Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Feeling a bit distracted today. It happens.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Oh, today is our sixth anniversary of our move to Virginia. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here that long. Twelve more years to retirement if everything works as we hope. That’ll happen in the blink of an eye.
A half-day’s drive from the gray drizzle of Starbucks headquarters in Seattle – over the Cascade Mountains and into the bright sunshine of Walla Walla Valley – you’ll find rolling green fields dotted with little orange pumpkins that may one day be in your Pumpkin Spice Latte.
I like it when companies do these types of profiles. We get to see the real people who make the day to day work, plus I have a soft spot for farmers.
Apple might have a big expansion of its iPad apps in store. A new report today says that Apple could soon release four new iPad apps: Pixelmator Pro, MainStage, Motion, and Compressor. These apps would join Apple’s existing pro-level apps Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which came to the iPad last year.
It’s nice to see Apple giving some attention to their Professional apps.
Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The job market is already tough enough. I can’t imagine how difficult it’s gonna be to find a new job. These poor folks. 😔
Charlie Cheever and James IDE • Expo
React and React Native now belong to the React Foundation, a new independent home for the ecosystem. Expo is proud to be a founding member.
I still think Apple should get involved with this project. It runs on their platforms and is used by a lot of developers. Why not make sure it’s really good on iOS and Mac?
They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997.
When I hear replace the web it’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like. I like the web.
Look, I’m not a fan of singletons and I think you should avoid them. I really like the composition root pattern, or the more technical term of “passing arguments to functions”. There are a million similar, more sophisticated options.
Yes, passing arguments to functions is a great way to avoid having singletons. 🤣 I love that we have to come up with a fancy term for that.
Don’t get me wrong the singleton pattern has its place but I’ve seen it abused to the tune of tens in an app and it makes for a terrible mess.
In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community.
Good on the Python Software Foundation. Supporting racist initiatives by the American government is something we should all avoid.
Virginia Brown • Atlas Obscura
As old as the country itself, the Dobbin House has stood on the same Gettysburg soil since 1776. The oldest building in Gettysburg, the Dobbin House was built by Reverend Alexander Dobbin, an Irish-born early frontiersman, minister, and community leader. Dobbin studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow before coming across William Penn’s advertisements of new land and free worship in the New World.
We’ve eaten at the Dobbin House Tavern! It’s neat. Employees are in period dress and the food was pretty good.
Be careful with the mixed drinks however! I had a Rum Bellies Vengeance and it just about knocked me on my butt! 🤣
After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like Chrome with a chat button bolted on. I do not see the appeal, at all, despite being a daily user of ChatGPT. Atlas offers nothing of any appeal to me that’s better than using Safari as a standalone browser and ChatGPT’s excellent native Mac app as a standalone AI chatbot. But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc. My web browser is for browsing pages on the web. Perhaps this sort of browser/chat hybrid appeals only to people who live the majority of their desktop-computing lives in browser tabs.
Nowadays a lot of folks refer to web based apps as “desktop apps.” The web has been taking over the role of desktop apps for a very long time. Web technologies are extremely arcane but they are the most popular tooling in the world of software development. I don’t feel like desktop apps will cease to exist anymore than the web will cease to exist but the web is definitely a way more popular way to make applications accessible from multiple platforms than are native apps.
Trying to keep the desktop relevant was a battle Microsoft waged in the late 90’s and early 2000’s before deciding to embrace the web. Now Apple is fighting the fight to keep its platforms relevant to native developers. I believe this is partly why SwiftUI was created.
With the race on the flat 1-mile Phoenix Raceway, neither the Joe Gibbs Racing drivers (Hamlin and Briscoe) nor the Hendrick Motorsports drivers (Byron and Larson) has a clear advantage as both organizations have won races there in the last six events and all four drivers have at least one Phoenix win on their resume.
Trying to pick a winner among the four is challenging. But the feeling here is to go with Kyle Larson.
While I love the idea of Larson winning his second Cup Championship my heart is with Denny Hamlin winning. He’s one of the winningest NASCAR drivers in the history of the sport but doesn’t have a Cup Series Championship. He’s an instant hall of famer even if he doesn’t win but I’d like to see him get one, even if that means Larson has to wait a while for his second.
We’ll find out tomorrow. The Cup Series Championship from Phoenix airs tomorrow at 3PM eastern on NBC.
I hadn’t used ReadKit in over a decade, and when I checked it out again, I was impressed. It’s looks modern with Liquid Glass support, works with Feedbin, and works as well on the Mac as it does on iOS and iPadOS. I’ve been running it this week and so far, so good!
There are so many great feed readers on the market today and ReadKit looks to be one. Besides using Stream daily — even my alpha quality Mac version — I’ve found Unread to be a beautiful option and its read later feature is really good. I’ve started using it to collect articles for Saturday Morning Coffee, until I can get the read later feature of Stream working, but that’s a story for another day. 😀
TELUS Corporation (NYSE: TU) announced the completion of its acquisition of all outstanding shares of TELUS Digital (NYSE: TIXT) (TSX: TIXT) not already owned by the company for $4.50 per share in cash or TELUS common shares. The transaction totaled approximately $539 million and gives TELUS 100% ownership of TELUS Digital.
TELUS International purchased WillowTree a couple years back. At some point after the acquisition TELUS International was rebranded as TELUS Digital. Eventually the WillowTree name went away and we all became part of TELUS Digital.
Now our parent company, TELUS, has acquired TELUS Digital.
All that to say I’m now a TELUS employee, by way of TELUS Digital, TELUS International, and WillowTree. 😳
