Among these announcements was the launch of the Watch Face Format. This offers developers a new way to build watch faces for Wear OS smartwatches with a declarative XML format to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces.

According to Google, this means there is no need for the executable code involved in building a watch face, and there is also no code embedded in the watch face APK.  With this release, users can create analogue and digital watch faces, watch faces with complications, customizable watch faces, and more. 

Updates have also been made to Jetpack Compose, including the ability to bring Compose everywhere that the developer is building UI, whether that be on a phone, tablet, foldable device, watch, or TV. These changes are available in the May 2023 release and the most recent alpha versions of the Compose libraries.

Furthermore, the performance of Compose has been improved. The company stated that since October, modifiers have started to migrate to an improved system, and with this, text has seen a 22% performance gain that can be seen in the latest alpha release.

The alpha version of the UI framework for creating functional apps for Android TV Compose for TV has also been released. With this, apps can be built with less code, easier maintenance, and a modern Material 3 look. 

Next, Android Studio Hedgehog was launched in order to offer developers an AI powered conversational experience geared at heightened productivity. This offers improved tools when developing for multiple form factors, and helps to improve the quality of applications with new insights, debugging, and testing solutions.

Android for Cars also received updates intended to expand the reach developers have with users in the car.

Among these updates is the global rollout of Waze on the Google Play Store for all cars with Google built-in. Additional templates were also created for Android for Cars App Library in order to accelerate development time across several app categories, such as navigation.

This update also brings tools to port media apps across Android for Cars; new app categories for driving experiences; and video, gaming, and browsing in cars. 

Additionally, Google Play has been updated so that on top of the ability to tailor by country and pre-registration status, users can now customize listings for inactive users, so they have the chance to try out an app or game again.

Google also announced that custom store listing groups for Google Ads App campaign ad groups are set to be launched in the near future. This will allow for custom listings to be served to users coming from specific ads on AdMob and YouTube.

Next, Google Workspace adds Duet AI, combining all of Workspace’s generative AI features and allowing users to collaborate with AI so they can enhance their productivity. Duet AI is also coming to Google Cloud, enabling users to solve common work challenges with the AI collaborator.

There have also been several updates to Vertex AI, including three new foundation models that can be accessed through API, tuned through an AI in Generative AI Studio, or deployed to a data science notebook. 

Lastly, Google Cloud has launched the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer. With this, Google Cloud offers users a complete range of GPU for the training and inference of machine learning models. 

For more information on these releases, visit the website. 

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“GitLab’s vision for generative AI is grounded in privacy, security, and transparency. Our partnership with Google Cloud enables GitLab to offer private and secure AI-powered features, while maintaining customer data in our cloud infrastructure,” said David DeSanto, chief product officer at GitLab. “This allows us to harness the power of Google Cloud, while continuing GitLab’s privacy-first approach to customer data. We look forward to our continued collaboration to deliver enterprise-grade AI-assisted functionalities to joint customers.” 

One of the new features is called “Explain this Vulnerability,” which provides natural language descriptions of vulnerabilities and also offers recommendations on what to do about them.

GitLab also has some existing AI features in its platform, such as Code Suggestions and Suggested Reviewers. There are also developer productivity features like Explain this Code, Summarize Issue Comments, and Summarize Merge Request Changes. 

The hope that GitLab has with this partnership is to improve “DevSecOps workflow efficiency by 10x.” According to a recent survey by the company, 62% of developers used AI to check code in 2023, which was up from just 51% in 2022. They also found that 36% use AI for code review. 

“Organizations today are required to deliver software faster than ever before to remain competitive while requiring a stronger security posture in order to maintain customer, investor, and stakeholder trust,” said June Yang, VP of Cloud AI and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud. “Together with GitLab, we’ll be able to deliver generative AI functionality that empowers our joint customers to increase delivery velocity without sacrificing security.”

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For developers experimenting with AI, Google has released the PaLM API, which can be used to build on top of the company’s language models. As of today, there is an efficient model available in terms of size and capabilities, with more sizes coming soon.

The API also brings users MakerSuite, a tool that allows for prototyping ideas and will have features for prompt engineering, synthetic data generation, and custom-model-tuning, supported by safety tools.

Google is also bringing generative AI support to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. This provides foundation models for generating text and images with audio and video coming in the future. With this, users can discover models, create and modify prompts, fine tune them with their own data, and deploy applications that use these new technologies.

Next, Generative AI App Builder connects conversational AI flows with search experiences and foundational models. The company stated that this tool is intended to help organizations build generative AI applications quickly.

Additionally, new features have been introduced in Google Workspace to help users utilize generative AI to create, connect, and collaborate.

A limited set of trusted testers now have access to a new set of features geared at making the process of writing easier. With this, a topic can be typed into Gmail or Google Docs and a draft will be generated.

“We’re so excited by the potential of generative AI, and the opportunities it will unlock — from helping people express themselves creatively, to helping developers build brand new types of applications, to transforming how businesses and governments engage their customers and constituents,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post. 

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According to the company, when compared with standard PostgreSQL, AlloyDB was faster for both transactional workloads and analytical queries. In addition, it was also faster than Amazon’s comparable service for transactional workloads. 

“Developers have many choices for building, innovating and migrating their applications. AlloyDB provides us with a compelling relational database option with full PostgreSQL compatibility, great performance, availability and cloud integration. We are really excited to co-innovate with Google and can now benefit from enterprise grade features while cost-effectively modernizing from legacy, proprietary databases,” said Bala Natarajan, senior director of data Infrastructure and cloud engineering at PayPal.

AlloyDB is intended to help enterprises transition from legacy databases by combining Google’s scale-out compute and storage, availability, security, and AI/ML based management with PostgreSQL compatibility, along with the performance, scalability, manageability, and reliability that enterprises need to run applications.

According to Google, AlloyDB provides users with improved performance and scale, heightened availability, real-time business insights, easy to understand and transparent pricing, and ML assisted management and insights. 

“We are excited about the new PostgreSQL-compatible database. AlloyDB will bring more scalability and availability with no application changes. As we run our e-commerce platform and its availability is important, we are specially expecting AlloyDB to minimize the maintenance downtime,” said Ryuzo Yamamoto, a software engineer at Mercari.

To learn more, click here. 

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“We believe that it should be trivial to deploy web applications (and other workloads) from GitLab to major cloud providers. To support this effort, Cloud Seed makes it simple and intuitive to consume appropriate Google Cloud services within GitLab,” GitLab wrote on the project’s documentation page. 

While it is initially available for Google Cloud, GitLab hopes to work with every major cloud provider to extend it to those platforms as well.

GitLab users can use the interface to set up automated deployments to Google Cloud Run, and all Git commits, branches, and tags will be deployed to the proper Cloud Run environment. 

It can also be used to provision Google Cloud SQL databases, with support for all major versions of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Service. 

To learn more, visit the Cloud Seed website. 

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In addition to the way WSL is installed, Microsoft also added a few updates as a part of this preview, including WSLg being bundled as a part of the WSL app; new wsl.exe –mount features; Linux kernel updated to 5.10.60.1; the addition of a progress indicator helper function to show a “please wait” message to show users that WSL is still running; and more.

Unqork 2021.10 released

Unqork today announced the release of Unqork 2021.10, the second major platform update of 2021. Unqork 2021.10 offers new features that empower users to build mission-critical applications with more speed, new testing capabilities, an enhanced enterprise-grade security infrastructure, and more.

As a part of Unqork 2021.10, Unqork Private Cloud was launched with the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), PrivateLink, and Microsoft Azure PrivateLink. The private cloud provides a direct and secure connection between Unqork and a user’s cloud. 

Unqork 2021.10 also brings users Unqork’s new Discovery Hub, a centralized location where developers and business users can collaborate to track, prioritize, and measure ROI for ongoing projects. In addition, Unqork 2021.10 also brings a new Parallel Execution feature, giving developers the ability to create workflows that support simultaneous automated processes.

Tableau and Google Cloud collaborate

Tableau and Google Cloud today announced their partnership in pursuit of modernizing their users’ data and analytics infrastructure and unlocking the full value of data. The combination of these will allow users to explore complex data problems in real time.

With this collaboration, Tableau and Google Cloud are working to make data more accessible and more valuable with integrations between Tableau’s analytics and Google applications. Combined, Tableau and Google Cloud support user’s digital transformations by leveraging the flexibility of the cloud to unlock as much value as possible from data, regardless of where the user is in their cloud migration.

Solo.io announces GraphQL support 

Solo.io today announced the addition of GraphQL support into Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge. This will enable developers to more efficiently query microservices while  also benefiting from the connectivity and security provided by an Istio service mesh. 

With GraphQL support, Solo.io is providing a GraphQL server, resolvers, a GraphQL schema generator, and schema stitching for GraphQL, all powered by declarative configuration. By embedding a GraphQL server natively into Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge federating GraphQL’s queries of APIs are enabled, making GraphQL’s protocol easier to adopt and implement at scale.

“Even though GraphQL allows you to describe schemas and provides the query language to retrieve data from those schemas, service developers still need to write code to manage access control, security, rate-limiting, and other API concerns,” said Yuval Kohavi, chief architect at Solo.io. “With our GraphQL extensions for Envoy and Istio, developers can auto-generate schema and use the declarative configuration capabilities of Gloo Mesh to define connectivity, security, and even observability capabilities.”

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Among the upgrades featured is native Google Cloud data source integration with Google Cloud Dataflow. This provides users with faster data ingestion in Elastic Cloud as well as a simplified data architecture. This integration allows users to easily and securely ingest Pub/Sub, Big Query, and Cloud Storage data into their Elastic Cloud deployments. 

In addition, there have also been updates to Elasticsearch and Kibana that include: enhancements to runtime fields which gives users a new way to explore their data with the flexibility of schema on read and schema on write. 

InstallAware X14 for Windows 11

InstallAware released InstallAware X14, its first major version upgrade in almost a year. Some features included in the update are: the ability to programmatically pin apps to the new Windows 11 Start Menu/Taskbar, fully updated definitions for Windows 11 and Server 2022, and the ability to deploy .NET 6 in a single click.

In addition, users can also programmatically emit setup scripts from 64-bit binaries with the new 64-bit Scripting Interface as well as gain access to Full Stack ARM64 support including native setup captures and a 100% runtime free setup engine.

For more information on the upgrade, visit InstallAware’s website.

Testim Pro free for startups under 20 employees 

Testim is now offering Testim Pro features free to startups with fewer than 20 employees. With this, smaller startups gain access to Professional plan features such as: accessibility testing, TestOps, network mocking, API testing, and more.

Testim has also recently added TestOps features like pull requests, test status, owners, folders, and insights in order to help teams grow their test automation projects more efficiently and now small startups can gain access to those tools. 

The Professional plan also includes advanced features such as: scheduler, TestOps dashboard, email validation, pull requests, and test lifecycle status, all of which are essential to integrating a companies CI/CD pipeline and scaling your quality in your application. To find out if your startup qualifies to get Testim Pro for free, visit Testim’s website. 

Apache weekly update

ASF’s official global conference series, ApacheCon, is wrapped up for 2021 with presentations for ApacheCon Asia available on the ASF Youtube channel and ApacheCon@Home presentations to be posted shortly. 

Apache’s distributed infrastructure runs across three continents and 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100.00%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers globally. 

This past week, Apache Code Snapshot showed 328 Apache committers changed 7,398,124 lines of code over 2,924 commits. The top 5 contributors listed are: Harikishna Patnala, Gary Gregory, Andy Seaborne, Daniel Gruno, and Mark Thomas.

Apache also announced the release of Apache Druid 0.22.0, Apache Kafka 3.0.0, Apache Ignite 2.11.0, Apache NetBeans 12.5, and Apache Pulsar 2.8.1.

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In addition to this, the Google shell terminal stays open while users navigate around the site and work through tutorials within Google Cloud’s documentation. This helps with processing from two different but connected tutorials.

Cloud Shell also comes with a built-in, browser-based code editor with language support debuggers for Go, Java, .NET, Python, and more.

Apache Kafka 3.0.0

Apache announced the release of Apache Kafka 3.0.0. This release introduces new features, breaking API changes, and improvements to KRaft. Users also get durability and ordering by default as the Producer enables the strongest delivery guarantees. 

In addition to this, the release includes: Kafka Connect task restart enhancements, Kafka Streams upgrades in timestamp-based synchronization, and MirrorMaker2’s flexible configuration setups. 

A full list of the enhancements can be found on the release notes.

Django 4.0 first alpha released 

Django released Django 4.0, the first stage in their 4.0 release cycle. With this release, users can experience the python standard library’s zoneinfo as the default timezone implementation in Django. 

Also included in the release is the new *expressions positional argument of UniqueConstraint() which enables users to create functional unique constraints on expressions and database functions. 

Django 4.0 also brings with it a higher level of customization with template based rendering offering enhanced customization of Forms, Formsets, and ErrorList.

For a full list of new features, see the in-development 4.0 release notes.

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The AGDK tools and libraries work across many different Android versions and work across almost any device in use today. Also, Android plans to enhance the AGDK features in future Android platform updates and the libraries will provide backward compatibility when possible. 

The Android Game Development Extension adds Android as a platform target to Visual Studio and Android said it’s working with game engine developers to be able to integrate tools and libraries directly.

Additional details are available here.

Informatica launches data governance and catalog as-a-service

The enterprise cloud management provider Informatica announced a seamless data governance and catalog-as-a-service to help enterprises modernize their data and analytics governance programs.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud enables companies to accelerate trusted insights through data and analytics. 

“The demand for access to trusted data and actionable intelligence has never been greater,” said Jitesh Ghai, chief product officer of Informatica. “Our Cloud Data Governance & Catalog solution with the industry’s first holistic data and AI governance is a big step towards helping enterprises truly operationalize an AI-powered cloud first, cloud-native approach to digital transformation.”

Google Cloud’s certificate service now generally available

Google Cloud announced that its Certificate Authority Service (CAS) is now generally available, offering a highly scalable and available private CA to address the unprecedented growth in certificates in the digital world.

The top desirable features of CAS according to Google include its scale and availability, cost savings, and security.

“Google Cloud CAS offers a virtually unbounded quota for the total number of issued certificates at a rate that can meet any of modern scales backed by an enterprise grade SLA, making customer managed deployments very hard to justify. Start planning your transition to a cloud-ready CA platform that CAS enables,” Anoosh Saboori, the product manager at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

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“Even if your team is small, it doesn’t mean your challenges or files are. Helix Sync was built to help teams go faster,” said Gerhard Krüger, cloud architect and product manager at Perforce. “Securely versioning design assets alongside code removes complexity and accelerates development.”

Helix Sync is an alternative interface for Perforce Helix Core, the game and media development standard for version control. 

Additional details on the new UI are available here.

WhiteSource Priority Score technology
WhiteSource released a Priority Score to accelerate application security and enable users to develop novel metrics for different products and projects. 

The Priority Score takes a few considerations into account including the CVSS Score, which addresses vulnerability severity, prioritization based on whether the proprietary code is making calls to the vulnerable method (effectiveness), availability of fix, ease of remediation, and malicious package probability.

“When a specific application provides access to financial data, or Personally Identifiable Information its security is considered a higher priority to handle. The WhiteSource Priority Scoring lets organizations put their DevSecOps on autopilot, and accelerate software product delivery at scale,” said Shiri Arad Ivtsan, the director of product management at WhiteSource.

IonQ now available through Qiskit
IonIQ announced the full integration of its quantum computing platform with Qiskit, an open-source quantum software development kit.

Qiskit users with an IonIQ account are now able to run their quantum programs on IonIQ’s cloud quantum computing platform with little to no modification by changing the code to point to the IonIQ backend and setting it to run as usual. 

“IonQ is excited to make our quantum computers and APIs easily accessible to the Qiskit community,” said IonQ CEO & President Peter Chapman. “Open source has already revolutionized traditional software development. With this integration, we’re bringing the world one step closer to the first generation of widely-applicable quantum applications.”

Broadcom and Google Cloud team up on digital transformation
Broadcom and Google Cloud announced a strategic collaboration that will enable Broadcom to deliver its security and enterprise operations software on Google Cloud and also enable businesses to deploy Broadcom solutions in security, DevOps and more on Google Cloud’s trusted, global infrastructure.

Other benefits of the partnership include the accelerated development of new and transformational cloud-native services, reduced latency for service-to-service communications and improved scale and resiliency. 

“Leveraging Google Cloud enables Broadcom Software to scale and innovate faster to meet the growing needs of digital businesses globally,” said Tom Krause, president of Broadcom Software Group. “This collaboration is fundamental to delivering secure access to cloud applications and providing enterprises with increased performance, continuous compliance, and enhanced security that empowers an organization’s cloud adoption journey.”

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