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Dart, a general-purpose programming language originally developed by Google, that's easy to learn, scalable and deployable everywhere is now rebooted for client-side web and mobile development in Version 2 of the language.

The cleaned-up syntax and rebuilt developer tool chain in Dart 2 has positioned it as a potential replacement for JavaScript in the browser, with strengthened type system and ability to run on VM with a just-in-time compiler, enabling hot reload during mobile development.

And developers will have advantage from fast development cycles whereby code can be edited, compiled, and replaced in apps running on a device.

Google has demonstrated the use of the language in building applications for iOS, Android, and the web. Dart can also be compiled to native code for ARM and x86 platforms.

The version 2 of the language boasts of such nifty features as definition UI as code for faster context switching between a UI markup language and the programming language, and strong typing to catch bugs earlier, boost quality and improve applications run by a team.

Google has made available a beta version for developers on GitHub or the Dart SDK, so that you can try out the beta of Dart 2 in Flutter.

Google positions Dart for Client-side Web and Mobile development



The Chrome browser ad-blocking feature which took effect on Feb. 15, has been received with mixed feelings both from the side of web users and advertisers, as effectively serving to forestall more users from turning to third party ad-blockers.

While Chrome would not eliminate all ads from websites, it will target ads that the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) says violate what the industry group calls its "Better Ads Standards," then expunges such ads from websites.

That's quite distinct from conventional ad blockers functionality baked-into-the-browser software that scrubs all online ads from website pages.

The Coalition for Better Ads standards have identified several ad types on the personal computer desktop and on mobile devices that CBA-released research claimed are the most annoying of all online advertisements. And Chrome will squash a mix of ads from about a dozen originally scrutinized formats running on the Android and iOS devices.

The browser targets for four ad categories out of six considered by the panel: pop-ups, ads that automatically play video and audio, "prestitial" ads accompanied by a countdown clock, and those dubbed "large sticky ads" On PCs.

Thus, Chrome filtering is on a site-by-site basis, not ad-by-ad, something most critics failed to mention.

Chrome also does look-up from a set of ad "fingerprints" caged from EasyList, the open-source ad-identification-and-removal rules list that forms the backbone of most browser ad blockers, including Adblock and Adblock Plus.

The scrub on advertisements from any site will last for at least 30 days, while review submissions cannot be made until 30 days have elapsed. With failing-grade sites added to a list that Google maintains on its servers.

And Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a 'failing' status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days, which according to Google, just about 1.5% of 100,000 sites it evaluated prior to the ad filtering launch failed to meet CBA standards.

Why Google Chrome's ad blocker functionality is rather just ad filtering?

Google has finally brought all its different payment tools under one umbrella, Google pay, though the Android Pay app still maintains its distinct identity. But, the company has gone ahead to launch Google Pay for Android.

While the Google Wallet app has been redesigned for sending and requesting money, and it’s now called Google Pay Send and existing users on Android Pay will get updated over the course of the next few days.

Google is also introducing some new functionality that will make its payment service ubiquitous across all platforms.



The Google Pay app runs Google’s own Material Design, albeit it's basically similar design with Android Pay, but one notable change, is that the Google Pay home screen displays relevant stores around you where you can pay with Google Pay.

And the list is personalized, based on your location and previous stores where you've used the service. Additionally, it displays all of your recent purchases and you can add all of your loyalty cards to the app.

For now, only users in the U.S. and UK will be able to use the Google Pay app for sending and requesting money. Such users can also set up Google Pay right from their bank’s app without having to install Google Pay, and they can pay with Google Pay both on online and offline stores.

Google has made available the Google Pay API to help developers that want to integrate the payment system with their app or website, and then, they can accept payments through Google Pay.

Enter Google Pay: The Unification of all Google's payment tools

While Microsoft's Cortana offered essentially the same capabilities across various platforms, the key weakness was that it just isn’t a great smart home controller, as it lacks many of the services supported by rivals.

Now, Microsoft has added support for IFTTT to Cortana, bringing the power of conditional web-based service chains of simple statements, with the new smart-home controls available from the Invoke, and also from Windows 10 PC or even the Cortana apps for Android and iOS.

The Invoke support for Samsung SmartThings, Nest, Philips Hue, Wink, and Insteon was announced late last year, and now, the support have expanded to cover products from Ecobee, Honeywell Lyric, Honeywell Total Connect Comfort, LIFX, TP-Link Kasa, and Geeni.



Albeit, there's still the problem of Cortana's relatively small number of “skills,” or third-party services support, but IFTTT will provide its own app interactions, and thus expand Cortana’s reach.

The IFFTT expanded smart-home support may not still bring Cortana up to par with Alexa or Google Home-powered devices ecosystem, but certainly, it will help to elevate Cortana’s standing.

Microsoft and IFTTT published a list of suggested Applets on a dedicated Cortana channel, which those who want to give it a spin can download and apply. To enable for Windows 10, you’ll need to open Cortana on Windows 10, click the Notebook, then open the Connected Home submenu, and add your smart-home account to Cortana.

Microsoft brings IFTTT Support to Cortana smart home



Google’s Go Language (Golang) version 1.10, which is the next version of the popular open source language has brought performance improvements without any substantive changes to the code base.

The new update, Go 1.10 offers compiler tool chain along side some other key features that offers improvements for code generated by the compiler across supported architectures.

While Go 1.9 released in August 2017, helped speed up the garbage collector with better-generated code, and core library optimizations to make programs run a bit faster, further enhancements in Go 1.10 is the unicode package upgrade from 9.0 to version 10.0, adding 8,518 new characters, including a bitcoin currency symbol and 56 emojis.

Go 1.8 brought new compiler front end as a foundation for future performance enhancements, and shorter garbage collection pauses by eliminating "stop the world" stack re-scanning. And the Go 1.9 retained the previous versions’ go command’s support for parallel compilation of separate packages.

Albeit, the linux/ppc64le port now requires external linking with any programs using the cgo command, with go build command able to detect out-of-date packages based on the content of source files, specified build flags, and metadata in stored packages.

And the go install command now only installs packages and commands listed on the command line.

For scalability, Go 1.10 support for type-alias declaration for code repair remains unchanged, as type aliases support gradual code repair while moving a type between packages, which is helpful for code repair during large-scale refactoring, moving a type from a package.

The prodyctin version of Go 1.10, the next version of the popular open source language can be downloaded from the Go Project website.

Google's Go Language offers more improvements with compiler toolchain

The game streaming platform, Twitch has launched a social feature called “Rooms” - an always-on chat room available for both the Web and mobile users worldwide.

While the launch was delayed from last year-end, as the company had announced back at its developer event TwitchCon in October, 2017. The launch follows some major changes on Twitch, like the update to the community policies to crack down on harassment and sexual explicit content.



Twitch Rooms, which are rather custom chat groups are available from the channel page, and anyone with Twitch account can set up a room, though creators can host up to 3 Rooms. And channel owners can create a “Room” for any specific group of users – including their channels’ subscribers, moderators, followers, or others with shared interests.

Albeit, the use case could be to present topics that would rather make sense to hide from the publicly accessible main group chat.

The Rooms can equally be used for any other topic of the creators’ choosing, whether related to gaming or not, just like the main Stream Chat which can host any unrelated messages, memes, or even outright jokes.

Twitch allow the channel’s community to stay connected and chat even when the creator isn’t streaming, and it also allow people to move messages back-and-forth of the main chat to a sub-chat or even make invisible to general viewing.

Though moderator chats are always private, the creator can choose to allow all viewers to preview their Subscriber chat Room, even if they can’t participate. The design, according to Twitch is based on requests from the community, but Twitch will not tolerate any hateful content.

Twitch goes social with always-on Chatrooms for the Web and mobile app

Google's push with its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) platform, isn't slowing down a bit, as the company now pitches AMP email for better engagement, and actionable email experiences.

While the email has undergone some changes over the decades, the basic idea of simplicity has remained unchanged, and since its general standardization in the late 90s, interoperability and privacy has become baked into the email system.

Now, the email works more reliably and available on virtually all platforms cum operating system, on every device. Albeit, emails generally are somewhat static because messaging are so, as the concept of communication via the internet is based around the telegraphic model of exchanging one-way packets with static payloads.

The crossroad between email's design and websites/apps are overwhelmingly the interaction possible with the later.

And the email doesn’t actually download stuff on its own, as it doesn’t run scripts, and attachments are discrete items, unless served as images in the HTML, which is rather optional. Google, however wants to change all that, by essentially allowing applications to run inside emails.



Google aim to make the content itself as part of the AMP system it has defined, employing its privileged position as the means through which people find content online.

For instance, as Gmail users leave the platform to go to online stores, social media, and other places; Google intends to bring the everyday tasks inside Gmail, and exerting control over the intimate details, while defining what other companies can and can’t do inside the email system.

But critics already sees AMP as a blight on the web, and equally posit that it will be bad for email too. And the fears stems from the fact that ads and trackers stick around the content, thus undermining the users privacy.

AMP Email is currently available to developers who request preview access, though Google plans to roll it out to all users later.

Google pitches AMP Email for Interactive and Actionable Experiences

Google has been hard at work in surfacing relevant news stories, especially on mobile search, with the Stamp news system allowing publishers to create visual media contents, and now, the company has launched what it calls AMP Stories.

The AMP Stories will allow publishers to create visual-oriented stories in a mobile-friendly format similar to the Snapchat’s Discover portal. While the publishers will also be able to try out a developer preview of AMP stories, which feature swipeable slides of text, photos, graphics and videos.

It's built on same code from Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, a framework that allows webmasters to create webpages that load much faster than conventional pages on the mobile web.



Albeit, the AMP format have been criticized by some webmasters as too bare bones to allow for the full spectrum of digital ads, reducing their revenue per page view. And publishers have been eager to make money from the growing consumers viewing their content on mobile devices, with products designed to aggregate news and speed the loading of articles on mobile, such as Facebook’s Instant Articles.

Google is perhaps still in the process of building support for ads for the AMP stories format, but would the initial lack of monetization stall its adoption among publishers?

Google's track record in delivering relevant ads in all its platform is ingenuous, though AMP stories isn't revenue driven already, several publishers have already expressed willingness to experiment with the format.

AMP stories is currently been rolled out to users, you can find the stories by searching for one of the participating publishers (including: CNN, Cosmopolitan, Wired, Mashable, Vox Media, and The Washington Post) on Google Mobile search.

AMP Stories Visual storytelling debut on Google Mobile



While the Java Development Kit (JDK) 10 first release candidate hit base on February 12, with the second release candidate scheduled for March release date, it's pertinent to explore the new features and improvements expected in the JDK 10.

The key improvement as proposed is perhaps the local type inference, which enhances the language to extend type inference to local variables.

Other nifty improvement includes: a “clean” interface for garbage collection, which is intended to improve source-code isolation of different garbage collectors, and better modularity for internal garbage collection code in the HotSpot virtual machine to make it easier to add new garbage collector.

Find below the detailed features expected in JDK 10?

  • A Parallel full garbage collection for the G1 garbage collector to improve worst-case latencies by implementing parallelism.
  • HotSpot to allocate the object heap on an alternative memory device, such as an NVDIMM memory module, as specified by the user. 
  • Consolidated repositories of the JDK forest into a single repository, to streamline development. 
  • Application class-data sharing to reduce the footprint by sharing common class metadata across processes.
  • A default set of root certificate authority certificates in the JDK.


Albeit, there are still additional phases for the development of JDK 10 before the final release. With February 22, 2018 as the data for final release candidate.

Oracle, however has mapped out the upgrades for Java, including Java 18.3 due in March 2018 as part of a new, six-month release schedule for standard Java. And JDK 10 is an implementation of Java Standard Edition 10, due for release on March 20, 2018. Join the early adopter program by downloading the beta versions of JDK 10 to give it a spin.

What's expected in Java Development Kit (JDK) 10 set for March release?



Against the long rumored "dislike" button, Facebook is about now testing a new "downvote" feature that allow users make a negative reaction to comments, which is an opposite of the decade-old positive reaction option, the thumbs-up.

The feature which was first spotted in the US, among a small number of people using the social network's app on Android phones, is already generating a lot of buzz.

While Facebook had acknowledged the feature in a statement, that it's exploring a feature for people to give feedback about comments on public page posts. And the downvote button offers more reporting options like "offensive," "misleading" and "off topic" tags, which is perhaps other ways Facebook is hoping to spur more interaction on the social platform.

It will also serves as easy ways for people to mark "offensive" and "misleading" comments, which may help quell users' concerns about harassment, and spread of fake information.

Albeit, the thumbs-up "like" button, which was rolled out in 2009 has continued to receive some criticism from people arguing that the "like" feature only allows users to express their approval, without the option to also show their disapproval, thus limiting their power of expression.

Even though, the reaction options were expanded to include laughing face, an angry face, a "wow," a sad face and a heart, yet it just wasn't enough.

The downvote button is more about giving feedback to Facebook, as the company aims to give users a way to flag inappropriate, uncivil or misleading comments, to keep its users safe. And won't affect a post's ranking, as users won't even see how many people downvoted a comment.

Facebook testing 'downvote' button to mark Offensive/Misleading comments

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