| The 12 News Days of Xmas 05 - May |
| Written by Editor |
| Wednesday, 26 December 2018 |
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May, the spring is sprung (sorry southern hemisphere) and we are all ready to do new things. The hype surrounding the IoT seems to have quietened down at this point but this doesn't mean that embedded devices and ambient computing aren't making inroads to the home and workplace - count the number of smart speakers... Eclipse took it on itself to find out what the average IoT developer was up to: Tuesday 01 May The Eclipse Foundation’s Eclipse IoT Working Group has released the results of its IoT Developer Survey 2018, which surveyed 502 Eclipse developers between January and March. Its findings confirm that Linux rules in Internet of Things development and that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud service for IoT. It is always good to have what you know confirmed by a survey, but what if you were wrong and the IoT was hot on Windows? Jupyter, and the notebook metaphor in general, has been something of a sucess that was recognized this year and they deserved the ACM award: Thursday 03 May The Project Jupyter team has been awarded the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award for developing a tool that has had a lasting influence on computing. It is the largest team ever to receive this award. Facebook made waves this year and generally not in a good way. The problem is that the need to protect its data means that it has little choice but to see developers as its enemy to be kept at a distance and under close supervision. I don't think we are going to see Zuck prancing around a stage saying "Developers! Developers! Developers!" any time soon - unless it's a curse. F8 is a strange developer conference and it's the conference and the developers who are strange. The first reason it's strange is that most of its announcements that make the headlines are user-oriented. The second reason it is strange is that developers are the enemy.
The GDPR was May's big talking point, but in practice it seems to have had only a small effect, apart from the annoying popups that keep asking if it's ok to use a cookie or tracking data. The big guys are still mostly ignoring the spirit of the GDPR and just arranging to look as if they are compliant. At the end of the year there are still websites that refuse to serve pages to visitors from the EU - this has to be spite surely? Are You Ready For GDPR? Friday 04 May GDPR is European legislation that comes into force on May 25th and will affect any business, online or otherwise, that keeps personal data on European citizens. If you don't know how this affects you, Future Learn has some short courses that could help. Ah Android Studio we had such high hopes for you. The latest attempt to try to make it look as if Android programming is moving into the 21st century is a repackaging of all the well known libraries into JetPack. There some new things, but not much, and we still have a mess to contend with - only now we have JetPack as well. JetPack And Android Studio 3.2 - Not Much New Wednesday 09 May
Google I/O used to be an exciting meet up where really new and startling things were announced. Now it's past its best and Googler's have to work hard to package the dull into something that looks exciting. So it is with JetPack and Android Studio 3.2 Canary. Microsoft may be doning amazing things, but it is still desparate to make its UWP apps more attractive to users. By the end of the year it has become obvious that it should admit its mistake and go back to Win 32 and .NET. More money for apps - yes, but this isn't really fixing the problem. At Build 2018 Microsoft announced an incentive to encourage developers to create apps for Windows 10. A new fee structure will enable devs to keep 95 percent of revenue earned from certain apps. It excludes games, where the 70 percent share will still apply. Another probable blunder is the creation of Android Things - Google's attempt to carve out a portion of the IoT market. In this case the need to appear to be secure makes the system unworkable. The Android IoT team really doesn't have much idea what the needs of the IoT developer actually are, and this is more than a slight disadvantage. Whoever gets to control a large chunk of the IoT market will get a lot of power and presumably profit. Android Things 1.0 is Google's offering and it emphasizes security. But is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Wow! And that's not Windows on Windows... Microsoft is open sourcing WPF and a bunch of other things that we never thought they would. Now all they have to do is drop UWP apps and things would be back to before the Windows 8 disaster and perhaps even better. Perhaps Microsoft is listening after all, but it could still listen a little harder. A low key, and almost unnoticed, announcement at Build 2018 reveals that .NET Core 3 will support a GUI - but only on Windows. And finally - in an attempt at an App-Store-Spring, developers got together and attempted to get a say in what Apple was doing. The Developer Union Wants To Negotiate Nicely With Apple Monday 21 May After the publication of an open letter to Apple, asking it to allow free trials for all apps in the App Store by July 2019, developers are flocking to join a newly formed group which aims to campaign for sustainability in the App Store. Did they succeed? What do you think... Related ArticlesThe 12 News Days of XmasTo be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 04 January 2019 ) |
