Month: May 2017

Microsoft announces “Windows Template Studio” for Developers

Dan Uff May 12, 2017 0

Today, we are pleased to announce the next evolution in your File → New Universal Windows Platform app in Visual Studio – Windows Template Studio. Windows Template Studio addresses a top community ask in our developer survey to make it easier and provide guidance to create new projects that target the Universal Windows Platform. In this post, we’d like to spend a few minutes introducing Windows Template Studio, and showing you how it works.

Windows Template Studio uses a dev-friendly wizard to get your UWP apps to F5 in no time, bringing together the pages, frameworks and features that you want. Our wizard walks developers through four steps to quickly scaffold a new UWP app:

Project Type: Select between standard layouts and predefined controls.
Framework selection: Select the structure of your UWP app with in-house and third-party support.
App pages: Select which pages that make sense for the app, that you are trying to create.
App features: Easily add features such as background tasks with one click.

Furthermore, we’re open-sourcing Windows Template Studio, welcoming UWP devs to take the generation engine further – adding additional capabilities and app pages, improving the implemented best practices and patterns – and encouraging UWP devs to make the engine their own – tailoring it to their company’s specific needs.

Windows Template Studio is the evolution of Windows App Studio. App Studio produced a lot of great apps, and we learned a lot from building it and what helps developers. Where App Studio focused on creating a full app, Windows Template Studio focuses on high quality code generation for a strong starting point where developers can start building their application.

A Lap Around Windows Template Studio

We kick off Windows Template Studio by creating a new UWP app project. In the Visual Studio 2017 ‘New Project’ dialog, select the Visual C# → Windows Universal node.

For more information, click here.

Apple Watch able to detect Abnormal Heart Rhythm With 97% Accuracy

Dan Uff May 12, 2017 0

The Apple Watch's built-in heart rate monitor is 97 percent accurate when detecting the most common form of an abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an algorithm to sort through the data, according to a new study conducted by the University of California, San Francisco and the team behind the Cardiogram app (via TechCrunch).

There were 6,158 participants in the study, all of whom used the Cardiogram app on the Apple Watch to monitor their heart rate. Most were known to have normal EKG readings, but 200 suffer from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an occasional irregular heartbeat).

To read the rest of the article (including usage charts) click here.

Apple iTunes coming to the Windows App Store

Dan Uff May 11, 2017 0

At its developer's conference, Microsoft announced that Apple iTunes will be available on the Windows App Store by the end of the year.

Snap’s Stock is Sinking, FAST

Dan Uff May 11, 2017 0

(CNBC.com): In early March, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel received a hefty stock bonus worth about $750 million on completion of the company's initial public offering.

But on Wednesday, a poor reception for Snap's first earnings report wiped out more than that amount of his stake in the cmopany.

Snap fell short of Wall Street expectations for revenue and user growth in the first quarter, sending its shares down $5.35, or roughly 23 percent, to $17.66 in after-hours trading.

At that level, they're hovering just above their IPO price of $17.

If that same price drop is sustained in regular trading Thursday, it will cost Spiegel more than $1.3 billion in the space of less than 24 hours. Spiegel's co-founder Bobby Murphy will take a haircut of $1.1 billion.

At the time of the IPO, both men owned 210.97 million shares, including 97.16 million of Class A shares, 5.86 million of Class B and 107.94 million of Class C. Spiegel was granted an additional 37.4 million shares upon conclusion of the IPO.

Given the size of their stakes, any $5 drop in Snap's stock price will slash the value of their holdings by over $1 billion.

Still, even if the shares drop to $17, their holdings will be worth more than $3.5 billion each.

The company's earliest venture capital investors, Benchmark Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, are also in line for a big haircut when markets open on Thursday.

A $5 drop in Snap will cost Benchmark $604 million and Lightspeed $410 million, based on their post-IPO stakes.