Microsoft has announced plans to adopt Chromium into Microsoft Edge on desktop. Chromium is an open-source web browser project created by Google. According to Microsoft, this move will provide better web compatibility for customers and less web fragmentation for web developers. In addition, Microsoft will start to contribute to the Chromium project. “Ultimately, we want … continue reading
After announcing its vision last year to bring Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to Windows 10, Microsoft is starting to preview PWAs and has outlined its roadmap to bring PWAs to the Microsoft Store. “PWAs are web apps that are enhanced with modern web technologies such as Service Worker, Fetch networking, Cache API, Push notifications, and … continue reading
Google has announced a new version of its text-to-speech system, Tacotron 2. It uses neural networks to generate human-like speech. Typically, in TTS systems, the input is complex linguistic and acoustic features. The neural networks used by Tacotron 2, however, are trained using speech examples and corresponding text transcripts. “Generating very natural sounding speech from … continue reading
JetBrains IDE for JVM, IntelliJ IDEA, has reached version 2017.3. The new update contains many new features and bug fixes. On the Java side, it added the ability for smart code completion to be aware of type casts, new and improved inspections, improvements to JUnit5 support, a configurable command line shortener, and a run dashboard. … continue reading
The open source database PostgreSQL has announced the release of their latest version, PostgreSQL 10. It includes the ability to distribute data across many nodes, also known as a divide and conquer strategy. Other features include logical replication, declarative table partitioning, improved query parallelism, quorum commit for synchronous replication, and SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication. Logical replication will enable … continue reading
Digital transformation is the cornerstone upon which Microsoft’s announcement at today’s kickoff of the company’s Ignite conference were all about. Devices already outnumber users there are for them, and Microsoft sees security, intelligence and the cloud platform as key pieces that will facilitate that transformation. “With an ever-evolving and increasingly complex cyber threat landscape, security … continue reading
Salesforce has acquired MetaMind, an AI startup company. With the two coming together, they will be able to offer customers AI solutions with capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing, and other business processes. Salesforce’s data science capabilities will be extended by embedding deep learning within its platform. Salesforce also plans to integrate … continue reading
Shortly after Microsoft previewed the first set of extensions for Microsoft Edge, it was revealed the company is also working on a porting tool to allow developers to run Chrome extensions on the Edge browser. Jacob Rossi, an engineer for Microsoft Edge, tweeted: “Lots of questions on this: yes we’re working on a porting tool … continue reading
Microsoft is furthering its commitment to open source with the announcement of Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools now available on GitHub. The toolset was first released in 2010 as a set of Visual Studio extensions designed to improve developer productivity. “Making the current set of tools available to the community is important to us, and … continue reading
A month after announcing it would do so, Microsoft has released a core component of its JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge and Windows apps written in HTML/CSS/JS into open source. “Today, we are excited to share with you that we’ve just made the sources for ChakraCore available under the MIT License at the ChakraCore … continue reading
Windows 10 officially arrived this week, and not everyone is impressed. In an open letter to Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, Mozilla’s CEO Chris Beard called the company out on what he calls a disturbing feature of Windows 10. The latest release of the operating system automatically changes users’ default apps, such as making Microsoft Edge … continue reading
