At its I/O developer conference, Google just announced its new Play Games Services API, a new API that allows game developers to save game states and sync them between different machines. This service will be available for Android and iOS developers. The API will also include the usual achievements, leaderboards and multiplayer services that developers have come to expect from similar services. → Read More
Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android of all places. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Cydia for… → Read More
This is a fascinating little blip that popped up this morning and bears a mention. Games company GreenHeart released an $8 game called Game Dev Tycoon. The creator, Patrick Klug, sold a few hundred copies and, as a special treat, released a torrent of the game with a special feature built-in: after hours of play, the little virtual game devs would get a sales report that said pirates were stealing… → Read More
Last week, Google finally released the developer guides and other necessary documents that will allow developers to write apps for Glass. In some respects, the so-called Mirror API may have been a disappointment to developers who were expecting to run full-blown augmented-reality apps, but even in its current form, it will allow developers to create new experiences for their new and existing apps… → Read More
I’m all for open source and freely sharing code, but there are also occasions when it’s necessary to hide some of the mechanics behind a web-based application. That’s where JScrambler comes in, a Portuguese startup that’s launching version 3 of its service today. JScrambler 3 allows developers to obfuscate their source code for mobile and desktop web apps so it’s… → Read More
Xamarin, the company behind the cross-platform mobile development platform with the same name, today announced that it has recently acquired the Danish mobile testing startup LessPainful. LessPainful is the company behind the popular open source cross-platform functional test platform for Android and iOS, and Xamarin has already put this acquisition to use. The Xamarin Test Cloud, the automated… → Read More
Earlier today, Google announced that it is about to ship its first Google Glass units and just in time for them to arrive, Google has now also posted the developer guidelines for its Glass Mirror API. Access to the API itself, it’s worth noting, is still in limited preview and only developers who have access to the Glass hardware will be able to work with the API. Everybody else can also… → Read More
Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. → Read More
Cisimple a startup that helps automate the build, testing and deployment process for mobile applications, is today exiting its beta and making its new testing platform available to all developers. The company is also the first to integrate with Kickfolio’s API, another newly launched startup which brings iOS applications to the browser using HTML5. → Read More
The next version of jQuery, the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.” As Microsoft announced today, Microsoft Open Technologies, the company’s wholly owned… → Read More
Google today pledged that it will not sue any users, distributors or developers who have implemented open-source versions of its MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets, even though these implementations (including, for example, Apache Hadoop) probably infringe upon 10 patents Google holds for this technology. This move, the company’s senior patent counsel Duane Valz… → Read More
Gyft, the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 finalist working to bring the plastic gift card industry to mobile, is today announcing the general availability of its APIs, which allow developers to integrate Gyft into websites, apps, or other services. However, as Gyft co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham explains, the primary focus is on mobile app developers – a group that’s interested in offering gift… → Read More
Build is Microsoft’s developer conference for its Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server and Azure platforms, and the company just announced that Build 2013 will take place June 26-28 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Registration will open Tuesday, April 2, at 9am PT, and early-bird pricing for the first 500 registrants starts at $1,595. As Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s… → Read More
Embedly, the Y Combinator-backed content embedding service used by Yammer, bit.ly, 37Signals, Storify, Reddit, Kickstarter, SoundCloud, and others, is today extending its platform to include two new products called “Display” and “Extract,” now available to anyone after months of beta testing. In addition to “Embed,” the company’s core technology for embedding videos, photos and other rich media… → Read More
Nokia’s Asha line of less-expensive smartphones, not developed on Microsoft’s Windows Phone but Nokia’s own proprietary OS, is getting a new boost of attention today. The company is unveiling a new (and free) premium developer program for Asha developers. Modelled on a premium program started for Lumia developers last year, those participating will get extra developer resources, credits towards… → Read More
Twitter has released an open invite to a developer press event it’s holding April 2 on its dedicated developer website today. The event is mobile-focused, Twitter says, and will take place at Twitter HQ between 6:30 PM and 9:30 PM Pacific. Twitter says it will use the occasion to share “some exciting new features for the Twitter Platform” it has been working on. → Read More
The Barnes & Noble Nook isn’t doing amazingly well by most accounts, including a recently introduced giveaway program from the company itself that isn’t quite (but sure resembles) a fire sale. Now, B&N has made an announcement that is clearly designed to prop up developer interest in the platform, with the introduction of a feature that brings it up-to-speed with others: in-app purchases. → Read More
Browsers today are able to execute JavaScript code significantly faster than just a few years ago, but even as our web apps now look more like desktop apps, JavaScript performance is still a far cry from what you can expect from a native program written in something like C or C++. To bridge this gap, Mozilla launched the asm.js project a while back and today, this code has landed in Firefox… → Read More
Postmaster, a TechStars Cloud company based in Austin, Texas, just launched a new API in beta that will allow businesses to optimize their small parcel shipments. You’d think that shipping is pretty much a solved problem at this point. In reality, it’s still hard for developers to easily hook their applications into the APIs of major shippers and understand who offers the most… → Read More
Last week, Mozilla technology evangelist Paul Rouget asked web developers what improvements they wanted to see in Firefox’s developer tools. Based on the feedback the team got on HackerNews and Twitter, the Firefox DevTools team spent the last week hacking and prototyping a number of new and improved developer features that will likely find their way into a stable version of Firefox in the… → Read More
Errplane, a new Y Combinator-backed service for monitoring performance, uptime and errors for any type of web application, has officially launched its service. Currently, Errplane argues, developers need a number of different services like New Relic, Pingdom and Airbrake to effectively monitor their apps. Errplane unifies all of these functions into one single service, because, as the… → Read More
Airbnb just announced that it has open-sourced Chronos, the company’s replacement for the standard time-based Cron schedule that is probably familiar to everybody who has ever used a Unix-based system. Chronos runs on top of Apache’s Mesos cluster manager and allows developers to execute shell scripts at set intervals and, unlike Cron, you can also trigger jobs by the completion of… → Read More
Google has opened applications for its third annual Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants. The program provides $10K-$20K of funding to nonprofits that are willing to use Google’s Map technology to help them accomplish their goals. The company has used its own technology to help out during times of crisis, most recently and notably during Hurricane Sandy and the flu outbreak in the U.S. → Read More
The mobile app ecosystem isn’t poised to decline any time soon, according to a new study from Compuware, which finds that the majority of smartphone users (85 percent) still prefer mobile apps to mobile websites. Users believe apps to be more convenient (55 percent), faster (48 percent) and easier to browse (40 percent). That data isn’t shocking, of course – native experiences do tend to work… → Read More
Services on code-sharing site GitHub have been disrupted for over an hour in what started as a “major service outage” because of a “brief DDoS attack.” This is the second DDoS attack in as many days and at least the third in the last several months: Yesterday, GitHub also reported a DDoS incident. And in October 2012, the service also went down due to malicious hackers. → Read More
Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated all that regularly… → Read More
Google really wants developers to use the new Google+ application sign-ins it announced last week. As Google+’s Kinnari Jhaveri just announced, the interest in the new feature was “significant.” Because of this, the team decided to host a series of in-depth bootcamps in cities around the world. → Read More
Retail giant Target’s newly announced ”Target Retail Accelerator” isn’t really an accelerator – it’s more a sponsored contest taking place at SXSW in Austin. Developers who participate in the event will have a chance to create retail-focused mobile apps or mobile websites, with seven finalists receiving $10,000 for their ideas, and one grand-prize winner scoring a larger prize of $75,000. But… → Read More
Last year, Microsoft launched Azure Mobile Services, a cloud backend for mobile applications. But at the time, it only supported Windows 8, and the team then added iOS and Windows Phone 8 support a short while later. Starting today, Android users can also connect their apps to Azure Mobile Services and use the platform to store their structured data, use its user authentication tools and send out… → Read More
Airpair, a newly launched service which connects entrepreneurs and expert developers over remote online sessions, aims to help startups build better software and speed their time to launch. The idea’s name, which brings to mind “pair programming” techniques, offers its users one-hour screensharing sessions where developers will help review your code, brainstorm architecture, assist with problems… → Read More
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