Oculus Rift won’t be coming to Apple anytime soon, at least not to any of the Apple computers on the market today. According to Shack News, Apple computers aren’t good enough to handle the company’s virtual reality headset.

“That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it,” Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, told Shack News. “It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a US$6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended specs. So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we’d love to support Mac. But right now, there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it.”

The full story is available here.

Lessons learned from game developers
Google believes lessons learned from game developers can help all application developers succeed with their applications. The company is providing best practices, tips and insights from game developers that can be applied to any application.

“There is much common ground between freemium apps and games businesses when it comes to achieving success. Users are, however, more used to paying for games than apps, stemming from the history of traditional gaming consoles,” wrote Matteo Vallone, business development manager at Google Play, in a blog post. “Moreover, mobile games are also able to easily offer ‘virtual goods’ across a range of price points to suit every pocket. This means that game developers have had plenty of opportunity to learn about how to improve onboarding, conversion, and ultimately the user Lifetime Value.”

Tips, according to Google, include:

  • Optimize retention before investing in acquisition
  • Retain users with step-by-step engagement
  • Target the right offers at the right users
  • Offer in-app purchases when users are most likely to spend

Microsoft releases .NET Compatibility Diagnostics
The .NET Framework team has introduced the .NET Compatibility Diagnostics to help identify changes during .NET version upgrades.

Until this update, the only options available to understand what changes were introduced in a specific version were to look at the MSDN documentation or run the APIPort tool. The team said that it needed a tool that would work for bringing existing applications to a higher version of the .NET Framework. The team wanted to make sure that it would have detailed information on how the usage of particular APIs can impact the ability of select applications to work on the newer version of the .NET Framework. This would allow a better understanding of the impact of upgrades and which changes are necessary.

These diagnostics are designed to provide information coming from a version in the .NET Framework 4.x line of releases, such as:

  • .NET Framework 4.0 to .NET Framework 4.6.1 or,
  • .NET Framework 4.5 to .NET Framework 4.5.2.

This tool does not help migrate from other versions of the .NET Framework at the current time. More information on the tool can be found here.

Docker acquires Conductant
Docker has announced it is taking a new step to democratize technologies and integrate them into tools that are easy to use. The company is acquiring Conductant, a startup with a focus on orchestration. The acquisition brings with it the creators of the Aurora project, a popular extension of Apache Mesos.

According to Docker, Aurora could possibly be integrated with Docker Swarm in order to “form a powerful large-scale Web operations stack.”

“We believe that in many use cases, a stack combining Docker Swarm and Aurora could democratize the battle-tested Twitter operations model,” wrote Solomon Hykes, CTO and founder of Docker, in a blog post. “Of course, not every application is a good fit for Aurora, and it will remain completely optional for Docker users—and vice-versa. By making two of the most popular open-source infrastructure projects interoperate better, we believe both communities will benefit.”

RingCentral releases new WebRTC APIs to developers
RingCentral, a provider of cloud business communications and collaboration solutions, announced its WebRTC APIs are now available to third-party developers in beta. Developers can use the APIs to integrate voice capabilities into browsers and apps.

“We’re excited to have the developers leverage our open WebRTC API so that businesses can continue to improve upon customer satisfaction,” said Kira Makagon, executive vice president of innovation at RingCentral.

In addition, a new WebRTC SDK, tutorial and documentation is available to help developers get started.

Linkedin open-sources WhereHows
LinkedIn is open-sourcing its data discovery and lineage tool that integrates with all major data processing systems, and collects catalog and operational metadata from them.

WhereHows is able to curate, associate and surface metadata information through a Web app and an API endpoint.

More information is available here.