Mozilla is giving up on its Firefox OS phones. According to TechCrunch, the company has announced it will no longer develop or sell Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels. According to the company, the smartphone wasn’t able to capture the market as the best user experience out there. The company will continue to experiment with the operating system on other devices, including IoT devices.
“We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices,” said Ari Jaaksi, SVP of connected devices at Mozilla, to TechCrunch. “We will build everything we do as a genuine open-source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.”
Microsoft releases Windows.UI.Composition
Microsoft is releasing new APIs to help developers bring more creativity to their Windows apps. In the first update to Windows 10, the company introduced Windows.UI.Composition, a new family of WinRT APIs that will enable developers to create lightweight visuals, and apply animations, effects and manipulation to their apps.
“How does this help you with a beautiful engaging UI? By giving you access to this new layer of APIs, Windows.UI.Composition lets you create composition objects directly in the compositor layer, which improves performance and scale using exciting new features,” the Windows Apps Team wrote in a blog post.
Hortonworks announces upcoming advancements
Hortonworks is giving users insights into how the company plans to accelerate Spark at scale for the enterprise. The company announced upcoming advancements to the Hortonworks Data Platform, such as support for Spark SQL and Spark Streaming in Apache Spark 1.5.2; improvements to Apache Zeppelin to speed up data science productivity; improvements to Spark’s integration with YARN, HDFS, Hive, HBase and ORC; and improvements to Spark’s security, governance, operations and overall readiness for real-world production deployment.
“We continue to see customers across all industries derive real value from using Spark with Hortonworks Data Platform,” said Tim Hall, vice president of product management at Hortonworks. “Our customers rely on us to guide them on their Spark journey, and our ability to scale Spark against massive data sets is remarkable. With the inclusion of Spark 1.5.2 on HDP, customers can get new Spark capabilities and maximize its value for the enterprise.”
SmartBear makes code review process for GitHub easier
SmartBear is continuing to make enhancements to GitHub integration. Today, the company released Collaborator 9.4, which will continue its efforts in GitHub integration and improve Collaborator’s archiving feature. Collaborator also enables large enterprises to utilize one tool for peer review, as well as use integrations from third-party tools like IDEs.
Collaborator 9.4 adds new security features, allowing teams to peer-review code, user stories and test plans in a transparent framework. The team can stay up to speed on changes made to the code. Development, testing and management teams can save code review contents in a zip file for long-term data with the continued improvement of “Archive to Zip,” which was first added in October.
