtCreatorDeployment.txt file to their generic project for specifying the necessary information about where to deploy and which files to deploy. Support for OS For Windows, the team has added support for MSVC (Microsoft Visual C++) 2019. For macOS, a Touch Bar has been added so that users can run Qt Creator on a MacBook. And for Linux, the team has added OpenSSH tools. To know more about this news, check out the Qt blog post. Qt Creator 4.9 Beta released with QML support, programming language support and more! Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS Qt creator 4.8 beta released, adds language server protocol  

The first release candidate for Rails 6.0.0 was out yesterday. Rails 6.0.0 rc1 is the polished version of all the previous beta releases. Main features include Action Mailbox, Action Text, multiple database support, parallel testing, and Webpacker handling JavaScript by default. The latest  beta release, Rails 6.0.0.beta3 was released last month. In early January, the first release of Rails 6 was announced. Two new major frameworks are added in Rails 6.0 called Action Mailbox and Action Text. There are also two scalable upgrades in the form of multiple database support and parallel testing. Action Mailbox guides incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes in order for processing to take place in Rails. Action Text brings rich text and enables editing such files in Rails. Though the team at Rails couldn't meet their aspirational release schedule, they did manage to include around 1000 commits in Rails 6.0.0 rc1. The crew at The Pragmatic Programmers, particularly Sam Ruby, David Bryant Copeland have also come up with beta of Agile Web Development with Rails 6  to coincide with the release of rc1. For more information on the release, check out their official announcement. GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories Uber releases AresDB, a new GPU-powered real-time Analytics Engine Niantic, of the Pokemon Go fame, releases a preview of its AR platform

Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2019, the next major version of its signature IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for software design. This exciting news has come right on the heels of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. According to Microsoft, the company is still in the "early planning phase" for Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. Release timing will be shared “in the coming months,” with the company simply promising “to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively.” Along with general improvements to make the developer tool more reliable and more productive, Microsoft has some concrete goals in mind. Last month at Build 2018 developers conference, Microsoft demonstrated two new Visual Studio previews: IntelliCode and Live Share. The former uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code quality and productivity, and the latter lets developers collaborate in real time with team members who can edit and debug directly from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Specific features that will be delivered in VS2019 are not provided, rather Microsoft lists various themes that the project will address. Here are the major new features Microsoft will bring in Visual Studio 2019 in coming days : It will continue to explore connected capabilities such as Live Share, for users to collaborate in real time on the same code base worldwide. It wants to investigate making cloud development situations, such as working with online source repositories, smoother. Enhancements for AI-assisted development via IntelliCode and use of the Azure cloud to deliver AI-powered assistance to developers. Operational enhancements such as additional refactoring, quicker application load, faster builds, improved navigation, and improved debugging. The release date for VS2019 is not available yet, but VS2017 was released in March 2017 and was preceded by several preview builds throughout 2016. Similarly, one would expect the first preview build of VS2019 in late summer / early autumn this year.  Fortunately VS2019 is being designed to install side-by-side with existing VS2017 builds, so it will be easy to try out the new release when it is available. A key fact about this next release, according to Microsoft, is that it will remain a 32-bit application and will support Windows 7. Initial developer reactions indicate there are concerns about the unresolved issues and code quality problems with VS2017, and that it is premature to shift to VS2019.  Microsoft does not offer specifics, but does indicate that they are working to improve this with the development team. Microsoft is going to acquire GitHub Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality What’s new in Visual Studio 1.22  

On Saturday Github released the public beta version for a new feature to delete issues. This feature lets repository admins, delete an issue from any repository, permanently. This might give more power to the repository owners now. Since the time Github tweeted about this news, the controversy around this feature seems to be on fire. According to many, this new feature might lead to the removal of issues that disclose severe security issues. Also, many users can take help of the closed issue and resolve their problems as the conversation history of repository sometimes has a lot of information. https://twitter.com/thegreenhouseio/status/1060257920158498817 https://twitter.com/aureliari/status/1060279790706589710 In case, someone posts a security vulnerability publicly as an issue, it might turn out to be a big problem to the project owner, as there’s a high possibility of people avoiding the future updates coming on the same project. This feature could be helpful to many organizations, as this feature might work as a damage control for them. Few of the issues posted by users on Github aren’t really issues, so this feature might be helpful in that direction. Also, there are a lot of duplicate issues which get posted on purpose or mistakenly by the users, so this feature could work a rescue tool! In contrast to this, a lot of users are opposing this feature. This feature might not be so helpful because no matter how fast one erases a vulnerability report, the info gets leaked via the mail inbox. The poll posted by one of the users on Twitter which has 71 votes as of the time of writing, shows that 69% of the participants disliked this feature. While only 14% of users have given a thumbs up to this feature. And the rest 17% have no views on it. The poll is still on, it would be interesting to see the final report of the same. https://twitter.com/d4nyll/status/1060422721589325824 The users are requesting for a better option which might just highlight a way to report security issues in a non-public way. While few others prefer an archive option instead of deleting the issue permanently. And some others just strongly favor removing the feature. https://twitter.com/kirilldanshin/status/1060265945598492677 With many users now blaming Microsoft for this feature on Github, it would be interesting to see the next update on the same feature, could it possibly just be an UNDO option? Read more about this news on Github’s official Twitter page. GitHub now supports the GNU General Public License (GPL) Cooperation Commitment as a way of promoting effective software regulation GitHub now allows issue transfer between repositories; a public beta version GitHub October 21st outage RCA: How prioritizing ‘data integrity’ launched a series of unfortunate events that led to a day-long outage

Yesterday, the team at Eclipse release Eclipse 4.10.0, SDK project. Eclipse 4.10.0 is a part of Eclipse IDE 2018-12. This release features improved views, options, dialogs,Java editor and more. https://twitter.com/EclipseJavaIDE/status/1075422538484846597 Improvements to Eclipse 4.10.0 Views and dialogs The Quick Switch Editor (Ctrl+E) dialog for editor selection has been improved and now shows the path of the resource along with its filename. In Eclipse 4.10.0, the Workspace selection dialog shows completion proposals for making the process of picking a workspace with the keyboard easier. It is now possible to convert a plug-in project to a modular project by selecting the Configure > Create module-info.java context menu. This creates the module-info.java file for the project. Colors, Fonts preference page The Colors and Font preference page has been updated and it now supports searching for font, font height, and font style. The search has been updated allowing the users to quickly see where a font is used or where a specific style or size is used. This release comes with a new option that disables API analysis builder on the Plug-in Development preference page. Chevron button for hidden tabs The chevron button now shows the number of tabs that are hidden. It doesn't have transparency artifacts anymore, which makes it more readable especially in the dark theme. Added support for custom URL schemes in Eclipse 4.10.0 This release can handle custom URL schemes such as https, ssh, and git. When a user clicks on a link with a specific custom URL scheme, Eclipse first starts and then handles the clicked link. Users can now control the URL schemes that should be handled by the current Eclipse installation via General > Link Handlers preference page. ContentAssistant class The ContentAssistant class now allows consumers to configure whether the completion proposal trigger characters are honored or ignored. If ContentAssistant.enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(false) is used, then completion proposal trigger characters are ignored and the users have to press the Enter key to trigger insertion. If ContentAssistant.enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(true) is used, then completion proposal trigger characters can be used alongwith the Enter key to insert the proposal. If the enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(boolean) method is not called, then the default behaviour is equivalent to calling enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(true) so that extra trigger characters are honored. Java Editor Eclipse 4.10.0 comes with a quick fix Change project compliance and JRE to 11. This release comes with a quick assist, that allows adding var type to lambda parameters. This quick assist will only be available if the project compliance is Java 11 or above. An option to set compiler compliance to 11 on a Java project is now available. With this release, Java editor now shows the number of implementations and references for a Java element as decorative text (Code Minings) above the element. Read more about this news on Eclipse’ blog. Eclipse IDE’s Photon release will support Rust Will Ethereum eclipse Bitcoin? Apache Maven and m2eclipse