Industry News - Week of Jul. 27, 2020
IN THIS ISSUE: Android 10 Adoption Raises Bar; Facebook Unveils TransCoder; Calling Apple 'Lazy' Invites Ire; Apple's Security Research Device; Making Websites Look Good on Phones; 'R' Language Popularity Surges
Within just five months of its release, Android 10 was running on more than 100 million devices, an adoption rate 28 percent faster than that of its predecessor, Android 9 Pie. Google reportedly credits Project Mainline, which is intended to simplify adoption and deployment of its latest operating system. Zebra also offers Android migration advice for developers.
Researchers at Facebook have unveiled a utility they say will be helpful for porting code from one programming language to another. Members of Facebook's artificial intelligence team in a blog post describe the difficulties of unsupervised machine translation, and how their tool will "outperform commercial solutions by a wide margin."
Calling Apple 'Lazy' Invites Ire
In a tweet a few weeks ago, mobile and web developer Maximiliano Firtman took issue with the lack of rendering-engine choices offered by Apple and its Safari browser, opining that "WebKit took the lazy way." Apple took exception to that, publicly blasting him with mostly ad hominem attacks. Once past the back-and-forth in his open letter to Apple, Firtman intelligently defends his criticisms.
In an effort to help improve the security of iOS and devices that run it, Apple has introduced the Security Research Device Program, which provides shell access and encourages participants to "find, test, validate, verify [and] confirm" vulnerabilities and report them to Apple and any relevant third party developers. The Apple Security Bounty remains in effect. Maybe they'll send one to Firtman.
How to Make Websites Look Good on Phones
With more than 60 percent of website visits reportedly being done from mobile devices last year, and Google about to set its search engines to prioritize mobile-friendly sites, some websites might have their work cut out for them to avoid being deranked in search results. Fortunately, responsive web design holds some answers; this tutorial dives deep into the how.
Is 'R' Language Your Language?
After falling behind for a few years, the statistical programming language R has reappeared on the current TIOBE index, which tracks the popularity of programming languages based on analysis of search-engine results. Likely because of its name, R is also a favorite among pirates.
Edward Correia
