Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
The week started off a bit stressful for me. Stream was stuck in Waiting for Review hell at the beginning of the week. I finally pulled it from review and submitted a new build. That worked and some folks were able to look at the latest release. I even got some bug reports (nasty crasher on an iPad Mini I haven’t sorted yet) and found some terrible bugs running Stream on the new iPadOS 26 windowing support. Ack! 😲
I’m hoping I can fix them during my Grit development time tomorrow. 🤞🏼
This release of Stream does the minimum amount of work to support Liquid Glass in iOS 26, but it’s a start.
Graham Greene, the Canadian actor best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves,” died on Monday in Toronto after a battle with long illness. He was 73.
This was really sad to see. I loved his performance in Wind River. I thought the film was incredibly good but I don’t think it did well in theaters.
As an actor his performances always felt real, like he was just living life, not reading from a script. I always appreciated that. 🪦
Atlassian said it has agreed to acquire The Browser Co., a startup that offers a web browser with artificial intelligence features, for $610 million in cash.
My congratulations to The Browser Company! 🥳
I interviewed with this team, I think it was one of their founders? I also think he realized I wasn’t a heavy enough hitter and I wasn’t willing to kill myself for a company again.
We spoke for about 30-minutes. Very nice guy and I’m really happy for him.
But this seems like bad news. I just don’t see how Atlassian/Jira DNA can possibly be a good thing to inject into an innovative user-focused web browser.
Arc was adored by its fans and I’m not sure how Dia is doing.
I could see Atlassian merging the two together to form an excellent browser. Both extensible, like Arc, and AI driven like Dia.
My gut says the extensibility and customization features of Arc are really attractive. Atlassian could take advantage of that plus add Dia’s AI support to build up a very compelling Jira App as well as a fantastic browser.
What if all that customization support really opens up the door to better desktop apps built from web technology? Think Electron.
Oh, one more thing. The Browser Company is the first company I know of to stretch Swift the way they have. They built up Swift support for Windows and used that to ship their Windows version of Arc.
Arc’s exit fits this history neatly. It’s tempting to be cynical: yet another beautiful app sacrificed on the altar of enterprise bundling. But there is another way to read it. Beauty survives by being absorbed. The design DNA of Arc may not persist in its purest form, but elements will filter into the larger ecosystem. That’s how Sparrow influenced Gmail, or how Wunderlist informed Microsoft To Do. Users lose the standalone purity, but the market as a whole advances.
I appreciate Joan’s take on the sale. Hopefully we get a beautiful new browser out of the deal.
Will Power will move to Andretti Global next season as he replaces Colton Herta, who will move to Europe and serve as a test driver for the Cadillac F1 team.
Wow! This is quite the shakeup both ways. Will Power is an IndyCar legend and Colton Herta is a rising IndyCar star!
I do admit I like seeing Herta going to Cadillac F1. They will be my new F1 team going into 2026. I’d been on the Haas train for some time but they just don’t invest at the levels of other teams. I’m hoping the Cadillac backed team will. It’ll also be really nice to see an American built engine back in F1 in 2028.
Making just one type @MainActor can result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide that MainActor guarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not too big a deal for smaller code bases/teams, but I bet this is a killer for big projects. So what do you do?
I honestly don’t know. 🤣
The new concurrency support for Swift sounds extremely complicated, even for the best of developers. Matt seems to be an authority on the matter so I hope to read more of his stuff once I get to a new app that needs it. For now Stream is what it is. It uses closures/callback blocks to update models and the UI after pulling new feeds. It works as is and changing it just to change it feels like a waste of time. I really want to finish the Mac version and I do have another app to build. That seems like a good time to do SwiftUI and proper concurrency work. Like a dummy I’ll try to do both at once. 🤣
Almost exactly 15 years after the service first launched to the world – they waited 15 years but couldn’t wait a few more weeks to make for a fun story? – we now have a version of Instagram tailored for the iPad. And… it’s sort of crap.
I had a third-party Instagram for iPad app a very long time ago, at least ten years back. Then Facebook decided they were going to shutter their API and cut off all third-party access. That third-party app, that I can’t remember the name of, was a pure iPad App. It was fast and beautifully designed. The layout would change, as expected, when rotated and would show you a grid of photos you could tap into to view larger. It was beautifully executed.
From what I’ve seen of the new Instagram built version it’s nowhere near that and that’s a real shame.
If you’re looking for a pure, elegant, platform for viewing and posting photos I’d recommend Glass. It’s gorgeous and not full of crummy ads, displays a beautiful stream of pictures, and even has a proper iPad app.
Windows Mixed Reality headsets were left in a non-functional state last year, after Microsoft suddenly discontinued the platform with its 24H2 update to Windows 11. Now, an Xbox engineer at Microsoft is bringing these headsets back to life, thanks to a new driver that enables SteamVR support.
This is extremely cool! Thanks Mr. Microsoft Xbox Engineer for this gift! ❤️
Thank you Microsoft for allowing this! When I was there, there’s no way this could’ve happened.
If you glance over this blog, you will see that I am an avid Android fan. After setting up numerous Linux prootdesktops on phones, I wanted to see if I use a phone as a server and run my blog from an Android phone. Since you are reading this, I was successful.
I absolutely love projects like this! Take a teeny device not at all meant to host a web server and do just that! Incredible work!
I’ve often wondered how you could take a bunch of the same model iPhones and build a blade style bus for them to plug into to act as a kind of super computer. Wouldn’t it be cool to add a web server to an iPhone and use it to host your blog or use a bunch to process data. They’re super fast and amazing computers, why not repurpose them? I mean if folks could build super computers out of 286 chips why not A16 chips?
Anyway. It’s a neat thought experiment.
Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson announced they will launch a new West Coast Health Alliance to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics. The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.
It’s really wonderful to see the west coast of the United States come together to support common sense science. I miss the west coast. ❤️
Gavin Newsome’s troll game is top notch. 🤣
