Why this hasn't happened before is a mystery, but at long last a big software company has decided to rebel against the App Store. Epic Games has filed a civil anti-trust lawsuit against Apple - and made fun of them with a parody of the famous 1984 Apple ad. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Google's intuitive learn-to code-platform, Grasshopper
has added a Gallery feature, the idea of which is to promote sharing of  projects and to showcase your code.  

Further to yesterday's report of layoffs at Mozilla we now know that Mozilla's MDN team are among those losing their jobs, which will come as a blow to the many developers who rely on MDN as a source of quality documentation.

Elyra AI Toolkit is now available in a 1.0 release. The open source project extends the JupyterLab user interface to simplify the development of data science and AI models.

Blaming the impact of COVID-19, CEO Mitchell Baker announced yesterday that Mozilla is laying off 250 employees, a quarter of its workforce, and shuttering operations in Taiwan. Another 60 Mozillians are changing roles. 

Microsoft Research has announced several improvements to the use of reinforcement learning in gaming. The improvements include the development of  game agents that learn how to collaborate in teams with human players.

Edge now has over eight percent of the desktop browser market, gaining half a percentage point between March and July 2020. Chrome, however,has fared even better with over a three and a half percentage increase, giving it a share of over 70%.

Project ACRN has released version 2 of its IoT hypervisor. Supported by the Linux Foundation, ACRN is an open-source, lightweight hypervisor that supports IoT functions including graphics, imaging, and audio in less under 40K lines of code.

Microsoft has announced Open Service Mesh (OSM) an open-source lightweight and extensible cloud-native service mesh that runs on Kubernetes. A proposal to donate OSM to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has already been submitted.

Julia has been updated with improvements including struct layouts and allocation optimizations, and stabilization of the multithreading API.

There are more cameras in the world and more people taking photos all the time than ever before. What is more we all tend to take the same shots whenever we are near something "touristy". A new technique can put these crowdsourced photos together into a single image, capturing the many viewpoints.

If you've not visited the I Programmer webzine (web-based magazine) before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's additions to Book Watch Archive and our Book Review of the Week. 

More than two dozen human genes have been renamed so that they can be typed into a spreadsheet without being formatted as dates. New guidelines for standardized gene naming explicitly allow for renaming genes to avoid problems with data handling.

The OpenJDK team is getting close to its goal of moving the source code of open source Java to GitHub. The plan is to move the repos from Mercurial to GitHub by early September.

The latest version of Kotlin has reached release candidate status. Version 1.4 has a preview of extra support for Node.JS and improved IDE support.

js1024 is the continuation of the legendary js1k JavaScript golfing competition which ended last year and like its predecessor is planned to be an annual contest. The winners of the first one  have just been announced.

I suppose you say that the unreasonable effectiveness of OpenAI's GPT language program is just a special case of the unreasonable effectiveness of Deep Learning but ... it is so much more shocking.

In the latest edition of the RedMonk Language Rankings, Python has displaced Java to occupy second place, below JavaScript which holds on to its long-help top position. This is hardly unexpected - Python and Java tied in second place last time round. But when it comes to programming languages change at the top of the rankings is a rare occurrence and thus newsworthy.