Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Its been a pretty average week this week. Work was fine. I moved to a new team on the same project so I’m getting back up to speed on what they’re doing. All good and familiar to me after two years on the project.
👍🏼
The big excitement happened yesterday! Kim and Taylor returned home after two weeks in California! I’m really thrilled to have them home! A return to normalcy. I love my time alone, I really do, but two weeks separated from Kim is about all I can take. Just having her in the room again is extremely comforting. ❤️
So I reached out to Gedeon Maheux, a designer at Iconfactory. He has worked on numerous projects for various apps, games, and brands. He’s not just a designer — he’s a real artist. I paid $120, and sure enough, two weeks later, the finished portrait arrived by email.
I’ll keep pushing The Iconfactory as a premier design shop. Yes, they’re amazing app designers. Yes their iOS and Mac resource designs are stellar. But, they just do amazing design work in general. Case in point the article I linked to above.
Microsoft president Brad Smith acknowledged that the four rounds of layoffs this year are more about using the money saved to fund AI data centers and GPUs than workers being replaced by AI.
You know, if the end goal is to use AI for all technology work, replacing humans, then I’m down for it if I no longer have to work for a living. If I can stay home and have everything paid for by the virtue of our new AI overlords, let’s do it.
That would mean I could focus on my artisanal iOS and Mac Apps. Yeah baby! 😀
Of course that’s not the goal. The goal is to make a small group of billionaires even richer at the expense of everyone else.
I hear farmers in Louisiana are having a difficult time filling jobs in the fields. I mean, $11 per hour, 12 hours a day, seven days a week in temperatures approaching 100 degrees. Who the hell wouldn’t want a job like that?
Apple is investing $500 million in a deal with US rare earths company MP Materials as the iPhone maker faces pressure from President Donald Trump to produce its popular smartphones domestically.
This is the kind of thing Apple needs to continue doing until Marmalade Messiah is out of office and we get a Democrat back, then they can go back to normal as the new administration begins the arduous task of repairing the damage caused by Trump and his merry band of idiots and assholes.
Some states are particularly welcoming to workers. These are not those states. They are the states with America’s worst quality of life in 2025.
Red States. Don’t live there. They are Republican dream states. They’re just there to enrich a few at the cost of regular everyday folks. Crappy healthcare, crappy jobs (for the most part), and politicians who couldn’t care less about their constituents.
We’d move back to California if our grandchildren weren’t in Virginia.
Callstack • Burak Güner and Michał Pierzchala
In this webinar, Michał Pierzchała and Burak Güner walk you through a reimagined approach to brownfield React Native, built for modern teams. You’ll learn how to skip the structural headaches and start embedding React Native in your iOS and Android apps with a modular, dev-friendly setup.
I plan on watching this at some point given I’ve been on a Brownfield React Native project for almost two years. That Brownfield project is leading to a brand new 100% rewrite in React Native that’s using all the code we’ve already built. The Greenfield app is up and running and mostly complete and the React Native bits that came from the Brownfield project fit right in and work in both projects. At some point down the road the brand new app will slide right into the place of the old native apps and nobody will know the difference.
Today, Waymo announced its own expansion — minus the puerile humor. It’s just a bigger map with more customers for the Alphabet-owned company’s budding robotaxi business. And more pressure on Tesla to drop the dick jokes and get serious about autonomous driving.
How anyone can view Space Karen as a serious person is beyond me. The only reason he’s still CEO at Tesla is because he’s lining the pockets of his bro friends on the board. It’s all rigged to keep him there to enrich them.
He’s a complete fake. Not a genius. He’s a racist, Nazi, bully.
Michael Teo Van Runkle • Ars Technica
Ultra’s biggest improvements over preceding CarPlay generations are in the center console infotainment integration. Being able to access climate controls, drive modes, and traction settings without leaving the intuitive suite of CarPlay makes life much easier.
I like the new Ultra experience but it’s not something I’d rate high on my list of requirements for a car. Especially some super expensive car. I don’t mind analog gauges for speed, RPM, water, gas, and oil level. They’re perfectly fine and easy to read.
I am, however, going to buy a CarPlay device for my truck because I do want that nice bit of integration. I could see hooking it up to other systems in the car if that’s possible just for the heck of it. 😃
I can’t open LinkedIn without seeing a new post from a Microsoft employee who lost their job in the company’s latest round of layoffs. Around 15,000 jobs have been eliminated at Microsoft over the past couple months — the biggest cuts at the company in more than a decade.
15,000 jobs. All in the name of training AI. Sickening.
Chiara Mooney • Microsoft Dev Blog
For years, Windows developers have been asking the Microsoft client platform team “What platforms does Office use to build their applications? Does Microsoft use the same tech internally that they espouse externally?” This article is focused on answering that exact customer question.
The Office apps are really old. They were all originally written in C and later C++ using COM components. If memory serves there is even some .Net code in there. It’s a ton of code.
Our world has become so internet and web app focused that folks learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so we have tons of developers with those skill sets. So, it’s much easier to get web folks familiar with React to make the transition to React Native on other platforms. They’re already well versed in the technology and Microsoft is the creator and maintainer of React Native for Windows.
I’s imagine it’s extremely costly to Microsoft and many other shops to teach folks how to write native C and C++ code using the Windows API or the new Win 3 UI frameworks. Just get some skilled C and C++ devs to make a framework that allows React Native JavaScript and Runtime to exist inside the existing applications. Then you get web folks to build onto the app.
Since it’s React Native and uses native controls for everything there’s no way to know by looking at the app to know what’s React Native and what’s native. At least that’s true for the iOS apps I’ve worked on and used. We usually find out because someone dissects the app looking for clues that tell you it’s React Native or Electron.
I continue to use Swift for my iOS and Mac apps, but I think React Native is a good choice for most development on the platform. It’s too bad Apple refuses to embrace it and make it a first class citizen on iOS and Mac. It would open the door to more developers.
Then again, Apple kind of hates third-party developers. Which makes me terribly sad because I love the platform. 😕
