Swift Might Not Be As Fast As Apple Claims It To Be: First Benchmarks
Performance is one of the benefits that Apple claims its new Swift programming language should bring to OS X and iOS developers, and being in beta hasn’t prevented independent developers from running benchmarks and reporting their findings. Perhaps unsurprisingly these show that in some cases Swift performance is not yet satisfactory.
Google Announces Development Kit for a Tablet with Advanced Vision Capabilities
Google has announced the availability of Project Tango Development Kit, which should allow developers to make applications that track full 3-dimensional motion and capture surfaces in the environment. Tango development kit, created in collaboration with NVDIA, includes the new Tegra K1 mobile processor and aims at providing a platform designed for computer vision and 3D sensing.
Amazon Announces Mobile Associates API for iOS
Amazon has announced that it has started exploring integration of the Mobile Associates API (MAA) into iOS apps. Amazon encourages developers to present their use cases for them to participate in a private beta program that will guarantee early access to MAA for iOS. Interested developers will be selected by Amazon based on their use case and their willingness to provide feedback.
Beta Testing on iOS 8 with TestFlight
At WWDC 2014, Apple announced the integration of TestFlight within the iOS 8 development tool suite. This aims at giving developers more options to set up a beta testing program and make the whole process a lot easier, thus promising to fix a longstanding complaint from developers about the hardness of testing iOS apps before launch.