37signals Dev — Announcing Strada:
I’m happy to announce the official launch of Strada, the long-awaited member of the Hotwire family. Strada enables you to create fully native controls in your hybrid mobile apps, driven by the web. Build web components and native components that work together in WebView screens to elevate your Turbo Native apps to the next level.
How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn’t believe the minutiae”:
That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.
“I’m typically a very organised person,” says Gary Butcher, human interface designer at Apple. “So I felt, ‘We’ve got a limited amount of time together and there might be some uneasiness, so I’ll print out 148 pieces of blank paper and we need to leave the room having filled out every one of those pages.’ By the end of the day, we’d not touched the wall of A3 paper, but had tons of sketches littering the table.”
[This. Is. So. Good!!!]
The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release:
In the last few years, though, the gates have been trampled by smaller, more aggressive companies, such as Clearview AI and PimEyes. What allowed the shift was the open-source nature of neural network technology, which now underpins most artificial intelligence software.
Understanding the path of facial recognition technology will help us navigate what is to come with other advancements in A.I., such as image- and text-generation tools. The power to decide what they can and can’t do will increasingly be determined by anyone with a bit of tech savvy, who may not pay heed to what the general public considers acceptable.
[Oy.facial re]
A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model:
Apple wants a model that can run very quickly and very frequently, without draining much of your device’s battery. When I was testing the predictive text feature, suggestions appeared almost instantly as I typed, making for a great user experience. While the model’s limited size means it wouldn’t be very good at writing full sentences or paragraphs, when it exhibits very high confidence in the next word or two, they’re likely to be good enough to suggest to the user.
[Making progress one little step at time…]
The web is a miracle
Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.
Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.
I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.
The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.
The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.
Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.
[Anything open is inherently better than anything closed. I tell you 3X.]
Scrypted can bridge most cameras to the three major home hubs: HomeKit (including HomeKit Secure Video), Google Home, and Alexa. Scrypted streams are fast, low latency, and have rock solid reliability.
Cameras: Unifi, Amcrest, Hikvision, ONVIF, RTSP, Ring, Arlo, Nest/Google, Tuya, Reolink, and more…
[Hmm…]
At this juncture in DevOps history, there has been considerable hype around observability for developers and operations teams, and more recently, much attention has been given to help combine the different observability solutions out there in use through a single interface, and to that end, OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key standard.
[Nice to see OTel gaining traction.]
Announcing Auth.js! 🔒Authentication for the Web.
– Brand new `@auth/core` package,
– Runtime/framework agnostic
– Web standard APIs
– Builds on NextAuth.js conventions/API
– Decoupled from Next.js & Node.js.We’re adding official support for new frameworks…
Starting with SvelteKit! 🎉Today, SvelteKit 1.0 was announced, and we thought that
this is the perfect opportunity to let everyone know what we’ve been working on.
[Hmm]
Bloomberg: Apple planning to change course, allow third-party app stores and more – Six Colors:
The usually well-sourced Mark Gurman at Bloomberg with the scoop:
Software engineering and services employees are engaged in a major push to open up key elements of Apple’s platforms, according to people familiar with the efforts. As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company’s App Store, sidestepping Apple’s restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments.
If this pans out, it’s not only a groundshaking change to a major chunk of Apple’s Services revenue, but also a 180-degree change to what has been probably the most contentious element of the company’s business. Apple hasn’t, of this writing, confirmed the plan.
[🍿]
Crowned CBN (Cubic Boron Nitride) grinding wheels provide a precise, clean, and cool-running alternative to bonded abrasive grit wheels. We worked with Woodturners Wonders to design a wheel specifically for hollow-grinding chisels, plane irons, and other woodworking tools. Joel has long been a proponent of hollow-grinding chisels and plane irons, because it makes honing so much easier. However, for many folks even high-quality bonded abrasive wheels are too dusty, difficult to maintain, or challenging to dress.
[Time to try these.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 