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The Android development team has announced several new features in version 1.4 of the UI toolkit Jetpack Compose .  First, there is now support for vertical and horizontal paging . This enables users to flip through content with a page flip animation, as if they were actually reading a physical book or magazine. Previously in order to get this functionality, Android developers would go through the Accompanist library, which is now being replaced by the built-in paging support.  There are also new Flow Layouts, which can be used to layout items in dynamically sized containers. This allows items to flow into the next row or column when they run out of space. Another improvement in this release is that the “Text” and “TextField” are much more customizable.  “Text” has new features for drawing outlined text, improving text transition and legibility during animations, options for line breaking behavior, hyphenation support, and more.  The Android team is also continuing its refactor o

GitHub announced a major upgrade to Copilot, its AI-assisted development tool. Now in public preview, GitHub Copilot X utilizes the new GPT-4 model , adds chat and voice capabilities, and brings Copilot to the command line, pull requests, and docs.  “With AI available at every step, we can fundamentally redefine developer productivity. We are reducing boilerplate and manual tasks and making complex work easier across the developer lifecycle. By doing so, we’re enabling every developer to focus all their creativity on the big picture: building the innovation of tomorrow and accelerating human progress, today,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post .  The new chat capabilities are intended to provide a “ChatGPT-like experience” in the editor. It natively integrates into VS Code and Visual Studio and can recognize code that has been typed and what error messages are shown, enabling it to provide analysis on what the code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, a

Microsoft has announced a new app in public preview called Loop which is designed to improve collaboration and communication within teams. Loop is an all-in-one platform that integrates chat, video calls, shared calendars, and task management features.  “At its core, Microsoft Loop is about people—people who want to create together with ease, no matter where they are or what tools they use. It’s a transformative co-creation experience that brings together teams, content, and tasks across your tools and devices,” Wangui McKelvey, general manager at Microsoft wrote in a blog post .   The app is built to make it easier for teams to collaborate on projects and co-create content in real-time. Users can add a workspace title and any other relevant keywords, and Microsoft Loop will suggest the most relevant pieces to add to the workspace. New pages can easily be started with templates and drag-and-drop pages or blocks of content. When users want to share pieces of information, they can tu

SmartBear , a leading provider of software development and visibility tools, today announced the acquisition of  Aspecto , an OpenTelemetry ( OTel ) pioneer. Aspecto has been instrumental in driving and defining the OTel project and community since its founding in 2019. The acquisition provides developers a unique capability to rapidly identify and correct bugs in distributed environments through the integration with the market-leading error tracking and performance monitoring solution,  BugSnag  from SmartBear. “Developers are taking on more responsibilities for how their apps run and perform in production while OTel is becoming the telemetry standard for gathering product data about those apps,” said Anthony Bryce, VP of Product Management at SmartBear. “Today, BugSnag provides developers visibility into their end users’ experiences of their app, whether it’s unforeseen errors, crashes, or performance issues. With the addition of Aspecto, we are extending these capabilities to provi

Mozilla announced Mozilla.ai, a startup aiming to make a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem, and pledged an initial $30 million investment in the company. “We’ve learned that this coming wave of AI (and also the last one) has tremendous potential to enrich people’s lives. But it will only do so if we design the technology very differently — if we put human agency and the interests of users at the core, and if we prioritize transparency and accountability,” Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, said in a blog post . “The AI inflection point that we’re in right now offers a real opportunity to build technology with different values, new incentives, and a better ownership model.” Surman added that while many founders, engineers, scientists, designers, artists, and activists have this positive approach to building AI, there are also big tech and cloud companies with the most power and influence that want to consolidate control over the market,

Fermyon Technologies, the serverless WebAssembly company that was spun out of Microsoft Azure’s Deis Lab team, today announced a major new release of its serverless functions framework based on WebAssembly, Spin 1.0. According to the company, Spin 1.0 was released in an effort to meet the needs of modern, full-stack developers, and offers support for SQL databases, NoSQL key/value storage, OCI registry support as well as other popular languages.  With a serverless API, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, Spin applications are made easier to build and easier to deploy. Additionally, Spin has already been integrated into Microsoft’s cloud offerings, with other software vendors working to integrate in the future. “Cloud native development has been slow and tedious for developers. Fermyon wants to reverse that trend. We want to make serverless apps fast. Fast to develop, fast to deploy and fast to run. With Spin, a developer can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in 66

Amazon is attempting to make it easier to analyze data while preserving privacy. It has announced the release of AWS Clean Rooms , which allows multiple parties to pull in their collective data and analyze it.  According to Amazon, there are many reasons why different parties would need to do this. For example, in marketing, brands, publishers, and partners need to analyze data stored in many different channels in order to improve their campaigns. However, they also want to protect their customer’s sensitive data and prevent raw data from being shared. Clean rooms are the answer to this problem, but they can be difficult to set up, requiring complicated privacy controls, specialized tools to protect collaborator data, and customization of analytics tools, which can take months. This complexity just increases with each new collaborator that is added.  With AWS Clean Rooms, they will be a bit easier to set up and more approachable for more companies to utilize. According to Amazon, i

The API platform Postman today announced Postman Flows , a visual tool to create API applications. This release helps to make the process of building software easier by using APIs as building blocks so anyone can produce workflows, integrations, and automations without needing to write any code. “APIs are the building blocks of modern software. However, those blocks have not always been accessible to everyone,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. “We are on a mission to change this. With more than 25 million users across every continent, we believe Postman can accomplish this at a massive scale so that any user, anywhere, can build and participate in today’s API-first world.” According to the company, Postman Flows is a response to the increasing demand for low-code tools that allow users to build software without a large amount of programming experience.  With this release, users can manipulate data with API calls as well as create workflows utilizing a high volum

Despite 65% of tech team leaders being asked to cut down on costs, 72% stated that they still plan to enhance their investment in technology skills development in 2023 according to technology workforce development company Pluralsight ’s 2023 State of Upskilling Report . Furthermore, 97% of learning and development and HR directors said that they are opting for fostering internal talent rather than outside hiring for open positions because upskilling talent is more cost-effective for an organization.  The report also found that, with the prevalence of layoffs in the tech industry and the uncertainty of the economy, sixty five percent of executives are being asked to seek out cost efficiencies.  “This year’s research findings underscore the importance of maximizing employee potential and optimizing learning investments to drive business ROI,” said Gary Eimerman, chief product officer at Pluralsight. “Organizations and individuals alike are being asked to do more with less in the fac

Oracle has announced the release of Java 20 , which includes seven JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs). According to Oracle, many of the new features are follow-ups to previous features, adding new functionality or making improvements, and all are either preview or incubating features.  Two language updates in Java 20 are the ability to nest record patterns and use pattern matching for switch expressions.  RELATED CONTENT:  Oracle makes significant changes to its Java license Eclipse Foundation finds significant momentum for open source Java this year There are also three features that came from Project Loom, which is a project that explores ways to improve the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A new incubating feature , scoped values, will enable sharing of immutable data within and across threads. Virtual threads are in their second preview, and these threads will significantly reduce effort associated with writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applicati

A lot of us have been looking at ARM more closely since litigation with Qualcomm started . To refresh you on that situation, that litigation appears to be an effort to get Qualcomm to pay significantly more for licenses for PCs than it does for smartphones, even though the PC effort has yet to be successful. That effort likely won’t be successful until 2024 but only if Qualcomm invests a massive amount of cash – which, if ARM’s litigation is successful, Qualcomm wouldn’t have. The litigation is not only counter to the contract between Qualcomm and ARM, it places a cloud over ARM, and it appears to be increasing a migration of developers from ARM to RISC V. To me, it reads like extortion, but at best it is premature because the product ARM is attempting to get more money for doesn’t exist in market yet, so, getting a higher percentage of nothing is still nothing.   So why is ARM so hard-up for cash that it’s willing to put its future at risk in what looks like an effort to get Qualcom

Eli Zaretskii, Tad (SkewedZepplin), and GNU Jami have been announced as the winners of the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) 2022 Free software Awards. These awards are given annually to groups and individuals who have made notable contributions to the cause of software freedom.  Zaretskii was the recipient of this year’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software , which is given to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the progress and development of free software.  He is currently the co-maintainer of GNU Emacs , one of the flagship programs of the GNU operating system . Zaretskii has been a contributor to Emacs for over thirty years and as co-maintainer, he oversees the work of more than two hundred active contributors.  The Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor was given to Tad, chief developer of the DivestOS project, a fork in the Android mobile operating system that gets rid of any proprietary binaries and prioritizes freedom, security,

The majority of organizations seeking to make a digital transformation are not equipped to do it successfully, according to the results of the recently released “2023 Project to Product: State of the Industry” report by portfolio management company Planview. Only 8% of respondents stated that they have operationalized the shift from project to product, meaning that 92% have yet to realize or capture the full value of a product operating model at scale. However, 63% reported that they are in the exploratory phase and 29% said they are expanding on earlier experiments. It was also found that, until a mature product model is in place, enterprises spend 70% of their delivery capacity on defect remediation and waste 40% of their efforts due to overload and bottlenecks. Read the full article here on VSM Times. The post Report: 92% of organizations are not prepared for digital transformation appeared first on SD Times . from SD Times https://ift.tt/E4jIHrh

The PyTorch team has officially released PyTorch 2.0 , which was first previewed back in December 2022 at the PyTorch Conference.  PyTorch is a Linux Foundation machine learning framework that was originally developed by Meta.  This release includes a high-performance implementation of the Transformer API. It supports more use cases now, such as models using Cross-Attention, Transformer Decoders, and for training models. The goal of releasing this new API is to make training and deployment of Transformer models more cost effective and affordable, the team explained.  PyTorch 2.0 also introduces torch.compile as the main API for wrapping models and returning a compiled model. This is a completely additive feature, helping to maintain backwards compatibility.   Torch.compile is built on four other new technologies:  TorchDynamo, which uses Python Frame Evaluation Hooks to safely capture PyTorch programs AOTAutogram, which can be used to generate ahead-of-time backward traces P

The new Qt Insight platform provides real customer insights into the usage of applications or devices. The platform reveals how users navigate devices, identifies customer pain points, analyzes performance, and creates concrete, evidence-based development plans to optimize product development and lower running costs by eliminating redundant, unused features based on session activity and metrics such as button clicks and time on screen. “Understanding customer behaviour, needs, and pain points is essential to delivering an outstanding customer experience,” says Marko Kaasila, the senior vice president of product management at Qt Group. “We are delighted to see such a high level of interest in Qt Insight from a wide range of industries, including industrial automation, consumer electronics, medical and automotive. With the launch of Qt Insight, we are providing businesses with the information they need to truly understand their users, making it possible to develop evidence-based UX str