Thanks to the work of Katayama Hirofumi and Mark Jansen, ReactOS now better serves requests for fonts and font metrics, leading to an improved rendering of applications and a more pleasant user experience. Your continued donations have also funded a contract for Giannis Adamopoulos to fix every last quirk in our theming components. The merits of this work can be seen in ReactOS 0.4.5, which comes with a smoother themed user interface and the future promises to bring even more improvements. In another funded effort, Hermès Bélusca-Maïto has got MS Office 2010 to run under ReactOS, another application from the list of most voted apps. Don’t forget to install our custom Samba package from the Application Manager if you want to try it out for yourself.

Developers will be able to choose from 3 states shown in the top image: not excluding devices based on SafetyNet, excluding those that don't pass integrity, or excluding the latter plus those that aren't certified by Google. That means any dev could potentially block their apps from showing and being directly installable in the Play Store on devices that are rooted and/or running a custom ROM, as well as on emulators and uncertified devices (think Meizu and its not-so-legal way of getting Play Services and the Play Store on its phones). This is exactly what many of you were afraid would happen after the Play Store app started surfacing a Device certification status.

Today the Android team is excited to announce that we are officially adding support for the Kotlin programming language. Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun. It has already been adopted by several major developers - Expedia, Flipboard, Pinterest, Square, and others - for their production apps. Kotlin also plays well with the Java programming language; the effortless interoperation between the two languages has been a large part of Kotlin's appeal.

The Kotlin plug-in is now bundled with Android Studio 3.0 and is available for immediate download. Kotlin was developed by JetBrains, the same people who created IntelliJ, so it is not surprising that the IDE support for Kotlin is outstanding.

For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chance to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity. Kotlin is easy to get started with and can be gradually introduced into existing projects, which means that your existing skills and technology investments are preserved.

So for today's AMD Financial Analyst Day, AMD has released a little bit more information as part of the next step of their campaign. The first Vega product to be released has a name, it has a design, and it has performance figures. Critically, it even has a release date. I hesitate to call this a full announcement in the typical sense - AMD is still holding some information back until closer to the launch - but we now finally have a clear picture of where the Vega generation kicks off for AMD.

Say hello to the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

If you had any version of Windows since Vista running the default Windows Update, you would have had the critical Microsoft Security Bulletin known as "MS17-010" pushed down to your PC and automatically installed. Without doing a thing, when WannaCry came along almost 2 months later, the machine was protected because the exploit it targeted had already been patched. It's because of this essential protection provided by automatic updates that those advocating for disabling the process are being labelled the IT equivalents of anti-vaxxers and whilst I don't fully agree with real world analogies like this, you can certainly see where they're coming from. As with vaccinations, patches protect the host from nasty things that the vast majority of people simply don't understand.

Friday saw the largest global ransomware attack in internet history, and the world did not handle it well. We're only beginning to calculate the damage inflicted by the WannaCry program - in both dollars and lives lost from hospital downtime - but at the same time, we're also calculating blame.

There's a long list of parties responsible, including the criminals, the NSA, and the victims themselves - but the most controversial has been Microsoft itself. The attack exploited a Windows networking protocol to spread within networks, and while Microsoft released a patch nearly two months ago, it’s become painfully clear that patch didn’t reach all users. Microsoft was following the best practices for security and still left hundreds of thousands of computers vulnerable, with dire consequences. Was it good enough?

European companies such as Spotify, Rocket Internet and Deezer have complained that online platforms - such as search engines and app stores - abuse their position as gateways to customers to promote their own services or impose imbalanced terms and conditions.

The Commission said that initial findings of an investigation launched last year showed platforms were delisting products or services without due notice, restricting access to data or not making search result rankings transparent enough.

The Commission wants to establish fair practice criteria, measures to improve transparency and a system to help to resolve disputes.

The KEYone got me out of CrackBerry retirement and using a BlackBerry Smartphone again (and loving it!). I have no shortage of phones at my disposal and can reach for an iPhone or Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy whenever I want. Since picking up the KEYone, I've never felt that urge. What more can be said than that? With battery life that will last you all day and night (and well into the next day) and a smart physical keyboard that makes typing on buttons feel new school again, it's a communication-centric phone that power users will love.

The 30th anniversary of Amiga inspired me to dig into Amiga programming. Back in Amiga's golden era (late '80s and early '90s) I never had the chance to try this out since despite my relentless whining my parents wouldn't get me one. Luckily later when I was studying at the uni, I managed to bargain one fine Amiga 500 specimen from the flea market at an affordable price of 20 euros.

Although Amiga as such is not that useful a platform to know these days, learning how to write programs for it can be very educational. Amiga as an environment is much simpler than (for instance) modern PCs. This makes learning low-level programming on it faster than on more complex environments. Although the hardware architecture is quite simple, it has some computer system design features that are still in use in modern environments as well such as DMA and interrupts. On top of being plain fun, writing assembly on Amiga teaches programming concepts that are usually hidden by higher-level languages and modern operating systems.

I've written this blog post together with Harri Salokorpi. We'll walk you through an example that creates graphics on the display with a simple animation. We both hope this blog post provides a quick start to those who want to try out programming on this legendary device. However, we're mostly going to use an emulator as a development environment, so the real device is not mandatory.

Opera Neon, released in January, is an experimental browser that envisions the future of web browsers, similar to the way concept cars predict the future of automobiles. One of its novelties is the ability to seamlessly hop between discovering new content and chatting with friends, or even share online discoveries while browsing.

Inspired by Neon, we decided to bring those seamless transitions between chat and discoveries to the Opera browser. The result is Opera Reborn, complete with integrated popular messengers so you can keep chatting with friends without skipping a beat.

The Mesa renderer in Haiku presently ventures into software rendering. Haiku uses software for rendering frame buffers and then writes them to the graphics hardware. The goal of my project is to port Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Driver for i915, from the Linux kernel to Haiku with the help of DragonflyBSD's Linux Compatibility layer, so that those drivers can be later extended to add OpenGL support (Mesa3D) for hardware accelerated 3D rendering.

The past few years haven't been great for the luxury watch market. Economic downturns, currency devaluations, and the development of the smartwatch - once poised to be the next major tech sector following the smartphone and tablet - helped usher in two years of declines in sales and profits for the Swiss watch industry. The common narrative was that the watch industry was being killed by smartwatches and was ultimately doomed. But much like the introduction of quartz watches in the '70s, which nearly decimated the luxury watch market, Switzerland rebounded and is now growing once again.

The arguments are well-worn, and we've been hearing them ever since Apple opened the App Store for the iPhone. Windows 10 S blocks the execution of any program that wasn't downloaded from the Windows Store. Arbitrary downloaded apps, or even apps with physical install media, are forbidden, a move that on the one hand prevents running malware but on the other blocks the use of most Windows software. Windows Store apps include both tightly sandboxed apps, built using the Universal Windows Platform, and lightly restricted Win32 apps that have been packaged for the Store using the Desktop App converter, formerly known as Project Centennial.

This positions Microsoft as a gatekeeper - although its criteria for entry within the store is for the most part not stringent, it does reserve the right to remove software that it deems undesirable - and means that the vast majority of extant Windows software can't be used. This means that PC mainstays, from Adobe Photoshop to Valve's Steam, can't be used on Windows 10 S. It also means that Windows 10 S systems can't be used to develop new Windows software. Should you want to run this kind of software, you'll need to upgrade to the full Windows 10 Pro for $50.