Flock OS is the world’s first chat operating system

  20 Dec 2016 , 17:23

Flock, a team messenger for businesses, on Tuesday launched the world’s first chat operating system called “FlockOS”. The new OS allows developers to build customised apps, bots and integrations on Flock.

The developers can either use the customised apps within their organisations or publish it on Flock’s App Store, making them available for all Flock users.

“With FlockOS, we have thrown open our platform to the global developer community. Our User Interface (UI) is a canvas for developers, allowing them to create truly intuitive apps and integrations which seamlessly blend with the core product,” Bhavin Turakhia, CEO, Flock, said in a statement.

“Chat will soon become the next operating system, probably within the next three to five years. FlockOS empowers teams and developers to create custom experiences within Flock that is designed for their unique team needs,” Turakhia added.

With FlockOS, developers can build apps that provide a tightly integrated experience by using widgets. These include the attachment widget, sidebar widget and modal widget.

FlockOS provides setup slash commands, providing an additional option for users to interact with the app and can configure a Bot to send directed messages to users, carry on conversations and completing tasks from within Flock.

IANS

Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the entire Visual Studio IDE to macOS this month

visual studio microsoft

By tech2 News Staff /  14 Nov 2016 , 18:07

Microsoft has announced Visual Studio for Mac at the Connect(); conference this month.

For the first time in its history, Microsoft is bringing its Visual Studio development tool to the Mac. As Microsoft explains in its blog, “At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.” The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is designed to feel familiar to a macOS user, while still offering the cross-platform and cloud-based development capabilities of its Windows counterpart.

This IDE will reside alongside Visual Studio Code for macOS, which is a stand-alone, cross-platform text editor for developers.

Microsoft’s sudden interest in cross-platform development seems to stem from a deeper desire to connect with developers, regardless of their OS of choice, and offer them a common, connected platform to work on.

Microsoft has shown tremendous interest in cross-platform development this year, notably with their acquisition of Xamarin. Xamarin started out as a cross-platform development tool for developing iOS, Android, Windows and Mac apps. With its acquisition, Microsoft integrated its workflows into Visual Studio itself.

As TechCrunch suggests, Microsoft has realised that the future depends on cloud-based tools and services like Azure and that’s also where the company is making its money. If more developers start using Visual Studio, more developers will inevitably start using Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

For developers, this is a win-win anyway.