Max Desiatov @maxd@mastodon.social

As many of you Swift devs could notice, swift.org website is not searchable, contains outdated information, and is not translated to any other language. As many other community-driven projects, it should be open-source. Please vote here https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-1317

Killing mds_stores did somewhat help, but it got 1 gig of RAM after it respawned. Not too inclined to kill accountsd worrying it would lock me out of iCloud or smth. Restarting the OS did help with accountsd, it's now just 24.3 MB. And it's Catalina 10.15.7, not some beta stuff.

Wait, what did they do to Slack? How did this go unnoticed? I have 21 teams in it, how does it not consume a gig of RAM for each team anymore?

`mds_stores` consumed 7 gigs in the meantime, `accountsd` is at 3 gigs. Native apps rule, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you know that Apple cut off a whole country with no warning whatsoever from registering Apple developer accounts? As usual, all transparency and two-way communication is in characteristic Apple's style, that is non-existent.

https://ain.ua/en/2020/09/30/ukrainians-unable-to-register-apple-developer-account/

Just tagged OLEKit 0.2.0, it's a parsing library for an old weird binary format that's used in ton of places, including old MS Office documents, and even .hwp files used by South Korean government. Mostly a bugfix release with a few breaking changes.

https://github.com/CoreOffice/OLEKit

I’ve just discovered the works of Shaun Tan and OMG it’s outstanding! “Cicada” is available on iBooks (in the UK at least), go read it now, it’s just 150 words, and I don’t think you’ll regret it.

https://www.shauntan.net/cicada-book

Has anyone started testing their Swift projects on Windows with GitHub Actions yet? Please upvote and provide your feedback here: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/1652

It looks like concurrency support in Swift 6+ is going to be quite powerful, and quite possibly not limited to just async/await. I'm starting to see more and more references to actors in toolchain PRs. OTOH, this could be a purely internal thing.

https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/33998

I was going to wait for iOS 14.1 or maybe 14.2 before upgrading my phone from 13, but I hear crackling sound from my AirPod Pro again, and they were already replaced for the same reason. I know that Apple support checks if you're on latest firmware in hope it was fixed, so... 😔

I've just published on update on what happened to SwiftWasm during the last two years, hope you enjoy reading it. Sharing and feedback always welcome 🙂
https://desiatov.com/swift-webassembly-2020/#title

This film almost (how do I buy enough different tofu without plastic?) made me vegan. I hope that BBC makes it streamable worldwide for free. It's sad that right-wing propaganda is spread for free everywhere, while a lot of popular science is paywalled 😞 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000mn4n

I don't get how Apple promises to become carbon neutral by 2030, how are they going to ship stuff across continents? Are electric container ships or electric planes going to be usable on this scale by 2030? Or do they just not include these shipments in "supply chain" accounting?

9/ The outcome will depend on how much control hardware vendors will have. It's exciting that Apple has hardware powerful enough to bring all this to consumers probably before the end of the decade. But will we see enough competition? Anyway, it's all just speculations
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

8/ We may see a cottage industry of AR "furniture", which would be a throwback to desktop themes that were a thing before mobile, before everyone stopped caring how their desktop looks. Flat YouTube wouldn't make much sense in a 3D world, so expect to see some disruption there.

7/ Navigation limited to a small flat screen and navigation in AR would become totally different. With that much space, why not organize different entities in virtual boxes on a virtual shelf instead of having a ton of similar-looking 128x128 pixel icons on a 10″ screen?

6/ But also, in AR you’re no longer limited to 10″ or a 15″ screen. If you have a whole table or a whole room at your disposal, why not make controls bigger? They initially may be colorful boxes to move around, but it’s a big opportunity for customization.

5/ Input fidelity plays a big role. Controls had to become bigger to become touch-friendly on mobile. In AR, tracking target is closer to the size of you hand, or at least a few fingers, especially in early stages hardware may not be powerful enough for detailed finger tracking

4/ If productivity AR apps (and maybe any AR apps in general that need complex input) ever take off, I think we’ll see the next wave of skeuomorphism. You’d manipulate something close to real objects on a table or in your room instead of flat controls on a floating flat screen.

3/ If waving your hands in front of a real giant screen didn’t work before (I don’t believe we’ll see a touch screen iMac), it’s hard to expect that waving hands in front of a virtual screen will. Especially for high-precision tasks w/o haptic feedback.

2/ I don’t develop AR apps (yet), but interesting to see how people imagine AR productivity UI/UX before any hardware gained mainstream traction. Virtual flat surfaces with flat controls flying in the air, with only benefit those are somewhat bigger than your real screen.