Tech News - Application Development

Yesterday, the team at GitHub released Git 2.21 with a new date format, improved performance and bug fixes from over 60 contributors. What’s new in Git 2.21? Performance and internal implementation It is now possible to clean-up the code with optimization for the codepath that checks non-existence of loose objects. The "strncat()" function is now counted amongst the banned functions. This release comes with portability updates for the HPE NonStop platform. The loose object cache used for optimizing existence look-up has also been updated. The flaky tests can now be repeatedly run under load with the “--stress" option. Human-readable dates with --date=human This release comes with git log that displays the date for each authored commit. In this release, the timestamps will be displayed in Git’s “default” format (for example, “Tue Feb 12 09:00:33 2019 -0800”). Although Git 2.21 comes with a new date format --date=human which makes it possible to frequently switch between the human and machine-readable formats while putting together a pipeline. Multi-pack indexes Git 2.21 can create a multi-pack index file instead of repacking and this index file acts as a listing of objects residing in multiple packs while removing the need to perform expensive repacks. Delta reuse with bitmaps Git now comes with bitmaps and gives an optional on-disk data structure to record the sets of objects “reachable” from each commit. On the availability of this data, users can query it to quickly determine whether the client has a base object. This would result in server generating smaller packs that are produced more quickly for a faster experience. Enhanced repositories In Git 2.21, the repositories can now enumerate alternate tips, and make the corresponding transaction much faster. Major Fixes The corner cases in merge-recursive have been fixed. The Refspecs configured with "git -c var=val clone" which did not propagate to the resulting repository, have now been corrected. Now there is no need of configured username/email under user.useConfigOnly for creating commits. In this release, the http-backend CGI process now cleans up the child processes. Users seem to be excited about this release. One of the comments on HackerNews reads, “Few Detecting files that differ only in case being cloned onto a case-insensitive file system is a great feature.” To know more about this news, check out the release notes. GitHub launches draft pull requests GitHub increases its reward payout model for its bug bounty program GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories

Yesterday, the team at SpaceVim released the first stable version of SpaceVim v1.0.0, a distribution of the vim editor that manages collections of plugins in layers. This release comes with two major changes, : The behavior of 2-LeftMouse in vimfiler has been changed. The default font has been changed to SauceCodePro. What’s new in SpaceVim v1.0.0? This version comes with unicode spinners api. Layer option for autocomplete layer has been added. Function for customizing searching tools and Lang#scheme layer have been added. This release also comes with log for bootstrap function and updated runtime log for startup. Error key bindings and Spacevim debug info have been improved. This release comes with more key bindings for typescript. Even the align feature has been improved. Major bug fixes This release comes with Ctrlp support in windows. Layers list and vimdoc command has been fixed in windows. Statusline icon has been fixed. The issue with comment paragraphs key bindings has been resolved now. Missed syntax for detached FlyGrep has now been added. Log has been added in this release for generating configuration file. FlyGrep syntax has been improvedto support different outputs. Few users are confused between SpaceVim and Neovim. Neovim is more than a rewrite of vim. Its main functionality is to provide a server that allows other editors to edit a buffer in response to keystrokes. Whereas SpaceVim is just a configuration of vim. Users are also not sure of the performance of SapceVim and they are comparing it with Spacemacs, a configuration framework for GNU Emacs. To know more about this release in detail, visit SpaceVim release notes. Qt for Python 5.12 released with PySide2, Qt GUI and more Google Cloud releases a beta version of SparkR job types in Cloud Dataproc Eclipse 4.10.0 released with major improvements to colors, fonts preference page and more

Last week, the team at GitHub released Git v2.20.0, a free and open source distributed version control system that tracks changes in computer files and coordinates work on those files among multiple people. Features Git clone process gets better with Git v2.20.0 The Git clone process will now warn users while they are cloning a project to a case-insensitive file-system, where there are files in the repository that only differ with their cases but have the same pathnames. Git v2.20.0 requires Vista With this new release, Git will now at least require Windows Vista or above versions to operate. Improvements to the Windows port has been observed, such as better support and DLL handling of nanosecond resolution file timestamps. Even the logic for selecting the default username and e-mail on Windows has been improved. Shows a progress bar The git status now shows a progress bar when refreshing the index takes a long time. Git multi-pack-index has been updated The git multi-pack-index has been updated for detecting corruption in the .midx file, and this feature has been integrated into "git fsck". Consolidation When there are too many packfiles in a repository, looking up an object requires consulting multiple pack .idx files. Git v2.20.0 comes with a new mechanism which consolidates all of these .idx files in a single file. Major Improvements The generation of (experimental) commit-graph files now shows progress in the output. On platforms with recent cURL library, http.sslBackend configuration variable can now be used for choosing a different SSL backend at runtime. With Windows port, it is possible to switch between OpenSSL and secure channel while talking over the HTTPS protocol. A pattern with '**' that does not have a slash on either side was considered an invalid one in previous versions. With this update, double-asterisks are treated the same way as two asterisks adjacent to each other are. "git rev-list --stdin </dev/null" initially used to be an error in the previous version but it now shows no output without an error. The developer builds in Git now use Wunused-function compilation option. With this release, it is possible to create an alias that expands to another alias. The test scripts have been updated in Gitv2.20.0 for style and correct handling of exit status of various commands. Major bug fixes The issue with registering same path under multiple worktree entries has been fixed. The "git interpret-trailers" had a buggy code that ignored patch text after committing log message and that triggered various codepaths. This has been fixed now. The bug that leaves the index file corrupt during a partial commit has been fixed now. This release has received some positive response from users.  An interesting fact stated by one of the users on Twitter is, “In Git for Windows, if we build cURL on one machine,it will run on an estimated 3 million different machines. This release has already created some buzz around, it would be interesting to see what GitHub plans next.” Read more about this news on the official mailing list. Upgrade to Git 2.19.1 to avoid a Git submodule vulnerability that causes arbitrary code execution Git 2.19.0 released with better git grep, Python 3 compatibility for git p4 4 myths about Git and GitHub you should know about

GNU team released version 4.0 of their GNU Nano, a text editor for Unix-like computing systems that use command line interface, yesterday. GNU Nano 4.0 explores new changes and improvements. GNU Nano 4.0 release has been named as “Thy Rope of Sands”. What’s new in GNU Nano 4.0? The overlong line that used to get automatically hard-wrapped has been fixed in GNU Nano 4.0. Smooth scrolling has become the default in GNU Nano 4.0. No newline character will be added automatically at end of buffer. Option --breaklonglines (-b) can easily turn the automatic hard-wrapping back on. Other pption --jumpyscrolling (-j) provides the chunky, half-screen scrolling, and option --emptyline (-e) leaves the line below the title bar unused. <Alt+Up> and <Alt+Down> can now do a linewise scroll instead of a findnext. Option --guidestripe=<number> is now able to draw a vertical bar at the given column in GNU Nano 4.0. In case a line continues offscreen, it will now end with a highlighted ">" in GNU Nano 4.0. The bindable functions such as 'cutwordleft' and 'cutwordright' have been renamed in GNU Nano 4.0. The paragraph-jumping functions have been moved from Search to Go-to-Line. An option --rebinddelete can compensate for more misbindings. The --disable-wrapping-as-root configure option has been removed. For more details on GNU Nano 4.0, check out the official release notes. GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements GNU Health Federation message and authentication server drops MongoDB and adopts PostgreSQL GNU Bison 3.3 released with major bug fixes, yyrhs and yyphrs tables, token constructors and more

Earlier this month, the team at Lazarus announced the release of Lazarus 2.0.0, an open-source cross-platform built with FPC 3.0.4 (Free Pascal Compiler). What’s new in Lazarus 2.0.0 LCL (Lazarus Component Library) Interface Changes ScreenToClient and ClientToScreen can now be calculated without scrollbar offset. Support for mouse wheel horz scrolling. This release comes with added flags to exclude support for some graphics formats to create smaller applications. The image list now supports multiple resolutions of one image. All the LCL controls now support High-DPI glyphs on Windows+Linux and Retina on Mac without any additional code. Every LCL control that supports ImageList now has a new ImagesWidth property for deciding what custom width at 96 PPI (100% scale) is to be used. IDE Changes This release includes several High-DPI IDE improvements and a retina support on Cocoa The IDE parses the custom compiler options for the fpc switch -FN<namespaces> for defining the default namespaces. Editor Lazarus 2.0.0 comes with "smart move cursor" moving commands for editor mappings. They are useful as an alternative for Ctrl+Left/+Right/+Shift+Left/+Shift+Right key. This release comes with added Goto/Toggle bookmark submenu for the toolbar. Additional options to fine-tune outline colors. Debugger This release comes with an added option "FixStackFrameForFpcAssert" to workaround fpc wrong frame pointer. There is an added option "FixIncorrectStepOver" to workaround "step over" issues experienced on some platforms. Components incompatibilities TSpinEditEx and TFloatSpinEditEx now inherit a common base class TSpinEditExBase. The reticule component is removed because the crosshair cursor is included in the more versatile charttools. To know more about this news, check out the Lazarus’ official post. Creating a Lazarus Component Microsoft joins the OpenChain Project to help define standards for open source software compliance Mapzen, an open-source mapping platform, joins the Linux Foundation project

PyPy team released version 7.1 of PyPy, a fast and compliant Python Interpreter, yesterday. PyPy 7.1 explores new features, improvements, and other changes. PyPy 7.1 supports x86 machines on common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD), ARM32,  s390x running Linux, etc. What’s new in PyPy 7.1? PyPy 7.1 comes with two different interpreters, namely, PyPy2.7 (an interpreter that supports the syntax and features of Python 2.7) and PyPy3.6-beta (second official release of PyPy that supports 3.6 features). The latest release finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Users can remove the conversions from strings to unicode internally, thus leading to a nice speed bump. The UTF-8 changes have been merged to the py3.5 branch (Python3.5.3). The ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays has been improved in PyPy 7.1. The CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) backend has been updated to version 1.12.2 in PyPy 7.1. Users can use CFFI as opposed to the c-extensions to interact with C and cppyy to interact with C++ code. PyPy team states that they need help from the contributors in case of PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, for tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, and general help with making RPython’s JIT even better. For more information, check out the official PyPy 7.1 release notes. PyPy 7.0 released for Python 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 alpha Python 3.8 alpha 2 is now available for testing Python steering council election results are out for January 2019

The November 2018 release of Visual Studio code (version 1.30) is now available. This version has multiline search improvements, custom tile bars for Linux, a simplified debug configuration and other changes. We take a look at the major updates in the November 2018 of Visual studio code. Multiline search input In the October release, support for multiline search was added. Now, the search UX has been improved for easier usage. Users can search with multiline text without writing a regular expression. Press Shift+Enter in the search box to insert a newline. The search box will grow to show the full multiline query. Users can also copy paste multiple lines from the editor into the search box. Custom title and menu bar on Linux by default The accessibility and themability of menus has been improving over the past releases on Windows through the custom title and menu bar. This was optionally available on Linux, it will now be enabled by default. You can use the native title bar by setting the window.titleBarStyle to native. References view The References view has moved out of preview and is now available generally. There are two commands: Find All References: Opens the References view. Peek References: Opens references in a Peek view. Hidden on startup, the References view will remain visible once it has been used. When all search results are cleared, a history of previous searches is shown. Snippet comment variables New snippet variables are available that insert line or block comments to honor the current language. BLOCK_COMMENT_START and BLOCK_COMMENT_END for using block comments and LINE_COMMENT for lines. JavaScript and TypeScript callbacks look better Any JavaScript and TypeScript anonymous callbacks were previously labeled as <function>. This was in the Outline view, breadcrumbs view, and document symbol list. Due to this, it was impossible to tell which function a developer was really after. TypeScript 3.2+ allows VS Code to display more context for callback functions, so now they can be differentiated from one another. Markdown elements in JSDoc comments are highlighted Fenced code blocks and other Markdown elements within JSDoc blocks are now syntax-highlighted. Initial debug configuration is simplified In this release, an area of improvement was to simplify the generated launch.json file for the most popular debug extensions. The goal was to encourage users to start and configure debugging. Unnecessary launch configuration attributes were hidden. Using the Quick Pick UI for better user interaction while generating the initial launch.json was also a part of this. Run on folder open A task that users always run on opening a folder can now be configured to run automatically. This can be done by configuring its "runOn" property when that folder is opened. This was done to make sure no one breaks the new strict null checks in the VS Code repository. On adding "runOn": "folderOpen", everyone who allows tasks to be run automatically will get markers the strict null check is violated. Install previous versions A previous version of an extension can be used if the current version has problems. An Install Another Version action is provided on an installed extension, on clicking it, a dropdown of available versions is shown. Preview Features HTML custom tags / attributes support is added which allows developers to specify a list of tags and attributes that VS Code loads during startup. Network proxy support for extensions for enabling network proxy support for all extensions by using Http: Proxy Support. 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

Shazam, the popular song-identifying app removed support for all third-party SDKs with one exception as reported by Appfigures blog. The removed SDKs were of ad networks, analytics trackers, etc. They were removed since these SDKs leaked data to third parties in some way. This is something that Apple is against and is following it on Shazam as they acquired it for $400M last September. The SDKs removed in the iOS update are: Admob Bolts Doubleclick FB ads FB analytics FB login Inmobi IAS Moat Mopub The only third party SDK retained is HockeyApp. Apple doesn't keep third-party SDKs in any of their apps except apple support. On Android, however, the following SDKs are still present for Shazam: Bolts FB analytics Butter knife Crashlytics Fabric Firebase Google maps Okhttp Otto Some users agree with the decision like this comment from Hacker news: “Makes sense, now that Apple owns them.” Another user shared his views on retaining the HockeyApp: “Makes sense to keep the HockeyApp integration as it is an amazing tool for crash analysis and they still need that. Integration with crash analytic is a different type of integration than facebook, advertisement and the other stuff (crap) they have removed.” Apple buys Shazam, and will soon make the app ad-free Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information

After Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,  Microsoft’s LinkedIn is getting into the league of video live streaming service by launching ‘LinkedIn Live’, this week, as reported by TechCrunch. This feature will allow people and organizations to broadcast real-time video to selected groups or the entire LinkedIn audience. Though, it’s still not clear when will LinkedIn make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn live videos. LinkedIn Live will be rolled out to selected U.S. users via invite-only for the initial beta phase. Eventually, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for the users who want to apply for accessing this service. The initial live content that LinkedIn hopes to broadcast would include conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by mentors and influencers, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies, and more. LinkedIn is partnering with several third-party developers of live broadcasting streaming services including, Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Wowza Media Systems and more for creating and posting more polished live video on LinkedIn. Microsoft’s Azure cloud media product will be handling the encoding services for LinkedIn Live. The reason behind bringing LinkedIn Live LinkedIn introduced its first native video features in 2017 and within 17 months, LinkedIn has seen a boost in traffic and revenues from videos on its platform. Pete Davies, the director of product management at LinkedIn, said, “Video is the fastest growing format on our platform right now, and the one most likely to get people talking. Live video has been a big request—not least, I’d wager, because it is such a prominent part of how video is being used on other social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, putting the functionality front of mind.” Other than user requests, there might be more reasons to add this feature. The reasons could possibly be engagement and revenue generation. LinkedIn has generated revenue around videos via video advertising so far. During Microsoft’s last quarterly earnings, the company reported that revenues at LinkedIn were up 29 percent, with a reference to growing its ads business specifically. In a statement to TechCrunch, LinkedIn said, “Video ads earn 30 percent more comments per impression than non-video ads and that LinkedIn members spend almost three times more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content.” As content is in the priority of LinkedIn Live, there are chances that the company might explore other ways of monetizing the content beyond ads. For instance, the company could charge viewers for unique experiences like conferences or for making certain Live events. It could also charge users for broadcasting content. LinkedIn might even launch Stories feature soon Last year, the company planned to work on implementing stories feature for the platform. The company plans to start off with “Student Voices” for university students in the U.S. This would allow students to post short videos to their Campus Playlist, which includes short 30-45 seconds videos made by college students. LinkedIn is possibly moving in the direction of rich content, with live streaming videos and stories the company might see a major benefit in terms of revenue and data. These live streaming videos will create an impact on the reach of the platform and also might help the platform’s premium subscription in near future. Tech jobs dominate LinkedIn’s most promising jobs in 2019 LinkedIn used email addresses of 18M non-members to buy targeted ads on Facebook, reveals a report by DPC, Ireland Creator-Side Optimization: How LinkedIn’s new feed model helps small creators