jaxondu

Apple has put up a "What’s New in Subscriptions" site with a "Coming Soon" label: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/whats-ne...

Also for Search Ads (Coming this fall): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/

Interestingly Sketch app announced today they're changing to a subscription model soon. Sketch app abandoned Apple store last December. Looks like Sketch will be back to Mac App Store this fall.

It is sad that Apple only took action now, after years of requests and complains by indie developers. Now that app boom is over, I doubt this App Store changes will have any impact.

Maybe Uber needs much more cash to fend off the alliance of Lyft (US) + Didi (China) + Ola (India) + Grab (SEA). Grab in Singapore just announced that you can now use the Grab app to book Lyft drive when in US.

Switch to use Bottle for rest API as Flask has dependencies such as Jinja2 that I don't need.

I had a hard time understand how Rails works under the hood by reading the source. No such issue when reading Django source code. Rails magic is really powerful and I got overwhelmed. Maybe its just my Ruby-fu is not strong.

In the FAQ page http://horizon.io/faq/

Can I use Horizon on mobile devices?

Horizon ships with a JavaScript client library that can be used for building web and mobile apps with frameworks like React, Angular, or React Native. We’re also working on specific platform client libraries that support the Horizon protocol. Client libraries for iOS and Android are coming soon.

Its free up to 100K SMS per month. Can find any pricing detail from Facebook.

It's rumor that Apple is using Intel modem chip for iPhone 7.

Serial killers, ghost hunting, fighting aliens

For those interested, Facebook has a site http://makeitopen.com blogging about how they build F8 (Reactive Native app for iOS and Android) for their recent conference. Advisable to read only if you have some basic knowledge of React Native. Too many techs: React, React Native, JSX, Flux, GraphQL, Relay, Redux, Flow, Jest, Webpack.

One thing that is not clear is their direction with Redux vs Relay. In the F8 app, they're actually using both in separate portion of the app. I understand the guy behind Redux is now working for Facebook. Are they going to combine Redux with Relay? Or build Redux+GraphQL? Both techs has seemingly similar use case.

I much prefer macOS to be consistent with tvOS, watchOS.

What are some of the notable startups in WebRTC space?

I use WebFaction and so far they're totally quite if there is any plan to support Lets Encrypt. Just does not gel with their "Hosting for Developers" tagline. Contemplating moving my sites to VPS at other host.

Very useful toolkit for developers. Is anyone worry this will become like Parse since it is rather independent from Facebook's core app and service can be terminated easily without affecting Facebook. Would be nice if there is an open source alternative built on top of Django, NodeJS, Rails.

The current bots trends started when silicon valley saw how successful WeChat is building a platform on top of its chat app. It has an eco that is not tied to AppStore/PlayStore. What WeChat is doing is more of building apps rather than bots on top of WeChat. They took the idea of SMS apps (e.g. SMS to vote for American Idol, SMS to top up your mobile data plan) and model it for chat. So one can basically build an Uber app inside WeChat, and that's what Uber's China competitor DiDi is doing. WeChat users in China can do all their Didi, shopping, order food, buy cinema tickets, book train tickets, payment, online banking all within WeChat app. Fast forward few years to 2015, and Slack bots become a thing. So interactive apps via text commands become bots as it gains more intelligence (or not like the case of Tay by Microsoft). Facebook is doing catch up and apparently it is different from WeChat. One crucial thing that made WeChat so successful is payment, and that enables commerce via the platform. There is no such option in Messenger. Maybe not ready or Facebook has a different direction for its bots platform.

Its $50 one time purchase for new purchase. The upgrade from Arq 4 is $25. During store checkout, you can also choose to add a "Lifetime Upgrades" at $30 which will give you free upgrades for Arq 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 etc.

Now we know why that iPad app is so expensive. http://youtu.be/P_KmFJ2gGzw

My first thought. Then looking at what Microsoft is doing by offering compelling tool for cross platform development, then there is a possibility that Google is working to offer its own Xamarin like solution. Can only dream it will be one single GUI API for developing apps for Android, iOS, Windows, WebAssembly and Linux desktops using Swift. If Google has this cross platform GUI API, then many are likely to abandon Cocoa API. Google probably sees API as platform and not language.

Thanks for the info. Any idea what GUI lib/framework are these Linux apps (Maya, Mari etc) using?

I always suspect Apple built Mac Pro for Pixar and Disney. It would be nice if there is a mid range (higher than Mac mini lower than Mac Pro) Mac that is not iMac and shape in a perfect cube. The outdated spec and high price makes Mac Pro all looks with no substance.

The strategy is an enterprise play. MS has loss the consumer for mobile, so focusing on enterprise to take advantage of its strongest strength. Enterprise needs cloud: Azure. Enterprise needs hardware: Surface Pro/Win10. Making it stick is the many enterprise C# developers and one developer tools for all platforms, outside or within enterprise. This will effectively counter IBM/Apple's Swift strategy with iOS devices for the enterprise. And keeping its enterprise customers away from AWS and Google. I'm learning React Native, MS is giving me pause to look at Xamarin. As a side note, it might be good startup idea to create a Xamarin clone that uses Swift that targets all platform. Likely acquire by Apple or IBM. Fastest way is for JetBrain to spin off one unit :-).

I was hoping for a fully supported Ubuntu running on MS Surface Pro.

React Native (RN) is not for all apps, it has its uses if what your app does is mainly text delivery, example news app. One of the more complicated app that uses React Native is Discord for iOS (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35309471/is-discord-mobil...), a Slack like chat app. That was then but I'm not sure the latest version is still RN heavy. You can actually build a native iOS app, and then add RN as part of your app. The tweet by Discord that said they are using RN is deleted.

Some reservations to choose RN: RN is possible due to the JavaScriptCore framework build by Apple. It is the bridge between JavaScript code and Cocoa API. Apple designed this so that you can use JavaScript as scripting language for Cocoa. The popular Sketch for OS X is using the precise JavaScriptCore to power its plug-in scripting feature. I guess Apple never have thought JavaScriptCore could be used the way RN does. Choosing RN means your app is relying on Apple's decision on JavaScriptCore API. Someone please enlighten me if RN is still possible or not if Apple remove JavaScriptCore.

JavaScriptCore opens up the Cocoa API, but does not give you a JavaScript ready API. So RN has to implement the bridge internally. So when iOS 10 is released, you will have some lag waiting for new features or changes to be supported by RN. I guess this is common problem to all cross-platform framework.

In order to implement RN for Android, Facebook implements its own JavaScripCore for Android. I have no Android experience, but what I read is RN app for Android is not performing as natively as its iOS counterpart.

If your business rely on all Apple's platform, then choosing RN does not help as there is no RN for watchOS and tvOS.

React Native will make app manager and web-dev team happy, but not those who treasure the last mile UX experiences. But is could also be useful for those startups creating their first MVP. Get app release fast and then change to native codes when you got the traction. Is this good or bad startup advice?

It will be a different ballgame if Facebook announce they are moving to use 100% React Native for Facebook for iOS app.

Android was not created in house by Google. The company created Android was using/emulating/whatever the technology that was popular when they created Android. They happened to check out Sun's Java 2 ME (J2ME) which Sun is pushing for small devices. At that time PDA, Windows CE, Symbian devices are popular and many are running or capable of running J2ME apps, just like running Java app on your PC today. J2ME is not just Java, but a complete SDK to build GUI apps.

When you have a faster computer?

I don't need the extra in virtualenvwrapper, just use the build-in venv module in Python 3:

$ python3 -m venv myvenv $ source myvenv/bin/activate

It's 2016! Left-padding without any deep learning algorithm is so lame.

> Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go.

I always thought Go is less suitable as C++ replacement due to its GC. Another candidate which could be a dark horse is Swift.

Soho Mail https://www.zoho.com/mail/ is another option. I have not used them.

From the article:

"Remember: Channels is a general-purpose utility for running background tasks. Thus, many features that used to require Celery or Python-RQ could be done using Channels instead. Channels can’t replace dedicated task queues entirely: it has some important limitations, including at-most-once delivery, that don’t make it suitable for all use cases. Still, Channels can make common background tasks much simpler. For example, you could easily use Channels to perform image thumbnailing, send out emails, tweets, or SMSes, run expensive data calculations, and more."