Search Results for: apple

Windows Subsystem for Linux is making inroads with developers

Enrico

Last week, Microsoft and Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution) were scheduled to host a developer conference focused on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Ars was invited, and I had plane tickets in hand—but the physical conference was canceled at the last minute due to the coronavirus. Note that I did say the physical conference was canceled—WSLconf itself went on, with 22 speakers and 21 talks given. Virtual attendees were reportedly more than double the (sold out) physical attendee registration and included developers…

Amazon’s own Echo Buds may have revealed a future fitness tracking feature

Enrico

Amazon’s truly wireless Echo Buds earbuds are excellent for their $130 price, to the point that they were the elephant in the room when we reviewed Apple’s new AirPods Pro. And they managed that resounding feat without one of their biggest rumored features — the ability to double as a fitness tracker and measure the calories you’ve burned. But don’t rule out fitness tracking just yet, because CNBC and The Verge both spotted a new “Fitness” tab in the Echo Buds section of the Alexa app today. You can see…

iPhone owners have less than two weeks to replace battery for £25

Enrico

Owners of iPhones with failing batteries have 12 days to take advantage of Apple’s out-of-warranty £25 battery swap offer before the price rises to as much as £65. The discounted battery replacement scheme, which applies to the iPhone 6 and newer models, was launched following revelations last year that Apple was intentionally slowing iPhones because of worn batteries. Apple apologised and reduced the cost of its out-of-warranty battery replacements for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, 6S and 6S Plus, SE, 7 and 7 Plus, 8 and 8 Plus and iPhone…

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub

Enrico

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire GitHub, and that the company chose Microsoft partly because of CEO Satya Nadella. Business Insider first reported that Microsoft had been in talks with GitHub recently. GitHub is a vast code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. Microsoft is the top contributor to the site, and…

Microsoft Buys Conversational AI Company Semantic Machines

Enrico

In a blog post, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of AI & Research David Ku announced the acquisition of Berkeley, California-based conversational AI company Semantic Machines. The natural language processing technology developed by Semantic Machines will be integrated into Microsoft’s products like Cortana and the Azure Bot Service. On its website, Semantic Machines says that existing natural language systems such as Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now only understands commands, but not conversations. However, Semantic Machines’ technology understands conversations rather than just commands. Some of the…

Enable and control iOS 11 Large Titles in Xamarin.Forms

Enrico
microsoft xamarin heros c# iOS Android UWP

Apple introduced with iOS 11 a new UI in particular for larger titles: if you open your email, you see at the top a large title. That sit in the Navigation Bar and can be scrolled away when more space is needed. We can enable large titles with a renderer. For this example, I only created a new project and added the following renderer in the iOS project under Renderers folder. You can easily add to all your solution the following renderer in your iOS project: using System; using YourProject.iOS.Renderers;…

Microsoft says iOS and Android support doesn’t mean Windows Phone is dead

Enrico

In an interview with Business Insider, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore spoke briefly about Microsoft’s recent announcements made at Build such as the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update but also took the time to comfort those worried about the small presence of Windows phones at the event and Microsoft’s growing focus on iOS and Android devices. “We’re going to continue to support Windows phone,” Belfiore said before adding that, “Windows is a platform that drives the experience on a whole range of devices. We live in a highly diverse world.” With the…

WebAssembly is now ready for browsers to use

Enrico

WebAssembly, a portable code format that could make for a faster web, has moved to minimum viable product (MVP) status, with browser vendors now able to switch WebAssembly on by default. A recent bulletin from Mozilla Senior Staff Engineer Luke Wagner said representatives of the four major browsers agreed that the design and binary format were complete to the extent that no further design work was doable without implementation experience and significant usage. Browsers represented included Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and WebKit, which is Apple’s browser engine for…

This is iPhone 8

Enrico

The hardware that allows the iPhone 8‘s rumored facial recognition capability could consist of a "revolutionary" new camera system for its front-facing camera. The report follows related rumors of Apple augmenting or ditching its Touch ID fingerprint scanner in favor of iris or facial recognition technology, fueled by its acquisition of Israeli facial recognition startup RealFace. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 — yep, that Galaxy Note 7 — was among the first phones to come equipped with an iris scanner.

99.6 percent of new smartphones run Android or iOS

Enrico

The latest smartphone figures from Gartner are out, and they paint an extremely familiar picture. Between them, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. This duopoly has been the norm for a while now (in the second quarter of 2015 this figure was 96.8 percent), but it’s always impressive — and slightly terrifying — to see how Google and Apple continue to wring the last decimal point drops of market share from global smartphone users. Of the 432 million smartphones…

Microsoft warns iOS isn’t as secure as you think

Enrico

Microsoft has warned customers that iOS is no more secure than Android, contradicting commonly held beliefs about the relative security of the two platforms. The company said that recent attacks targeting iOS prove it’s as vulnerable as Android. Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for enterprise and client mobility, set out his views in a company blog post last week. He used the Pegasus iOS spyware, revealed last month, as an example of severe vulnerabilities present in iOS. Pegasus is capable of monitoring everything a user does on their device,…

Continuous: C# and F# IDE for the iPad by Frank A. Krueger

Enrico

Continuous gives you the power of a traditional desktop .NET IDE – full C# 6 and F# 4 language support with semantic highlighting and code completion – while also featuring live code execution so you don’t have to wait around for code to compile and run. Continuous works completely offline so you get super fast compiles and your code is secure. Continuous gives you access to all of .NET’s standard library, F#’s core library, all of Xamarin’s iOS binding, and Xamarin.Forms. Access to all of these libraries means you won’t…

World’s First Autonomous Drone, The DJI Phantom 4, Revealed

Enrico

Recently, the Irish Internet of Things chip maker Movidius, has won a multi-million dollar deal with Google, and it has been revealed as the brain behind the breakthrough autonomous drone, the DJI Phantom 4. This autonomous drone, which went on sale in Apple Stores across the US last week, features a new visual guidance facet, which sticks to and follows a subject, and can stay in a fixed position without the need of a GPS signal. Described as the first in the industry, the addition of Movidius chips technology and…

Microsoft Announces Office 2016 Will Arrive September 22

Enrico

Microsoft announced this morning the official launch date for the long-anticipated new version of Microsoft Office: Office 2016 will be broadly available starting on September 22, the company says. Meanwhile, Office Customers with volume licensing agreements will be able to download the software on October 1st. The updated version of Office includes a number of new features for desktop customers, including the ability to co-edit documents at the same time, sync files to OneDrive in the cloud, and more. Alongside the announcement of the launch date, Microsoft noted a few…

Windows and OS X are malware, claims Richard Stallman

Enrico

Linux GNU firebrand Richard Stallman says Windows and Apple’s OS X are malware, Amazon is Orwellian, and anyone who trusts the internet-of-things is an ass. In a column for The Guardian Stallman preaches to the non-technical masses about the evils of proprietary software and vendor lock-in, and how closed-door coding facilitates clandestine deals with nation state spy agencies. “What kinds of programs constitute malware? Operating systems, first of all,” Stallman testifies. “Apple systems are malware too: MacOS snoops and shackles; iOS snoops, shackles, censors apps and has a backdoor. “Even…

Microsoft announces Microsoft Edge

Enrico

Today at Build 2015 in San Francisco, Microsoft announced its new Web browser called Microsoft Edge. This is the browser formerly known as Project Spartan. Microsoft Edge, the new default browser will ship on all Windows 10 devices including PCs, tablets, smartphones, and Microsoft’s own tablet, Surface. Microsoft Edge is the all-new Windows 10 browser built to give you a better web experience. Write directly on webpages and share your mark-ups with others. Read online articles free of distraction or use the offline reading feature for greater convenience. Microsoft Edge…

IDC: Android and iOS accounted for 96.3% of global smartphone shipments in Q4 2014 and the whole year

Enrico

Android and iOS accounted for 96.3 percent of all smartphone shipments in Q4 2014, and coincidentally, 96.3 percent for all of last year as well. That means the duopoly grew 0.6 percentage points compared to the same period last year (95.7 percent in Q4 2013) and 2.5 percentage points on an annual basis (93.8 percent in 2013). iCharts The latest figures come from IDC, which puts together these estimates every quarter. Here is the breakdown for the full year:   Above: Volume units are in millions. Google’s mobile operating system…

Add form validation ASP.NET MVC

Enrico

Building a Contact Management ASP.NET MVC Application (C#) In this series of tutorials, we build an entire Contact Management application from start to finish. The Contact Manager application enables you to store contact information – names, phone numbers and email addresses – for a list of people. We build the application over multiple iterations. With each iteration, we gradually improve the application. The goal of this multiple iteration approach is to enable you to understand the reason for each change. Iteration #1 – Create the application. In the first iteration,…

Choose the Correct Collection

Enrico

Learning to use the most appropriate class or object for the task at hand is fundamental to writing efficient code. This is especially true when dealing with collections. Happily, there’s a document named Collections Programming Topics on Apple’s Developer Library that explains in detail the differences between the available classes, as well as which situations suit each class. It’s a must read document for anyone looking to work with collections.TLDR? Here’s a quick synopsis of the most common collection types: Arrays: Ordered list of values. Quick lookup by index, slow…

Use a reuseIdentifier Where Appropriate

Enrico

A common mistake in app development is not setting the correct reuseIdentifier for UITableViewCells, for UICollectionViewCells, or even UITableViewHeaderFooterViews. For maximum performance, a table view’€™s data source should generally reuse UITableViewCell objects when it assigns cells to rows in tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:. A table view maintains a queue or list of UITableViewCell objects that the data source has marked for reuse.What happens if you don’t use a reuseIdentifier? If you don’t, your table view will configure a brand-new cell each time a row is displayed. This is an expensive operation and will…

Xcode 5: general info

Enrico

Xcode is the most used IDE for iOS development. Apple is doing a great job in updating and adding features to it. Knowing how to take advantage of its capabilities can help you code faster and more efficiently. Check out this Guide for Xcode 5 shortcuts, tips and tricks. Xcode’s workspace window is split into 5 main areas: the toolbar, the navigation area, the editing area, the debug area and the utility area: Navigating in Xcode The navigation area has a toolbar as well. It has 8 tabs: project navigator,…