Salaries for in-demand programming skills including Java and PHP are rising rapidly. Advertised tech salaries have grown for the third year in a row, up 1.7% in 2018, with pay for specialised tech roles increasing significantly, as demand for .NET, PHP and Java developers continues to expand.
Over that three-year period, Java developers have seen the largest increase in salaries – 41%. Their wages also increased 6% between 2018 and this year – the average Java developer earns £63,700, although that can rise to £70,700 according to the data from recruitment company Reed.
The second best-paid programming role was full-stack developer, which pays £53,500 on average, rising to £60,300. That's up 5.6% on last year and 18.8% up on 2016.
PHP developers have seen salaries increase by 20.6% over the three-year period, and enjoyed the the largest increase of any tech role in the past year, up 6.9%. .NET developers have also seen a significant boost in salary during the period, with average pay increasing from £39,900 in 2016 to £47,400 this year – an 18.8% rise.
In most programming language popularity indexes JavaScript, Java, and Python are the most popular languages.
Data scientist, data analyst, technical architect, DBA and network engineer have also all seen double-digit increases to salary over the three years.
Pay for the more business-focused roles, such as business analyst and project manager, has also risen, but by a smaller amount than for developer roles.
Indeed, one of the few jobs to see pay decline in the last three years, according to the data from Reed, is that of IT director, which it said dropped between 2016 and 2018, only to climb back up slightly this year. Overall, average IT director pay has dropped slightly over the period from £89,200 to £83,600.
These rising salaries are matched by increasing demand for staff with these skills, according to Reed: while the overall number of technology roles advertised increased by 10% since the start of 2018, specialist roles such as data scientist (20%), .NET developer (13%), and BI developer (13%), showed increases considerably higher than average. Demand for full-stack developers – a role that can demand many different developer skills – has also increased rapidly, with a 41% increase in roles advertised since the start of 2018.
The data comes from jobs posted on Reed's website between 2015 and 2017 and the advertised salaries.
Andrew Gardner, director of Reed Technology, said: "There are plenty of roles out there for candidates with mobile experience and front-end development. Alongside that, firms will also need people with cloud-based experience, and storage skills. The impact of legislation such as GDPR is creating a lot of demand, with companies making sure they have the right skills, systems and processes in place – as a result roles in data are also growing."
Of all the companies to embrace flexible displays in 2019, we didn’t think the fashion brand Louis Vuitton would be among them. Yet, that’s exactly what it’s done with its new lineup of handbags featuring 1920 x 1440 resolution flexible AMOLED displays from Royole. Engadget reports that LV plans to produce two variations of the so-called Canvas of the Future handbags, one with a single display, and the other with two.
On the runway at Cruise 2020, the screens were set to show an array of colorful urban visualizations, but in a video posted to Instagram one of the bags could also be seen showing a pair of scrolling web browsers. Louis Vitton says that the idea for the handbag is for it to become an extension of the smartphone, which suggests there’s more functionality here than meets the eye.
The handbags were produced using screens provided by Royole, whose FlexPai device is technically the first foldable smartphone in the world. If you haven’t heard of the FlexPai then we don’t blame you; when Vlad Savov tried it out at this year’s CES he declared that it was “charmingly awful” thanks to its buggy user experience and a relatively poor quality.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company put a display on a bag, and even Royole had a prototype purse of its own at this year’s CES. However, Louis Vitton has the advantage of being able to sell its bags at a price that could actually cover the cost of a cutting edge display.
Google is no stranger to Pixel-exclusive features, such as Night Sight, unlimited original quality photo backups, and more. It looks like the company might have one more exclusive feature in the works though.
XDA-Developers has found references to car crash detection functionality in the Android Q Beta 3 Safety Hub app. One string notes that the function will “automatically launch an alert activity when the device detects you are in a car crash.”
XDA also found a string in the app that suggests the feature is exclusive to Pixels. So the hundreds of millions of people using third-party Android phones might miss out on this functionality.
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Just how could the Safety Hub app detect a car crash? It’s possible the feature will harness GPS data to determine whether you’re in a car, the accelerometer to detect a sudden or violent stop, and a microphone to listen for the sound of the crash itself. These capabilities would likely be tied together with Google’s machine learning technology. After all, the likes of Intel and other entities have already experimented with neural networks to detect car crashes.
Google will also need to work hard to ensure that false positives are kept to a minimum — who needs the feature if it mistakes a falling phone for a crash?
The outlet speculates that the car crash detection mode could alert emergency services or designated contacts. And with roughly 1.35 million people killed annually as a result of road crashes according to the World Health Organization, prompt assistance could make a big difference.
Google’s Digital Wellbeing software is meant to be a helpful, transparent tool for monitoring your smartphone usage habits and striking a healthier balance between tech and life. But over the last couple weeks, a number of Pixel owners have come to the conclusion that it has the unwanted side effect of slowing down their device. There’s a very active thread on Reddit right now that includes many reports of improved performance when Digital Wellbeing is switched off. Some say the “night and day” difference is apparent almost immediately. Others seem less convinced that it’s anywhere near that drastic. The theory was originally brought up just over a week ago by Reddit user Trueray17, who said it fully resolved performance issues with their Pixel 3.
Slowing down your phone isn’t supposed to be one of Digital Wellbeing’s features, mind you. By design it runs in the background and logs how much time you’re spending in apps and using a device in general. This data can be hugely valuable if you’re trying to make better choices and waste less time staring at a screen. You can set app timers or turn the screen grayscale to make your go-to apps seem less appealing at times when you’ve decided you want to avoid impulsively opening them.
But the idea that Digital Wellbeing might be hindering Pixel phones from being as fast as they otherwise could be is a little alarming. If these user reports of speed and frame rate increases are accurate, this gives people a clear reason to disable a resource they might otherwise find tremendously useful.
Digital Wellbeing was one of the major new features of Android 9 Pie, debuting first on Pixel phones before moving to Android One and a (still fairly small) list of other devices. Google is set to expand on it in Android Q with a new Focus mode. Does it make sense that an all-seeing background process like this might impact overall performance? It’s certainly possible. The Verge has reached out to Google for comment on whether it’s aware of any slowdown caused by Digital Wellbeing.
In the meantime, if you want to turn it off — even temporarily — to see for yourself if there are any noticeable improvements, here’s how:
Go to settings on your Pixel phone
Choose Digital Wellbeing
Tap the three-dot icon at the top right and choose “Turn off usage access”
Confirm that decision on the next “Usage access” screen by choosing Digital Wellbeing and toggling the “permit usage access” option to off.
Rage 2 may not be launching until May 14 but Bethesda has already revealed a roadmap detailing post-release plans for the game from its release until the end of 2019. Even the most chaotic game worlds need a well-organised plan to thrive.
In a blog post on the Bethesda site, the publisher offered fans a brief overview of the plans to keep them entertained with promises of new vehicles, enemies, community challenges and expansions among other things.
From Rage 2's launch in May Bethesda will start rolling out community challenges and world events, while June and July will see bigger additions like brand new vehicles and some fresh weapon skins.
The year ahead
In August things start getting serious as you'll see the launch of the first “major” expansion: Rise of the Ghosts. This will introduce a new region and storyline to the game as well as more new weapons, vehicles and abilities.
September until December is still fairly vague at the moment. However, plans are in place and players can expect a second significant expansion in November, with yet another new story and areas to explore. Bethesda has teased that it will be revealing more about this expansion soon. Understandably, Bethesda probably wants to build excitement for the first major expansion before it starts the hype for the second.
Get a peek at what's comin' in the 2019 #RAGE2 roadmap! It's like a GPS for AWESOMENESS. pic.twitter.com/1wW1D7VdxiMay 10, 2019
In our hands on experience with Rage 2 earlier this year we called the game “ambitious” and found ourselves “anxious to try more”.
We don't have much longer to wait; Rage 2 will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC from May 14.
Enlarge/ Behold, the default desktop for the latest Canonical release: Ubuntu 19.04, gloriously nicknamed "Disco Dingo."
Scott Gilbertson
Canonical recently released Ubuntu 19.04, the latest version of its flagship GNOME-based Linux desktop. But if you're a desktop user, you might be feeling a little left out.
The big points of emphasis in this latest release are on Ubuntu as a tool for infrastructure development, server deployment, and the good old Internet of Things. For the server version of Ubuntu, the OS ships with all the latest cloud computing tools. In fact, that's already available in optimized builds on the major cloud services.
Elsewhere, the latest version of the venerable Ubuntu desktop packs quite a few additional, tempting reasons to upgrade for Linux gamers. Ubuntu 19.04 makes the leap to the Linux kernel 5.x series, for instance, which offers much improved graphics support.
Despite all the talk of developer tools and enterprise deployment stacks—Canonical has even taken to calling Ubuntu the "leading OS for cloud operations" lately—Ubuntu 19.04 is ultimately a worthwhile upgrade for all. After spending some time with it recently, we found some nice updates to the desktop, too. So no matter your Ubuntu use case, 19.04 seems to offer users a faster, more polished desktop than its predecessors.
The new icon theme in Ubuntu 19.04.
Scott Gilbertson
Ubuntu 19.04's slightly tweaked "yaru" theme.
Scott Gilbertson
GNOME
The default desktop for 19.04 looks, aside from the new wallpaper, more or less like previous releases. There are no major changes to be seen, but there are plenty to be felt.
Thanks to work both in the upstream GNOME project along with some contributions from downstream, Ubuntu 19.04 is the snappiest version of GNOME I've ever used. In fact, Ubuntu's GNOME desktop finally feels like it's about on par with the old Unity, at least in terms of speed and responsiveness.
Much of the credit here goes to the GNOME project, which has been hard at work speeding things up. To be completely fair to GNOME, the project has actually made even more speed improvements that didn't make it into Ubuntu 19.04; Ubuntu is looking to incorporate some more of those improvements down the road. It's also worth noting that nearly all the improvements to GNOME in 19.04 have been patched into 18.10 and will eventually make it to the 18.04 LTS release as well.
Suffice it to say that if you're a GNOME user, the huge, very noticeable speed boost in Ubuntu 19.04 will make you very happy.
Another trickle-down win from the upstream speed improvements is the inclusion of GNOME's indexing tool, Tracker, which is installed by default in Ubuntu 19.04. Previously, Tracker was considered too slow to ship with Ubuntu. You've probably never heard of Tracker, as it runs behind the scenes and indexes and stores metadata for use in searches throughout GNOME, but adding Tracker enables some new features for 19.04. Tracker means you can use the batch rename tool with metadata tags and that searching in the Files app is now full-text, for example.
Enlarge/ The Files app in Ubuntu 19.04 can make better use of metadata, thanks to GNOME Tracker.
Scott Gilbertson
While Ubuntu 19.04 doesn't make any radical changes to the basic GNOME user experience, there are a couple of visual improvements worth noting. The new default theme for Ubuntu (known as Yaru) has been further refined and includes a new icon theme that looks more unified—nearly everything gets a rounded square icon now (except, of course, any applications you install that aren't part of the icon set).
Another immediately noticeable change to the user experience is that alt-tab now switches windows by default. You can cycle through your applications with super-tab. Naturally, you can change this using the settings app.
But as with all things GNOME, the many steps forward come with a backward step as well. You can no longer put icons on the desktop in GNOME 3.32. Ubuntu has worked around this change by including a new GNOME Shell extension aptly named "Desktop Icons." So far, so good, but there's a catch: the extension doesn't allow you to drag and drop files or apps onto the Desktop. Instead, you'll have to do that using the Nautilus file manager. Drag and drop your file into the desktop folder and you'll see it show up on the desktop. It's a small annoyance easily worked around, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.
One much-requested new feature in GNOME 3.32 is support for fractional UI scaling, which is the ability to set the interface to something other than 100 percent (1080p and smaller screens) or 200 percent (for HiDPI screens). With GNOME 3.32, you can scale in 25 percent increments—not arbitrary, but it's certainly better than previous releases. The catch is that it really only works (in my testing) running under Wayland.
There is some experimental support for Xorg sessions, but you'll need to enable it yourself. Instructions can be found on the Ubuntu Community site, but in my testing it was pretty buggy, especially with GIMP. My suggestion is to use Wayland. After all, if your hardware includes a HiDPI screen, it's probably perfectly capable of running Wayland.
Several releases ago, Canonical began collecting metrics from willing users (it still does; you can opt out after installation), and one of the bits of data the company mentioned it has learned from that collected data is how often Ubuntu is installed as a virtual machine. Lo and behold, Ubuntu 19.04 will now automatically install the open-vm-tools package (to improve VM integration) when it sees its being installed virtually. It's a small thing, but one that really helps if you spin up a lot of VMs since this saves you the hassle of adding those tools by hand after the fact. With Ubuntu 19.04, you can just start up a virtual machine and when it's done installing, your clipboard will work inside the guest. You can easily share folders. And you'll get a much-improved graphics experience, all without doing anything extra.
Flavors
When I said earlier that Ubuntu 19.04 is the snappiest version of GNOME I've ever used, the emphasis there is on GNOME. In the broader scheme of Ubuntu desktops, there's really nothing particularly snappy about GNOME. In fact, in my experience, it's the slowest of the bunch. Fortunately, if you're looking for a faster desktop that uses fewer system resources and offers a more '"traditional'" experience, Ubuntu's various flavors have you covered.
All of the under-the-hood improvements apply to the flavors as well as the main release, so when I say that very little has changed, I mean very little in that flavor's desktop. But the truth is that very little has changed for most desktops with this release. There are plenty of improvements in the Ubuntu base packages that all these flavors are built upon, but the user experience in most cases remains largely unchanged.
After the GNOME-based version, the biggest changes to an Ubuntu flavor come in Ubuntu Budgie. Budgie 19.04 is notable for replacing the Nautilus file manager with Nemo, the file manager found in Linux Mint. This change is Budgie's way of dealing with the inability to show icons on the desktop in GNOME 3.32. Having tested both Ubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie's methods of fixing this feature removal, I'd have to give the edge to Budgie.
Nemo is simply a better file manager. Not only do you get desktop icons, but you also get some useful features GNOME long ago ripped out like a split-screen view and tree view.
Ubuntu MATE 19.04, which would be one of my top picks in the Ubuntu flavors world, looks to be a relatively minor update with some bug fixes and a couple new features. It's probably most notable for what's not included—the latest version of MATE.
Ubuntu MATE 19.04 ships with MATE Desktop 1.20 rather than the recently released 1.22. The MATE blog notes that this is for stability reasons. MATE 1.22 introduces some API changes that some third party applications have not yet incorporated, making them unstable. Look for MATE Desktop 1.22 to land in 19.10 later this year.
As you would expect from an Xfce-based flavor, Xubuntu is more or less the same as the previous release. Indeed the lack of change is one of the best reasons to use Xfce. Now there are some changes in this release that should be welcome news to Xfce-users' ears: more GTK 3 apps specifically. Xubuntu 19.04 ships with GTK 3 versions of the Xfce file manager and app finder. Xubuntu's transition to GTK 3 continues to progress and may even be finished by next year's Xubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Other Ubuntu flavors like Lubuntu (LXDE-based), Kubuntu (KDE-based), and the oft-overlooked Ubuntu Studio have updates for 19.04. The latter deserves special mention for 19.04 since it's now possible to install Ubuntu Studio's configuration and metapackages on top of an existing Ubuntu installation. That means you can have your stock Ubuntu (or other flavor) desktop and get all the Studio goodness as well. If you've ever wanted a complete audio/video Linux workstation without the pain of configuring low level audio and video settings, Ubuntu Studio is the way to go.
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