Alexa Smart Home Skills Gain Flexibility with New API

The latest update to Amazon Smart Home Skill API, available as a preview, introduces new capabilities that can be used as building blocks to model device settings or features. Additionally, Smart Home skills have gained greater flexibility by enabling the use of custom intents.

Swift 5 Enters Latest Development Stage to Release

After officially delivering Swift 4.2, the Swift team is now focusing on Swift 5 by kicking off the final phase of its release process. Planned to be released early 2019, Swift 5 aims to bring ABI stability to the language while preserving source compatibility.

Kotlin 1.3 Introduces Stable Coroutines, Contracts, and More

At KotlinConf 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, JetBrains announced Kotlin 1.3 RC, introducing new language features such as stable coroutines, contracts, inline classes, and more. At KotlinConf, Google and JetBrains also announced their joint effort to establish the Kotlin Foundation.

Smoke is a New Lightweight Server-Side Framework for Swift from Amazon

Amazon Smoke framework is a new open-source light-weight server-side framework written in Swift and aimed to build REST-like or RPC-like services. Its architecture stresses ease of use and favours a pure-functional programming style for request handlers.

New R8 Android Code Shrinker Available in Android Studio 3.3 Beta

Following the migration to D8 as its new Dalvik compiler, Google has been working on a new code shrinker, R8, which is now available in Android Studio 3.3 beta. R8 promises to deliver smaller APK files in less time.