InfoQ Homepage Mobile Content on InfoQ
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Hidden Costs of iOS/Android Shared Development, at Dropbox and Slack
Building a new native mobile app requires a lot of work since it is necessary to code it in Kotlin/Java for Android, and then again in Objective-C/Swift for iOS. In the past, Dropbox and Slack had been implementing a strategy to share code between platforms, building a shared library in C++, until recently, when they decided to get rid of this.
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Objective-C Introduces Zero-Runtime-Cost Direct Methods
Since Swift was launched in 2014, Objective-C has known only minor changes, mostly aimed at improving its interoperability with Swift. Far from being a fringe language, though, Objective-C has recently added support for "direct" methods, which look like ordinary class methods but behave more like a C function.
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PyTorch 1.3 Release Adds Support for Mobile, Privacy, and Transparency
Facebook recently announced the release of PyTorch 1.3. The latest version of the open-source deep learning framework includes new tools for mobile, quantization, privacy, and transparency.
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Google Open Sources its Cardboard VR Platform
Low-cost virtual reality (VR) platform Google Cardboard is now available as an open source project to let developers create new VR-powered apps and adapt existing ones to new devices. Google's announcement comes a few weeks after the discontinuation of its Daydream VR platform.
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Reduce Xcode Build Times Using Carthage and Caching Binary Dependencies
In a recent post, Spotify engineer Patrick Balestra explained how they managed to improve Xcode build time by 50% using dependency manager Carthage to avoid rebuilding dependencies over and over across their teams.
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Android NDK r21 Is the First NDK Release with Long Term Support
The latest NDK for Android, version r21, now available in beta, brings a number of significant changes, including Fortify being enabled by default, and newer versions of GNU Make and GDB. Additionally, starting with r21 Google will manage a new release process with a yearly Long Term Support (LTS) guarantee to provide users more stability.
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Smartphone-Based VR at a Dead-End with Google's Demise of Daydream VR
Google's decision to stop supporting its Daydream VR headset seemingly marks the end of phone-based virtual reality, a vision that attempted to combine the use of smartphones with "dumb" VR headsets to bring VR experiences to the masses. Google's decision is accompanied by the BBC disbanding its VR content team after two years of successful experimentation.
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IoT Visual Programming Environment Node-RED Hits 1.0
At the end of a two-year development cycle, Node-RED has finally reached version 1.0, bringing plenty of changes. Among the major new features in Node-RED 1.0 are a new asynchronous message passing model, new completion API, and message cloning by default. Additionally, the visual editor got a revamp.
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Google Enables Continuous Testing Using the Android Emulator
The Android Emulator is the main tool Android developers use to test their apps. Google has just made integrating the Android Emulator within a continuous testing pipeline easier by open sourcing the Android Emulator Container Scripts and two related tools.
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Swift 5.1 Brings Module Stability, Opaque Return Types, Property Wrappers and More
While module stability is by far the most impactful new feature in Swift 5.1, the latest version of Apple's language includes a number of new language constructs, such as property wrappers and opaque return types, and a number of standard library extensions.
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Mozilla Will Continue to Support Existing Ad Blockers, Partially Implementing Extension Manifest V3
Mozilla will continue to support existing extensions which prevent ads from being displayed, unlike Google, which in its draft Extensions Manifest v3, proposes changes to the browser extensions mechanism which may break ad-blockers.
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Five 0-Day iOS Vulnerability Chains Have Been Exploited for Years
A collection of fourteen vulnerabilities affecting almost every iOS versions from iOS 10 to iOS 12 enabled a number of hacked Websites to gain control of their visitors' devices and steal a wealth of private data aver at least two years, Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) engineer Ian Beer wrote. These vulnerabilities are not new. What is new is the discovery of their active exploit in the wild.
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Firefox 68 with BigInt, Extended Dark Mode, and Curated Extensions
Firefox 68 was recently released to web users. Firefox 68 supports big integers , expanded Dark Mode, improved extension security and discovery, and more.
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Android Studio 3.5 Aims to Be Faster and More Memory-Efficient
Coming at the end of an eight-month development cycle, Project Marble, the latest release of Android Studio, refrains from adding new major features and opts instead for improving performance and memory efficiency.
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Java on iOS and Android via Gluon
Gluon has released beta support for Java applications running natively on iOS. The result is one application and one codebase running across many devices.