Microsoft also announced that it’s moving from text-only search & chat to one that’s more visual with rich image/video answers and new multimodal support coming shortly. Users can get more visual answers including charts and graphs and updated formatting of answers, to help them find information more easily. Image Creator has also been expanded to all languages in Bing.

Microsoft Edge will be redesigned with a sleeker and enhanced UI and is adding the ability to incorporate visual search in chat so that users can upload images and search the web for related content.

Chat history allows users to pick up where they left off and return to previous chats in Bing chat with chat history. Chats can then be moved to Edge Sidebar so that they can be kept on hand while browsing. 

Microsoft stated that it will soon add export and share functionalities into chat for times when people want to easily share conversations with others on social media.

“The new AI-powered Bing has already helped people more easily find or create what they are looking for, making chat a great tool for both understanding and taking action. The integration of Image Creator saves you time by completing the task of creating the image you need right within chat,”  Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer wrote in a blog post that contains additional details on the new features. 

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The new release of the IDE includes improvements to help build UIs with Live Edit, new features that assist with inspecting apps, IntelliJ updates, and more. 

Developers can build an app using Compose by pushing code changes directly to attached devices or emulators. You can automatically push any changes made to a file, and the user interface will update in real time. This feature called Live Edit, is still experimental, and you can activate it in the Editor Settings. However, it is important to note that there are some known limitations to this feature.

Also, a new System UI Mode selector on the toolbar enables users to switch wallpapers and see how themed app icons react to chosen wallpapers. Dynamic colors can be enabled in the app and the new wallpaper attribute. 

Network Inspector Traffic interception now shows all traffic data for full timelines by default and users can create and manage rules that help test how an app behaves when encountering different responses. 

Updates to App Quality Insights help to discover, investigate and reproduce issues reported by Crashlytics and the latest update now enables users to close issues or add useful annotations in the Notes pane.

Additional features include build analyzer task categorization, one-click automated profileable build and run, Lint support for SDK extensions, and Android Gradle Plugin 8.0.0. 

According to Google, Jetpack Compose and Material 3 templates are now recommended for new projects. 

Additional details are available here.

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According to the company, the main highlights in this release are new controls for .NET MAUI, promotion of 10 MAUI components to production status, improvements to the PDF Viewer, and more accessibility features in the PDF Library. 

The new controls in .NET MAUI include the input control, Masked Entry; the alert control, Popup; and loading indicator, Shimmer. 

Ones that are now production ready include Funnel Charts, Pyramid Charts, Maps, Backdrop, Text Input Layout, Calendar, Autocomplete, ComboBox, DataForm, and Rating. 

“We are kicking off our first major release of the year with a generous batch of updates for the cross-platform .NET MAUI framework,” said Daniel Jebaraj, CEO of Syncfusion. “We want mobile developers to have a healthy variety of production-ready tools they can use across every platform they can target.”

PDF Viewer improvements span text search, document link and hyperlink navigation, RTL support through the UI, and localization. 

There are also new Cartesian chart types supported, such as range column, bubble, stacked column, and waterfall, which are useful for developers working in data visualization.

Accessibility improvements to PDF Library include the ability to extract PDF tags from a tagged document, which is useful for those using screen readers.

Other updates to file-format libraries are that Markdown files can be converted to Word documents maintaining original images, and slicers can be used to filter table data in Excel files.

Updates for web developers include production-ready Blazor Mention and Rating components, compatibility with Nuxt 3 and Vitest frameworks with Syncfusion Vue, and new Ribbon control for Essential JS 2 platforms. 

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The platform provides an advanced technology stack, which allows multiple users to edit together in real-time or with the ‘Operational Transformation’ algorithm.

It also includes a user-friendly database spreadsheet interface and database-native architecture through Changeset / Operation / Action / Snapshot.

The database spreadsheet UI enables users to use separated workspaces in place of App/Base-based structure and make unlimited tables link together. It includes dark mode and theme customization in addition to seven view types and a one-click API panel. 

Users can also activate row permissions with a single click through the Mirror functionality.

APITable is easily extensible and allows users to customize graph and chart dashboards, data column types, automation robot actions and more. 

It comes equipped with enterprise features such as SAML, single sign-on, database auto backup, a data exporter, the ability to auditor and watermark.

Additional details on APITable are available here. 

The post SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: APITable appeared first on SD Times.

Users can use it to build complicated front ends without any experience in React, CSS, or event HTML. They can also drag and drop over 35 built-in UI components for more complicated frontends. 

With ToolJet, developers can also verify the current properties of components, queries, and global states of applications. In addition, every app can have multiple pages linked with one another.

“We were looking for a low-code platform to migrate our team processes previously based on worksheets. By using Tooljet, we have been able to shorten significantly the design and development time of our tools and enrich their functionality. Moreover, the Tooljet team has always been reactive and keen to address our requests on the fly,” Francois Xavier Lecarpentier, head of research production management at Orange said. 

The solution is enterprise-ready with audit logging, permission and access controls, air-gapped deployment, priority support, and the ability to integrate with Okta, AzureAD, Google

or OIDC for a seamless authentication.

The company behind ToolJet (also named ToolJet) recently raised $4.6 million in a Pre-Series A funding round.

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The framework is built on top of Svelte, a UI component framework which makes it much easier to build UIs than by working in the DOM directly. 

SvelteKit defaults to client-side navigation after the initial server-rendered page load, which allows for fast page transitions, state that lasts between pages, and less data usage. 

It also enables developers to use one language instead of having two apps that generate HTML and handle client-side interactions separately. The app can be deployed as a traditional Node server or by using serverless functions at the edge through SvelteKit. 

Developers can build apps with personalized or dynamic data without having to fetch data from the browser after the page loads. 

SvelteKit 1.0 uses Vite, a build tool that includes support for hot module reloading, TypeScript, and other essential developer tools. Users can then install plugins through Vite and Rollup ecosystems to add support for other tools.

If an app was built with the pre-release versions of SvelteKit, the company recommends upgrading to the final pre-release version ‘@sveltejs/kit@1.0.0-next.587’ before upgrading to 1.0. 

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“The goal is to allow any company to manage user identity and risk in a way that suits them and their unique changing needs,” the project’s GitHub page states. 

It allows for multiple vendors accessible in one UI and case management dashboards, customizable UX and UI, and more.

With Ballerine Web & Mobile SDK Flows users can generate custom-made, branded flows to collect KYC/KYB documents and other user information. 

Web SDK offers pre-made KYC/KYB Templates and UI packs, customizable UI and flow to fit the desired experience and brand. 

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The project aims to reduce costs associated with Running production machine learning workflows at scale with new capabilities. The PyTorch training operator can now be scaled up and down introducing elastic training to make use of ephemeral or spot instances and Arrikto added the ability to monitor notebook servers and shut down those that are idle.

The newly released Kubeflow 1.5 includes lower infrastructure costs and helps simplify the operation of the end-to-end machine learning platform. The newest version also includes contributions from Google, Arrikto, IBM, Twitter and Rakuten, and others.

Kubeflow’s UI now also has a more uniform user experience across its components and also simplifies support for high-availability options in its AutoML component.

“Kubeflow is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the complexity of machine learning at scale” said Constantinos Venetsanopoulos, CEO at Arrikto. “As large-scale machine learning projects drive more and deeper value for the world’s largest companies, tools like Kubeflow will be instrumental in helping those companies not get bogged down in complexity and cost that so often hamper those efforts. Arrikto’s mission to help lead the Kubeflow community will continue as we  make the development, training and serving of models at scale less complex, more cost efficient and a create a more tightly integrated experience.”

Additional details on Kubeflow are available here. 

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The new features are built on top of the new opt-in concurrent renderer which is only enabled when someone uses a concurrent feature. Concurrency enables React to prepare multiple versions of a UI at the same time and it uses advanced techniques in its internal implementation such as priority queues and multiple buffering.

“When we design APIs, we try to hide implementation details from developers. As a React developer, you focus on what you want the user experience to look like, and React handles how to deliver that experience. So we don’t expect React developers to know how concurrency works under the hood,” the React team wrote in a blog post. “However, Concurrent React is more important than a typical implementation detail — it’s a foundational update to React’s core rendering model. So while it’s not super important to know how concurrency works, it may be worth knowing what it is at a high level.”

One key feature of Concurrent React is that rendering is interruptible. For example, when it starts to render an update, it can pause in the middle, then continue later and even abandon an in-progress render. 

React guarantees that the UI will appear consistent even if a render is interrupted. It can prepare new screens in the background without blocking the main thread which means that the UI can respond immediately to user input even while rendering a large task. 

Concurrent React can remove sections of the UI from the screen, then add them back later while reusing the previous state with reusable state. 

React also said that it provided new APIs to make it easier for libraries to take advantage of concurrent features, expecting that the main way developers will add concurrency to their app is by using a concurrent-enabled library or framework.

The new automatic batching feature works when React groups multiple state updates into a single re-render for better performance. Also, the new transition feature distinguishes between urgent and non-urgent update.

New suspense features enable developers to declaratively specify the loading state for a part of the component tree if it’s not yet ready to be displayed.

In this release React also redesigned the APIs it exposes for rendering on the client and server. These changes allow users to continue using the old APIs in React 17 mode while they upgrade to the new APIs in React 18.

React is also working on expanding features such as Server Components which will allow developers to build apps that span the server and client to combine the interactivity of client-side apps with the improved performance of traditional server rendering.

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Instead of giving me technical tips, he said, “Look at the technology as a customer would. Ask yourself: What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? When would you use feature A versus feature B? Why do they both exist?”

It turned out that while I was looking at things from an internal perspective – asking myself how can I learn a skill that I can apply from a technology perspective – he was telling me to be more externally focused. He was encouraging me to look at it from the outside in, to ask myself: how does a customer look at that product or that service? This article is going to build on that theme, because that is really how you gain incredibly valuable insights into your software products and services.

It’s critical to find this balance between internal concerns — How do we build and deploy our software? — and external concerns — How do customers use our software? What is their experience like? What works well, and what doesn’t?

To me, the true value of DevOps is that it brings these two areas together and harmonizes them, so we gain valuable insights that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. Such knowledge and understanding can’t simply be extracted from a book or a training course because they’re going to be unique to your offering and will depend on its characteristics, features, and how customers react to and use them.

So why is DevOps the glue that brings these internal and external concerns together? The response is as you might expect —  it’s many different elements. There’s the collaboration between development activities and production or maintenance; tasks that different people and teams used to do but are now increasingly being conducted by the same individuals. I actually strongly advocate the latter option, because that is one of the best ways to gain insights into how customers are using your service. I also strongly suggest that as you look into DevOps’ various processes, tools, automation solutions, and many other great things, always ask: What value do they provide?

Focusing on the customer by fine-tuning operations

Today, you have to be especially relentless in focusing on your customer, innovating quickly, adding new features and capabilities, and, of course, fixing any issues that come up. Before the pandemic, we were already approaching a totally digital economy; now we are almost there. This means things move faster than they used to. This means competitors can easily and quickly copy your business model. Most of all, this means you can’t afford to be complacent; you need to move quickly, and DevOps is going to help you do this. 

One of the ways is by streamlining operations, fine-tuning your service, and learning how customers react to and interact with it. How do you do this? Look at metrics, see what alarms are triggered, and observe where patterns exist. 

You can learn a lot about your service just from looking through the ticket queue. You’ll see what customers are asking for, what areas don’t work for them and even which aspects of the product/service confuse them or what things didn’t work the way they expected. Those are areas where you can really reduce the friction and make things a lot better for you and your customers in the process.

 Focusing on customers by expanding the “bubble”

I’ve worked with engineers, and they typically don’t get as much exposure to customers — or to product managers who are a proxy for the customer — as they would like. It is too easy to get inside of, and stay in, that internal bubble. That’s why we need to expand that bubble so teams are exposed not just to the development of our apps, but also to how we operate them and how we get them into our customers’ hands. That’s where it gets really exciting.

While it isn’t always so clear, think about who your customer really is. That’s who you should be focused on, whether that be through fixing problems or adding new features and capabilities to delight them.

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