Constructing user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most resource-intensive tasks in mobile development, often consuming more than half of overall effort. Although declarative frameworks such as Jetpack Compose (Android) and SwiftUI (iOS) have become mainstream, the majority of existing Android apps still rely on legacy XML-based layouts. Migrating these UIs to declarative paradigms is essential for maintainability and cross-platform reuse, but manual migration is costly, error-prone, and difficult to scale. We present GUIMigrator, a semantics-preserving framework that automates the migration of Android XML-based UIs to Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI. We design the Semantic UI Transpiler (SUT), which abstracts layout structures and resource semantics from legacy XML and systematically re-expresses them using the component abstractions and idioms of modern declarative frameworks. This design ensures that migrated UIs preserve both visual fidelity and functional equivalence, while generating idiomatic, compilable code that maintains cross-platform consistency with minimal manual intervention. By separating semantic interpretation from platform-specific realization, GUIMigrator provides a d
Web-based and mobile phone-based apps have become widely available for dietary self-monitoring; however, their use may increase the risk of disordered eating. College students frequently demonstrate poor nutrient intake despite consumption of sufficient calories. One way to improve diet quality may be via the use of a smartphone app that encourages intuitive eating. The purpose of this study was to improve diet quality among college students through the use of a novel smartphone app that promotes intuitive eating rather than calorie counting and weight loss. The In2Eat iOS mobile app was developed in SwiftUI and stored user data in a Firebase database. A total of 45 college students completed assessments of intuitive eating, diet quality, and disordered eating before and after 4 weeks of using the In2Eat app. Users evaluated the usability of the app with the System Usability Scale (SUS). Engagement with the app was recorded as the total number of days a meal was logged, the total number of meals logged, and the average number of meals logged per day. After our 4-week intervention, dietary qualities that protect against chronic disease increased by 28%, fruit consumption increased by 63%, and skin antioxidant levels increased by 6.1% (Hedges g=0.16; mean difference 0.33, 95% bias corrected and accelerated [BCa] CI 0.04-0.61; P=.03). Global intuitive eating did not change during the user study; however, the unconditional permission to eat subscale increased (Hedges g=-0.28; mean difference 0.28, 95% BCa CI 0.07-0.49; P=.01, adjusted P=.07). Overall, disordered eating also did not change with app use, although dietary restraint decreased (Hedges g=-0.23; mean difference 0.30, 95% BCa CI -0.61 to -0.04; P=.04, adjusted P=.22). The average SUS score for the In2Eat app was 67.2 (SD 15.5). The number of days a meal was logged was positively correlated with SUS scores (r=0.28; P=.06), and the total number of meals logged had a monotonic association with app usability (ρ=0.31; P=.04). When divided according to the low (mean 10.2, SD 5.3), medium (mean 26.3, SD 2.8), and high (mean 33.6, SD 3.8) number of days logging meals, participants with higher days of logging reported the app as more usable (H=6.75; P=.03). A regression analysis showed that 8% of the variance in system usability (R2=0.080; P=.31) was explained by app use; however, none of the individual predictors contributed substantially to the variance. An intuitive eating smartphone app can improve diet quality without increasing disordered eating. Results suggest that participants who logged more meals tended to rate the app as more usable. Further research is needed with a greater sample size after incorporating features to improve the app's usability.
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) viewers are essential tools in clinical practice, yet established open-source macOS viewers such as Horos rely on legacy Objective-C and C++ source trees. In the public Horos repository, the main application directory contained 310,033 source lines and the full public source tree contained 900,763 source lines. This study aimed to develop and evaluate OpenDicomViewer (ODV), a lightweight, open-source DICOM viewer for macOS built entirely in Swift and SwiftUI, designed as a modern native foundation for local DICOM viewing rather than a full picture archiving and communication system (PACS) workstation. ODV was developed as a native macOS application comprising 12,952 lines of Swift code, supporting multiple DICOM transfer syntaxes, multi-panel layouts with spatial synchronization, multiplanar reconstruction, and maximum intensity projection with hardware-accelerated raycasting. Memory performance was compared against Horos (version 4.0.1) and OsiriX MD (version 14.2.2) using the Cancer Imaging Archive Pancreas-CT dataset (19,022 DICOM files, 9.3 GB) on a Mac Studio with 36 GB of unified memory over three trials per viewer. Peak memory footprint was 9.6 ± 0.0 GB for ODV, 30.0 ± 0.5 GB for Horos, and 23.6 ± 1.8 GB for OsiriX MD (mean ± standard deviation). ODV consumed 32% of Horos's memory footprint without system memory pressure events. The main Horos application directory contained 23.9 times as many source lines as ODV, and the full public Horos source tree contained 69.5 times as many source lines. In this local-file large-series benchmark, ODV demonstrated that a lightweight, Swift-native DICOM viewer can achieve core local image-viewing functionality with lower memory consumption than the tested versions of Horos and OsiriX MD while maintaining a compact codebase that may facilitate human inspection and extension, including artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development after appropriate validation.
Visual impairment can significantly impact an individual's daily activities. Patients require regular monitoring, typically occurring within hospital eye services. Capacity constraints have necessitated innovative solutions to improve patient care. Existing digital solutions rely on task-based digital home monitoring such as visual acuity testing. These require active involvement from patients and do not typically offer an indication of quality of life. Digital phenotyping refers to the use of personal digital devices to quantify passive behaviour for detecting clinically significant changes in vision and act as biomarkers for disease. Its uniqueness lies in the ability to detect changes passively. The objective was to co-design an accessible smartphone app (OverSight) for the purposes of digital phenotyping in people with sight impairment. Development of OverSight included stakeholder consultations following principles of user-centred design. Apple iOS software frameworks (HealthKit, ResearchKit, and SensorKit) and a SwiftUI developer toolkit were used to enable the collection of active and passive data streams. Accessibility and usability were assessed using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and feedback following a 3-month pilot study. Consultations with patients informed the design of OverSight, including preferred survey scheduling and the relevancy of patient support resources. Twenty visually impaired participants (mean age 42 ± 19 years) were recruited to the pilot study. The average score on the SUS was 76.8 (±8.9), indicating good usability. There was a statistically significant moderate negative correlation between SUS scores and visual acuity in both the better (r = -0.494; p ≤ 0.001) and worse eye (r = -0.421; p ≤ 0.001). OverSight offers promising potential for collecting patient-generated health data for the purposes of digital phenotyping in patients with eye disease. Through further testing and validation, this novel approach to patient care may ultimately provide opportunities for remote monitoring in ophthalmology.
Genetic testing reports coding variants far faster than they can be interpreted, and placing a variant in its biophysical context, the domain it perturbs, whether its residue is buried or exposed, whether it lies near a disulfide bond or a predicted binding pocket increasingly requires projecting it onto a three dimensional protein model. The Genomics 2 Proteins (G2P) portal unifies the gene-to-structure identifier chain with a dense, residue indexed annotation table, but its visualization layer presumes a desktop browser and is awkward at the bedside, in the classroom, or in the field, where a phone or tablet is often the only device. We present G2P Explorer, a native iOS framework that consumes the public G2P REST API on device, parses its seventy one column tab separated feature tables without loss of fidelity, and presents the result through six interlinked modules sharing a single observable view model. Beyond porting, it contributes a SwiftUI Canvas multi-track sequence renderer, an on device reconstruction of the portal's unavailable isoform alignment route, a bidirectional Swift JavaScript structural bridge that absorbs the AlphaFold model file versioning scheme, and a faul
As an emerging operating system, HarmonyOS has a significant demand for software migration from platforms such as Android and iOS, where the User Interface (UI) translation accounts for a critical link. However, the latest UI development has shifted to declarative paradigms, e.g., Kotlin Jetpack Compose (KJC) for Android, SwiftUI for iOS, and ArkUI for HarmonyOS, rendering prior translation approaches inapplicable, as they target either backend logic or legacy imperative UIs. As such, this paper targets ArkUI and proposes an automatic translation approach, namely ArkTrans, to port UI files from Android and iOS to HarmonyOS. ArkTrans overcomes two salient challenges during the translation: (1) Programming Language (PL) unfamiliarity, and (2) severe syntactic chaos. Towards the first challenge, ArkTrans heuristically constructs ArkUI skeletons by extracting metadata from source PL, thereby guiding LLMs' initial translation. As for the second challenge, ArkTrans executes empirically revealed post-fixing rules via pattern matching to repair most of the remaining syntactic errors. To examine the effectiveness of ArkTrans, we construct a 100-sample parallel UI page translation benchmark
Modern educational environments increasingly rely on digital platforms to facilitate interaction between students and educators. Discord has emerged as a popular communication platform in academic settings, offering a combination of messaging and support for chatbot development. However, most existing Discord bots lack specialized educational functionalities and mobile-friendly interfaces, limiting their effectiveness for instructional use. This paper presents InsightEdu, an innovative iOS application that provides a touch-centric interface for managing a custom Discord bot designed for educational contexts. The system enables educators to conduct surveys, collect feedback, and track attendance through an intuitive mobile interface. The architecture combines a SwiftUI-based iOS client application with a Python-based Discord bot server. User evaluation with educators demonstrated significant usability improvements compared to traditional Discord interfaces, with 92% of participants (n = 20) reporting enhanced efficiency in managing educational interactions. This study demonstrates that mobile-first, instructor-friendly design can significantly enhance the utility of existing communi
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology in consumer-grade mobile devices can be used as a replacement for traditional background removal and compositing techniques. Unlike approaches such as chroma keying and trained AI models, LiDAR's depth information is independent of subject lighting, and performs equally well in low-light and well-lit environments. We integrate the LiDAR and color cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro Max with GPU-based image processing. We use Apple's SwiftUI and Swift frameworks for user interface and backend development, and Metal Shader Language (MSL) for realtime image enhancement at the standard iPhone streaming frame rate of 60 frames per second. The only meaningful limitations of the technology are the streaming bandwidth of the depth data, which currently reduces the depth map resolution to 320x240, and any pre-existing limitations of the LiDAR IR laser to reflect accurate depth from some materials. If the LiDAR resolution on a mobile device like the iPhone can be improved to match the color image resolution, LiDAR could feasibly become the preeminent method of background removal for video applications and photography.
Choosing an appropriate software development technology (e.g., programming language) is challenging due to the proliferation of diverse options. The selection of inappropriate technologies for development may have a far-reaching effect on software developers' career growth. Switching to a different technology after working with one may lead to a complex learning curve and, thus, be more challenging. Therefore, it is crucial for software developers to find technologies that have a high usage span. Intuitively, the usage span of a technology can be determined by the time span developers have used that technology. Existing literature focuses on the technology landscape to explore the complex and implicit dependencies among technologies but lacks formal studies to draw insights about their usage span. This paper investigates the technology usage span by analyzing the question and answering (Q&A) traces of Stack Overflow (SO), the largest technical Q&A website available to date. In particular, we analyze 6.7 million Q&A traces posted by about 97K active SO users and see what technologies have appeared in their questions or answers over 15 years. According to our analysis, C#
HEALPix by Górski et. al. (2005) is de-facto standard for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data storage and analysis, and is widely used in current and upcoming CMB experiments. Almost all the datasets in Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA) use HEALPix as a format of choice. Visualizing the data plays important role in research, and several toolsets were developed to do that with HEALPix maps, most notably original Fortran facilities and Python integration with healpy. With the current state of GPU performance, it is now possible to visualize extremely large maps in real time on a laptop or a tablet. HEALPix Viewer described here is developed for macOS, and takes full advantage of GPU acceleration to handle extremely large datasets in real time. It compiles natively on Intel and Arm64 architectures, and uses Metal framework for high-performance GPU computations. The aim of this project is to reduce the effort required for interactive data exploration, as well as time overhead for producing publication-quality maps. Drag and drop integration with Keynote and Powerpoint makes creating presentations easy. The main codebase is written in Swift, a modern and
MIT engineers have found a way to give chip-based lidar a wider, clearer view without relying on moving parts。 Their design uses differently shaped antennas that can sit close together without scrambling one another’s signals。 In tests, the system sharply reduced interference while steering a single precise beam across a broad field of view
NASA’s Swift Observatory observed a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star more than 30,000 light-years from the center of a distant galaxy。 The extraordinary flare briefly outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet light and revealed a black hole about a million times the Sun’s mass
A person’s sleeping brain may reveal warning signs of dementia long before memory problems begin。 Researchers used machine learning to analyze EEG recordings from about 7,000 adults and found that an older-than-expected “brain age” was tied to a sharply higher dementia risk。 Every additional 10 years of brain aging raised that risk by nearly 40%
China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter captured a faint but remarkable view of 3I/ATLAS as the interstellar comet raced past Mars。 The images reveal its tail and glowing coma, offering scientists a glimpse of material born beyond our solar system
A new chemical process can transform three of the most common plastics into high-purity hydrogen without sorting them first。 The technique operates at much lower temperatures than traditional gasification and captures most of the plastic’s carbon in solid or liquid forms instead of releasing it as carbon dioxide
Scientists have identified LHAASO J1912+1014u as a cosmic accelerator that can push protons beyond one quadrillion electron volts。 The finding may help reveal where the Milky Way’s most energetic cosmic rays come from and how they influence the galaxy
Physicists have uncovered a surprising limit to electrical resistance caused by particles colliding。 Using ultracold potassium atoms trapped in a grid of light, researchers created a highly controlled stand-in for electrons moving through a solid。 As collisions became more frequent and intense, resistance initially rose, but eventually hit a ceilin
A surprisingly simple change could make sodium-ion batteries far more powerful while opening the door to turning seawater into drinking water。 Researchers at the University of Surrey found that sodium vanadium oxide performs much better when its naturally occurring water is left inside instead of being removed during manufacturing