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Improving Threads' iOS Performance at Meta
An app's performance is key to make users want to use it, say Meta engineers Dave LaMacchia and Jason Patterson. This includes making it lightning-fast, battery-efficient, and reliable across a range of devices and connectivity conditions. In a recent article, they recounted their experience with the Threads app.
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Flutter 3.27 Promotes New Rendering Engine Impeller, Improves iOS and Material Widgets, and More
Flutter 3.27, brings a wealth of changes, including better adherence to Apple's UI Guidelines thanks to a number of improved Cupertino widgets, new features for CarouselView, list rows and columns, ModalRoutes transitions, and so on. Furthermore, the new release makes the Impeller rendering engine the default, with improved performance, instrumentation support, concurrency support, and more.
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How Meta Ported Million Lines of Android Code from Java to Kotlin
In order to maximize the benefits brought by Kotlin in terms of productivity and safety, Meta engineers have been hard at work to translate their 10 million line Android codebase from Java into Kotlin. One year into this process, they have ported approximately half of their codebase and developed a specific tool, Kotlinator, to automate the process as much as possible.
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Google Launches Android XR, Its New AI-Powered Extended Reality Platform
Android XR is Google's new operating system aimed at powering devices like headsets and glasses and making possible new experiences, a.k.a. apps, running on them. Android XR will integrate Gemini, Google's AI assistant, to enable understanding user intent, defining a plan, guiding through tasks, and more.
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Challenges of Creating iOS App Extensions at Lyft
In a recent article, Lyft engineers Artur Stepaniuk and Max Husar described how Lyft handles the complexity of creating an app extension for their iOS app without breaking the tight RAM and binary size constraints set by Apple nor impair user experience.
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Kotlin Reaches 2.1.0, Bringing New Language Features, Compiler Updates, and More
Kotlin 2.1.0 introduces new syntax, including guard conditions, non-local break and continue, and multi-dollar string interpolation. Additionally, it extends its multiplatform capabilities and improves the K2 compiler.
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Meta MobileLLM Advances LLM Design for On-Device Use Cases
With MobileLLM, Meta researchers aim to show that, for smaller models, quality is not a direct product of how many billions parameters they have; rather, it is the result of carefully designing their architecture. To prove their point, they coupled deep and thin architectures with embedding sharing and grouped-query attention mechanisms to improve accuracy over prior state-of-the-art models.
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Kotlin HTTP Toolkit Ktor 3.0 Improves Performance and Adds Support for Server-Sent Events
Ktor, Kotlin's native framework to create asynchronous HTTP server and client applications, has reached version 3. It adopts kotlinx-io, which brings improved performance albeit at the cost of breaking changes, and adds support for Server-Sent events, CSFR, serving static resources from ZIP files, and more.
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Vertex AI in Firebase Aims to Simplify the Creation of Gemini-powered Mobile Apps
Currently available in beta, the Vertex AI SDK for Firebase enables the creation of apps that go beyond the simple chat model and text prompting. Google has just made available a colab to help developers through the steps required to integrate it into their apps.
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Compiler Explorer Provides Insights into Low-Level Android App Optimization
Android engineers at Google added support for the Java and Kotlin programming languages to Compiler Explorer, an open source tool aimed at exploring how compilers work by compiling code in real-time. Using Compiler Explorer, Android engineers can optimize the performance of their apps by observing how the compiler works under the hood instead of using a set of pre-defined best practices.
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Android 15 Brings Desktop-Like Windowing UX on Tablets
The latest Beta 2 for the upcoming Android 15 release introduces desktop windowing for tablets as a developer preview. The new feature makes it possible to manage "freeform windows" that users can create to display multiple apps and resize or move around similarly to what they would do on a desktop computer.
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Swift 6 Officially Available
The Swift team has officially announced the availability of Swift 6, a new major version of Apple open-source language with focus on low-level and embedded programming, concurrent code safety, new cross-platforms APIs, and extended Linux and Windows support.
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Swift Testing is a New Framework from Apple to Modernize Testing for Swift across Platforms
While XCTest remains the preferred way to create tests in Xcode, the new Swift Testing framework attempts to introduce an expressive and intuitive API for the definition of tests that applies to all platforms where Swift is supported. The framework also enables parallelizing, categorizing and associating tests with bugs.
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Jetpack Compose Embraces Adaptive UIs with Compose Material 3 Adaptive
Compose Material 3 Adaptive, a library meant to create adaptive UIs able to adapt themselves automatically according to the current window size or device orientation, has reached 1.0 and is ready to be used in production apps.
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Vapor 5 Materializes the Future of Server-Side Development in Swift
Over four years since the launch of its current version, the team behind Swift server-side development framework Vapor is making room for Vapor 5, which aims at leveraging Swift 6 concurrency capabilities and laying the foundations for the framework's future evolution. An initial alpha release is planned to be ready when Swift 6 is officially released.