While we’re on a nostalgia trip, this bears mentioning: a brand new, under development, NeXT-like desktop environment for Linux.

It’s based on CentOS (which is sad, since it severely limits the amount of people who can take immediate advantage of it and makes it a pain to, for instance, port it to the Raspberry Pi), but is nevertheless remarkable–I miss the NeXT UX (and its brutalist aesthetic), and would love to see a modern Linux desktop based on it.

Worth revisiting in a year or so.

This is the second installment in John Siracusa’s Mac app development saga, now that he’s focused on bringing back selected portions of the “quintessential” Mac experience to today’s machines.

As usual, you can expect it to have been painstakingly polished to a micrometer of UX tolerance–and then some.

I used to attend this back in the day, and even though it devolved fairly quickly into a semi-random technology showcase after smartphones took over, it is still a landmark event.

But I think they made the right call, regardless of industry impact (and Marketing budgets). Some things are not to be trifled with.

I haven’t used Editorial in a while (although I initially wrote a bunch of workflows to aid my writing, I eventually decided to go back to non-scriptable editors), but I am very worried about Pythonista’s future, for two reasons:

The first is that my eldest kid pretty much lives inside it and has coded various apps, many using the bindings to UIView and the like.

He’s even ported bits of Tk across to do UI layouts, and it would be terrible to lose the one programming environment he really likes (Codea is nice too, but there is nothing else that even comes astronomically close in terms of “native”-ish Python development).

The second is that Pythonista is utterly unique in so many regards. It is an unstated masterpiece, and (at least in my view) pushed the envelope of what it is actually possible to do on an iPad beyond anything anyone else (even Apple) has done, so I really it needs to be future-proofed somehow.

I don’t think open sourcing it would be enough - there would have to be a team willing to keep it going, and even though I’d certainly roll up my sleeves and contribute (there are a few libraries I’d like to port over, for instance), Ole Zorn would still have to find a way to get actual income from it.

Apple, in particular, should take note. Swift Playgrounds were cute to begin with, but none of my kids used them after the first couple of weeks because they are too limited to do anything remotely useful, and this pushes forward the notion that the platform itself is, if not borderline hostile to developers, at least fundamentally unsuited for programming in general, even at the most basic levels.

“Beating” the Swiss watch industry, apparently.

This is interesting, but to be fair, the Swiss might not be that good a reference given the way precision manufacturing works these days, so let’s assume we’re talking about the premium watch tier.

Will need to investigate further, but it’s kind of weird that traditional watch manufacturers haven’t yet come up with competing products (yes, there are some, but tradition carries so much weight that they don’t really hold a candle to what the Watch can do).

And I wonder what Swatch is doing. They would be the perfect company to tackle fitness wearables in terms of both hardware and trust on how your health data is processed (which is the biggest gripe I have about things like the Xiaomi Mi Band).

And yet, after a full decade, it is still nigh on impossible to use an iPad for self-hosted development of anything but JavaScript. Pythonista, Codea and the like are amazing, but for me the lack of a shell (and a UNIX userland, even if sandboxed) is something I just can’t quite get over.

(As an example, I spent last evening compiling Janet inside the emulated x86 environment provided by iSH because I would really like to run some things locally instead of on a Raspberry Pi sidecar…)

Chris McCormick did a great presentation on piku at linux.conf.au 2020–and it’s jam-packed with working demos, which is always fun to watch.

Also, gotta love that tagline.

An interesting (but quite expensive) piece of kit I’d love to have.

E-ink is one of those things I wish had become far more commonplace, but small production runs (and yields for large sizes) still make it prohibitively expensive, and the hefty price tag on this is ample proof of that.

Seems like keyboards are a thing these days (I wonder why). I have grown disenchanted with ThinkPad keyboards (largely due to the lousy experience I had with the Carbon X1 I used a couple of years back) but I used to be a fan, and there are hordes of people out there for whom using this as a desktop/tablet¹ keyboard would be a dream come true.

It is also extremely clever marketing, so there’s that too.

This is interesting, but feels like it could have happened five years ago if Apple had prioritized things differently.

I’m game if they ever come up with an iPad mini version. Although Brydge’s current iPad mini keyboard looks like it would be a pain to use with conventional covers, a compact, standalone BT keyboard with backlit keys and a built-in trackpad would be nice.

I love Walt’s writing, but can’t help feeling he’s holding back a little (even though he does stick his finger in some of the wounds Apple has wrought in its customer base).

Personally, I think Tim Cook has done a stellar job of scaling the company but an absolutely lousy one at ensuring all its products stayed at the far end of the inspirational and quality scales.

I wouldn’t worry about Apple being able to churn out another blockbuster device–but I do worry about their ability to deliver excellent user experiences, because iOS and macOS are both crumbling at the base (i.e., in both stability and reliability).

Yes, the iPhone is (still) the best smartphone out there on many counts, and that is largely due to a combination of huge momentum and vertical integration that Tim has kept polishing. And yes, the Watch is a great product, and many people subscribe to the notion that more sophisticated content services is a next logical step (again, largely building upon the iTunes user base).

But the Mac (and software quality in general) have degraded to a point where many people are not just beyond being openly critical, but starting to question if someone else shouldn’t be running the show.

Because, all things considered, none of the above are worth squat if your customers stop being your advocates–and the Mac was a huge part of that for many years.

Well, this is a (very welcome) surprise. Of course, like every other early adopter/tinkerer out there, I’ve already got a working solution (courtesy of zigbee2mqtt, if you haven’t been keeping track), and I’m curious as to how “open source” everything will really be and how fast things will actually move considering that so far each and every one of them tried to build entirely separate ecosystems (and largely made a hash of it, too), but I’m quite looking forward to this actually working out for consumers.

Update: Apple has just open-sourced the HomeKit Accessory Development Kit, and, not to be left behind, Silicon Labs is opening the Z-Wave standard in 2020. This is going to get really interesting.

An interesting concept: an app whose sole purpose is to provide new functionality to Shortcuts, using almost entirely on-device processing (which is great, especially the ML bits).

I expect portions of it to be duly Sherlocked in time, but it seems like a great approach in general (and one I hope other scripting apps like Pythonista embrace fully).

On the far side of the on-device/on-cloud spectrum, I don’t use Zapier, IFTTT or Flow much, but I have to wonder why none of them have considered going down this route and integrating cloud workflows with on-device scripting in a deeper way.

No mention of fixes to the Mail data loss bug (which as far as I know wasn’t even acknowledged, although it was widely reported). I’m sticking with Mojave for the holidays. Or Springtime. Whenever they feel like fixing their desktop OS, really.

On other news, iOS 13.3 is out, so I think we finally got a stable release there. Third time’s the charm, right?

I’m still running Elementary on one of my laptops (and, since it’s based on Ubuntu LTS, on the house KVM server) and it is still the nicest, most user-friendly Linux desktop I’ve ever used. Zero hassles, smooth upgrades for the past three years. It just keeps ticking along.

Nice to see them shipping sane, useful and well thought-out incremental updates that (unlike modern macOS) actually improve the experience and don’t break things.

I’m not quite sure what to expect from this (it has smatterings of a “post-cloud” backlash, if such a thing were possible), but Jessie Frazelle and other luminaries have ganged up to do hardware for on-premises deployments.

Having kept track of the Open Compute Project and the massive scale of global data center deployments for many years I can’t avoid being skeptical about this, but it promises to be interesting to keep track of for the people involved alone.

Here in Portugal, at least, most SMEs doing on-premises stuff can just rent out cheap blade servers and drop literally anything on them, so I just don’t see a profit angle.

But I’d love to see someone deliver power-efficient, modular ARM servers that ran a managed Kubernetes stack out of the box. I just don’t know how big the market for that kind of thing would be.

I’m linking to Paw not because they gave away licenses during Black Friday (full disclosure: I got one), but because native, quality macOS apps deserve support and praise in this age of junk cross-platform Electron-based “apps” that try to shoehorn another Chromium runtime onto your machine.

Plus I use this kind of thing regularly, and it’s nice to have a native macOS tool I can rely on. You know what to do.