_frog

This is entirely ignoring the value third party developers bring to Apple's platforms. I'd argue Apple has hugely benefited from a robust selection of third party apps available via the App Store, and the quality and diversity of apps on that store has been a core part of the value proposition for their hardware.

I don't think people being unemployed and staying at home due to a global pandemic is remotely comparable to a situation where people were financially stable but worked less.

For Apollo's use case there's a solution: iOS 14 adds a new API that lets you perform a pattern match against the contents of the clipboard. That way Apollo can attempt to match a Reddit link, and only actually read the clipboard if that match is successful.

It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences

Interestingly there's a few mentions of Catalyst improvements in the Xcode 12 release notes:

When bringing iPad apps to macOS, you can now use the Optimize Interface for Mac target setting to use native macOS controls and Mac resolution

Hopefully this means Catalyst apps will feel a little more like actual Mac apps.

This largely only really true on Android. iOS at least lets you install content blockers that work with Safari as well as any embedded web browsers within apps. The only place I typically see ads on iOS is in free to play games, and in those cases that's usually a pretty good incentive to play something else.

My understanding was always that NeXTSTEP served as the foundation of OS X, and while it certainly got a new desktop environment and compatibility with MacOS's legacy Carbon APIs, it was essentially still NeXTSTEP under the hood.

Swift doesn't actually use garbage collection, it uses a variant of Objective-C's Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) which was introduced a few years prior to Swift.

I've been working through this book over the past few days, and writing my own git implementation in Rust in parallel, and I've found Ruby to be much simpler from an implementation standpoint. Ruby's standard library provides a lot of useful functionality out of the box (SHA1 digests, the deflate algorithm) which I've had to pull in dependencies for in my Rust version.

Obviously the Rust version is significantly faster, but the Ruby version is higher level and better expresses the concepts the book is trying to demonstrate without getting too bogged down in syntax, types, etc.

From my personal experience, Flow prioritises soundness in its type system, and thus can catch some bugs that TS won’t, but the TS tooling and editor support is drastically better than Flow’s.

Edit: oh and it’s worth noting that I’ve had much more luck finding TS definitions for third party packages than I have with Flow.

It feels weird to me that they’re putting those monetisation hooks back in without talking at all about the future of the product. I’ve used Instapaper for many years now, and I’m more than happy to pay for a service that I get so much value out of, but that said, Instapaper’s largely stagnated in recent years, with very little in the way of major updates or improvements. I’d really love to see even a rough roadmap that could give me some idea of where they want to be say, a year from now, but right now I don’t have a ton of confidence.

I had a ton of fun with Valkyria Chronicles back in the day, and I’m not sure anything’s pulled of that sketched style in quite the same way. The brushstroke renderer also reminded me a lot of Okami[1], one of my favourite games from the PS2 era. It had a very distinctive style based on Japanese ink brush art.

[1] https://youtu.be/G6NPoX7_ehc

I'm also a big fan of `ci[(|'|"]` to change all the text between a pair of delimiters. I can type `ci"` while my cursor's at the start of the line, and it'll jump to the first set of double quotes, remove the text that's currently between them, and enter edit mode.

My company's also using Buildkite, and I've been hugely impressed with how easy it is to work with, and how flexible it's been for us.

I’ve been tracking some of the bugs related to this for years, and there’s been a dispiriting lack of progress in them. Ultimately I’m still a Firefox user because it makes the best trade offs for my particular wants and needs, but I’d love to be able to more enthusiasticallt recommend it to others for whom non-native feeling apps are a non-starter.

In the same way other countries who've banned firearms have carried it out? It's not like there's no precedent for this if you look outside of America.

When your target audience is 'Firefox users', doesn't it make sense to more freely use features that are supported by Firefox?

Judging by where the article ends, I’m assuming this was published originally in early 2010

I think the light theme feels much more 'native' on macOS, especially in Nightly where they've added the same 'vibrancy' effects they use on the standard theme[1]. That said, a few things like the Photon-style menus and the lack of bouncy scrolling make it feel a little out of place.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/TrRyhLU.png

The scrolling thing is a real shame, and it’s shocking to me that they haven’t implemented bouncy overscrolling when macOS has had it for something like 6 years.

on last generation hardware too, though the screenshot in question might be taken one of the ports to more modern systems

For those not following Firefox development too closely, there's a few major projects in the works right now:

- Stylo, the new CSS styling engine currently enabled for a percentage of Nightly users

- WebRender, a new GPU-based rendering engine that's currently in much earlier stages

- Quantum, an initiative to improve Firefox's real and perceived performance (there's a bunch of smaller initiatives that compose this, like Quantum Flow and Quantum DOM)

- Photon, a project to redesign and modernise the Firefox UI

Most (but not all) of these projects are aiming to ship with Firefox 57 later this year, but you can check them out now in Nightly. I've been using it for a few weeks and the difference is really night and day, huge props to all the Firefox contributors.

Somewhat off-topic, but I saw your newsletter sign up form partway through the article and thought to myself "I would like to see new articles from this blog". The issue is I don't want to sign up for yet another email newsletter, and would much rather subscribe to an RSS / Atom feed. Do you have any plans to add one?

If I wanted voice search, file sharing and/or note taking I would find the appropriate piece of software for that task and install it separately.

The good thing is that these are all separate browser extensions, none of which are bundled by default. So that's exactly the case.

I'm pretty sure they said it was running LLVM at some point

I definitely agree that console emulation is a Good Thing from the standpoint of preserving the history of the medium. Hell, I've been working on my own Game Boy emulator in my spare time out of a mixture of technical curiosity and preservationism.

I also agree that a large, driving force behind the development of these emulators is the wider public's desire to easily play old games for free.

That said, it doesn't mean I condone the illegal redistribution of old games to play on these emulators. The fact that it's easy and largely overlooked by rights holders doesn't change the ethical equation for me.

Most emulation is based on approximation, and while getting super accurate emulation is important from a preservationist standpoint, the reality of the situation is that these less accurate emulators work fine for the purpose of playing old games for entertainment

A lot of these older classics that you'd probably want to emulate are actually available in some form or other. For PS1/2 games, you can often purchase inexpensive digital copies on the Playstation Store, and for older Nintendo titles they offer digital copies through their Virtual Console service.

Additionally, just because a title isn't easily available for purchase, or available through your desired channels, that doesn't magically invalidate copyright.

It's definitely possible to run something like hq3x in real time, and many emulators support that, though I'm not sure if RetroPie specifically makes it easy to configure that stuff. Though I'd argue that algorithmically smoothing out low res art frequently makes it look worse than the source material.

Have you checked out RetroPie, the distribution mentioned in the article? In my experience, using a PS3 controller with that consisted of connecting the controller via a USB cable, selecting 'configure controller' from the main menu, and mapping all the buttons. All in all that took maybe a minute or two.