Industry News - Week of Nov. 2, 2020
IN THIS ISSUE: Android Studio 4.1 Finally Emulates; Revamping Crash-prone Visual Studio; 2020 Was a Year of Firsts; PRPL Pattern Delivers Apps Faster; Vulkan Lands on Planet Android; Ehnancing WebView Speed with Glide
Android Studio 4.1 Emulates, Learns
The stable release of Android Studio 4.1 last week boasts an integrated Android emulator, a database inspector and supports the importation of Google's Tensor Flow Lite machine learning models.
Revamping Microsoft's Crash-prone VS Extension Model
If a Visual Studio extension crashes, it sometimes corrupts the whole IDE. That's a fact of which many developers using Microsoft's flagship development environment are painfully aware. In an announcement late last week, Redmond acknowledged the problem, and said that it will be taking another crack at the way extensions are engineered.
2020 Was a Year of Firsts, Even for Android
As the year finally approaches its end, 2020 will be remembered for many things introduced to the world. Least among them surely will be the things brought into existence by the Android development community. For for devs, they're noteworthy and memorable just the same.
While so-called "purple" states might be a threat to the political class, PRPL introduces a way of structuring and delivering web apps over the air that has demonstrated faster installation and launch times than conventional methods. Though not new, the PRPL pattern is now being applied in new ways.
Vulkan GPU Acceleration Comes to Android
Circa 2015, the Vulkan Runtime Libraries were introduced as a way to easily accelerate apps by routing some routines through a PC's graphics card. Earlier this year, the libraries came to Android and this tutorial explains how to use them.
How to Improve WebView Performance with Glide
Build browser-based apps is faster than using Java, but apps often slow to a crawl when images are being loaded. One option is to use Glide libraries, which focus on fast and efficient image loading and add features like smooth scrolling, scaling, cropping and more.
Edward Correia
