The keynote at Unite Copenhagen revealed an upcoming "XR Interaction toolkit". Will this be kept seperate from or integrated into MRKT?
MRTK will be investigating and evaluating Unity's announced features. Once we have more information, we will open GitHub issues to track any required work.
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have done my due diligence, and not found any other posts that answer this question, but as usual, if you know a similar question, point me that way!
I noticed a long time back that Libspotify has been dicontinued:
(https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/libspotify/)
So, my question is - what should we do for developing Desktop applications?
They do state: "We hope to be able to provide you with a new library for other platforms." But, this has been going on since 2015!
I have seen many projects in GitHub still using Libspotify - so what should we do? An update was promised "in the upcoming months" but I've not seen anything yet.
What should we do for developing Desktop Applications?
We at Spotify don't currently provide playback as part of our platform offering outside of our iOS and Android SDKs, and I don't have any updates on that at the moment. As mentioned on the website, we hope to be able to provide playback SDKs for more platforms in the future. We don't support any new development on libspotify.
You can use the Spotify Web API to interact with Spotify in a variety of ways, including getting information about metadata, and accessing/modifying user libraries and playlists, which may be useful. You can also use the Applescript API to control playback on macOS, which may also help.
The Spotify Web API is pretty straight forward to use. Of course it defines the protocol rather than implements it so it is OS independent.
I put together a few classes to help unwrap some of the JSON parameters simply. These were written in Swift for macOS.
In the Google Cast SDK Overview video published on YouTube by Google, the presenter says
There are design implications that are driven from the Design Checklist so in addition to the platform specific guidelines for Android, iOS and Chrome, it is important to do a thorough review of the Google Cast Design Checklist.
The sentence reads like legal-speak, but more importantly, it mentions existence of platform specific design guidelines for Chrome. I never knew that there is anything like that. I attempted googling around, I could find guidelines for Android, iOS, but nothing for Chrome. Does anybody know where the Chrome guidelines can be found?
The design checklist is here: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/design_checklist
The starting point for Chromecast developer doc is here: https://developers.google.com/cast/
There is an unified design guide for both Android and Web Apps that was announced on June 25 2014 at the Google I/O keynote. It is available at the https://www.google.com/design/ site. Regarding Google endorsed UI frameworks, there are two. Polymer Paper and Google Web Starter Kit. Additionally, there are stylesheets on GitHub from various people that aim to replicate the look and feel of the Chrome Settings page as well as various widely-used opinionated Responsive CSS Frameworks that can provide design clues, most notably Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation.
Polymer Paper
Polymer Paper is a set of Polymer Web Components which implements the unified mobile and web UI concept called Material Design. Some of the distinctive characteristics is the use of drop shadows and animated transitions to hide latency and give feeling of responsiveness. The components are built with the Polymer framework on top of web components, so it works best in cutting edge browsers.
Google Web Starter Kit
Together with the Google Web Fundamentals developer guide the Starter Kit provides a starting point regarding look and feel for your web app (a style guide with UI elements, e.g. sandwich sidebar), as well as preconfigured selection of helper tools to better manage your CSS styles, minify resources, keep performance considerations in mind and so on. The Starter Kit employs production ready tools and procedures that can be used today.
There is nothing like that, the presenter probably just misspoke. The Thinking in Web Apps page on Google Developers could give you some hints, but it feels outdated in many aspects.ยจ
Just some more general advice on that:
People tend to gravitate towards Twitter Bootstrap these days, so base your design on that and you will play well with others.
Watch the trends and adopt what the big players are using. For example, the sliding drawer on the side seems to be big now.
Regarding the ongoing effort by Google to allow easy porting of Chrome Apps to mobile phones, looking at the Android and iOS guides may help. Most importantly try to optimize your app for touch, avoiding hover, right clicking and minimize the need to type.
Since straight Java development isn't going to be supported on BB10 (Am I right?), at least not without using the Android Java Runtime (which I don't want to use), I'd like to know if there will be official support and an official API from RIM for accessing and writing on the Secure Element of the upcoming BB10 handsets. I'm a developer who's considering the BB10 platform for developing an application which will need read/write operations on the Secure Element. Would that be possible? Would I be needing special permissions and/or keys from RIM?
Apparently there's not much documentation on the subject so far.
They have removed the SE on BB10 and left only the UICC...And we feel it's a good thing, as there were loads of issues with accessing the SE of a SIM
After some posting on other forums, I learned that there is indeed an API for accessing the SE in the upcoming BB10 platform. It was included in the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK (Beta 2). So far, it seems it serves my purposes.
Your best bet would be to go to the RIM issue tracker site, you can get access if you make an account at the BlackBerry Jam Zone. Submit an issue under the BlackBerry 10 project making the business case for what you want to do. They may be able to tell you what their plans are, but there is still some mutability in the road map if you can make a strong enough case.
I understand that with MonoTouch and MonoDroid that you develop against the native UI layer, which is a good thing. However, I was wondering if there were any cross platform Mono API layers for features such as camera, location, storage, notifications etc... ?
PhoneGap supplies a JavaScript a abstraction layer that does just this. Is there a Mono equivalent?
There is an official monomobile api project from xamarin - that provides camera, contacts and gps abstractions, plus there are discussions (but not firm roadmaps) about extending this further. See http://blog.xamarin.com/2011/11/22/introducing-the-xamarin-mobile-api/ for an intro
Beyond that:
some api's exist cross platform from the start - eg isolated storage can be used on all platforms.
I've seen a few other GitHub projects started - eg chrisntr's mono extensions
I've written a few abstractions (e.g. File, gps, camera) in http://GitHub.com/slodge/mvvmcross
I recently came across MonoDroid.Dialog. I have yet to use it, but if it is as easy as MonoTouch.Dialog to do tables then I will be very happy with it.
Google has taken up the implementation of WebRTC in Chrome very seriously as indicated by the frequent updates in the Canary and Beta channel of Chrome. Are there any other browsers who are upto implementing this?
Firefox/IE/Opera are working on it. No word from Apple/Safari or Microsoft/IE, although IE is unlikely at best, because they're working on their own standard unfortunately. Crazier things have happened, but I wouldn't count on it. Apple has been fairly mum on the subject.
If you want support for those other browsers, we built a solution for it # Frozen Mountain (I work there) using IceLink.
Opera Mobile does offer support to WebRTC. And according to this article, Mozilla isn't all that far behind either. Ericsson Labs has their own custom browser which supports WebRTC. But it runs only on Ubuntu as of now. WebRTC itself is still under development and I'm sure that we can see complete support from all major browsers in some time.
Mozilla is far along in implementing WebRTC, and we're leading the design and implementation of DataChannels within WebRTC, as well as Identity work. We're working on a project-specific repo right now (alder), but pieces have already moved over into mozilla-central, such as initial support for getUserMedia.