From time to time, the thought has a occurred to me that it would be cool if I could build simple native apps with Python. So, I was excited when I found rumps.
Ridiculously Uncomplicated Mac os x Python Statusbar apps
You can't make full blown apps, but if you've ever had a status bar app idea you can use rumps to build it.
I’ve been a long-time Passenger user to switch between multiple Ruby web apps during development without needing to crank up rails s for each. When I began using RVM to switch back and forth between multiple Ruby versions, Passenger no longer solved my problem. That’s why I’m excited to try out Pow from 37 Signals. Pow aims to be “a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X.”
To install, run the install script
curl get.pow.cx | sh
To add apps, just symlink them to your ~/.pow folder:
$ cd ~/.pow
$ ln -s /path/to/myapp
… and browse to http://myapp.dev/.
We are a bit late to blog about this, but if you follow The Changelog on Twitter you would have seen tweets from us mentioning this project.
On December 3rd we chipped in to back a Kickstarter project started by Erik Michaels-Ober to fund Hubcap, a proposed native Mac client for GitHub. Erik’s plan is to bring the elegance of various Twitter clients for the Mac, including Tweetie, Hibari, Itsy, and Echofon to GitHub and increase social engagement. Obviously, we’re excited about this project, as are the guys at GitHub.
As of today’s date (Sunday - December 12nd, 2010) the Kickstarter project has 93 backers and has raised over $3000 dollars. Erik’s original goal was to raise $2222 (I’d love to know where that number came from) by December 16th, so that means this project “is on”, and awaits the release of the funding this Thursday on the 16th at 5:00pm EST.
If this is something you are interested in suporting, consider making a pledge to the cause.
Hubcap will leverage the GitHub API to display your activity feed, notifications, and inbox messages. It will also allow you to compose and send new messages, follow new people or projects, and read the news feed of individuals, organizations, or projects. Hubcap will be a Cocoa app written primarily in MacRuby.
Erik tells us to expect to have an alpha version completed in April 2011, with beta versions coming in the early summer and the 1.0 shipping in the fall. What’s the best part? Once the 1.0 ships, the source code will be made available on GitHub to everyone.
More great stuff from @itod, Fluidium is a Native Mac OS X Browser Platform based on WebKit with a Cocoa plug-in architecture, tabs, userscripting, userstyles, URL shortcuts, Twitter integration, more.
Docker is expected about 5x slower…
Docker on a Mac utilizes a hypervisor. Hypervisors rely on running the same architecture on the host as the guest, and are about about 1x - 2x as slow as running natively. Since you’re running ARM Mac, these hypervisors can only run ARM Linux. They can’t run x86_64 Linux.
And, “VirtualBox won’t work.”
VirtualBox is a hypervisor. Therefore, it won’t be able to run x86 Windows or x86 Linux.
And, “Boot Camp won’t work.”
Boot Camp is an Apple-approved way to dual-boot Mac OS and Windows. Boot Camp will definitely not be available on ARM Macs. It might be added later with the ability to run ARM Windows, though Microsoft would have to approve.
Call me crazy, but I like using the native Gmail web view. Thanks to a tip from my buddy Bryce Hewett, I started to using an open source tool called Gmail Notifr for Mac OS X. It’s pretty simple and tucks neatly away in your system tray and even supports multiple accounts.
If you want to try it out, download it here.
Gmail Notifr was originally written in RubyCocoa, then MacRuby, and recently Objective-C.
This guide is meant to document the things I have done, the software I have used, and the decisions I have made to be really fast and really well-organized at work, and to help prioritize and maintain focus on my current activities. One key decision, made for speed above all else, is to capture as much of my thinking and work in plaintext as I can. Thus the name: Plaintext Productivity
This article speaks my language, but does so to a corner of the software world that I don’t visit too often: Windows
Windows is a critical element in this system because it is hard to find good productivity software that runs on Windows, especially if you want to run it outside of a web browser. Windows, in my opinion, is far behind Mac OS X, iOS, and Android, in having thoughtfully designed and efficient software—both in general, and in particular for writing, organization, and task management
Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives.
I freakin’ love this site. They have quite a collection here, everything from Amazon.com and Google Maps to Mac OS and Super Mario Kart. Version 1.5 of Microsoft Excel was dope! (full Excel history here)
Ever wish you could keep tabs on your App.net stream but hate the thought of having one more client to check? What if you could keep up right from your terminal window?
----------
Rob Warner (@hoop33) (258) You
I'm working on PM support for Wry this weekend :-) #wry
ID: 5557218 -- 2013-05-11T12:04:10Z
----------
Wry is a command-line tool for Mac OS X 10.7+ that solves that problem by bringing App.net to the command line. Installing Wry couldn’t be easier especially if you’re using homebrew.
First run this to make sure everything is up to date.
$ brew doctorNext, simply type:
$ brew install wryIn seconds you’ll have Wry installed and can add authorization
$ wry authorizeCopy and paste your authorization code from the App.net website and you’re done. Yes, it’s that simple. You can also download and install the zip file yourself.
Once it’s installed, type wry to see a list of supported commands.
The wry commands are:
authorize Authorize with App.net
block Block a user
commands List available commands
delete Delete a post
download Download a file
find Finds users
follow Follow a user
followers List the users following a user
following List the users a user is following
global Display the global stream
help Display help
ls Get a file listing
mentions Display the mentions for a user
mute Mute a user
muted List the users that a user has muted
post Create a post
posts Display a user's posts
read Read a post
replies Display the replies to a post
reply Reply to a post
repost Repost a post
search Search for hashtag
star Star a post
stream Display the current user's stream
unblock Unblock a user
unfollow Unfollow a user
unified Display the current user's unified stream
unmute Unmute a user
upload Upload a file
user Display information about a user
users Manage the users you've authorized on this computer
version Display version information
The list of commands supported by Wry is impressive. After reaching out to Rob, to let him know how much I enjoyed using it, he told me that private messaging and patter room support was released with version 1.5. Just an added bonus to an already great tool.
Check out Wry on github and follow author Rob Warner (@hoop33) on App.net or Twitter.
Special thanks to Dennis Keefe, writer of The Common Geek, for pointing it out.
One of the biggest adoption hurdles to reaching the designer masses for Sass and Compass has been the intimidation level presented to designers when mentioning “the command line” … ooh, I just scared myself.
But seriously, the command line truly can be intimidating for folks who don’t care to or ever plan to go there. I’m talking about folks like traditional css designers, print designers, graphic designers and folks who just want to use GUI tools to do their day to day design work. No, I am not putting anyone down. Facts are facts.
Well, the good folks over at Handlino recognized these facts and got to work on creating Compass.app (written in Java) to do all the heavy lifting for you - leaving you to enjoy a command line free life, all while embracing the awesomeness that is Sass and Compass.
Out of the box Compass.app is supported on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. For a small nominal fee of $7, you can buy a pre-built copy for your platform at the official site. Or, if you know how to build it yourself, you can download the source from GitHub and save your money.
Either way you are gonna need to have Java, JRuby and rawr installed on your machine.
Sparkup is just plain cool. You can write HTML in a CSS-like syntax, and have Sparkup handle the expansion to full HTML code. In short, Sparkup lets you write HTML code superfast!
Sparkup is written in Python, and requires Python 2.5 or newer (2.5 is preinstalled in Mac OS X Leopard). Sparkup also offers integration for common text editors. Support for VIM and TextMate are currently included.
Sparkup was written by Rico Sta. Cruz and was inspired by Zen Coding of Vadim Makeev. For those who may be familiar with Zen HTML, the syntax is forward-compatible with Sparkup (anything that Zen HTML can parse, Sparkup can too).
Download Sparkup from Github - you can download the latest version here.
Simply double-click on the Sparkup.tmbundle package in Finder to install the bundle.
In TextMate, open an HTML file and type in something like …
#header > h1
Then, press Ctrl + E. Pressing Tab after the snippet is expanded will cycle through all your newly created empty elements.
Copy the contents of vim/ftplugin/ to your ~/.vim/ftplugin directory.
// Assuming your current dir is sparkup/vim/
$ cp -R ftplugin ~/.vim/
Put Sparkup in your $PATH somewhere and then invoke it by typing:
echo "(input here)" | sparkup
… or this for a list of commands.
sparkup --help
Check out the ZenCodingNetBeansPlugin.
This …
ul.feature-list > li*5 > h2 + p + a.button{Learn More}
Expands to this …
<ul class="feature-list">
<li>
<h2></h2>
<p></p>
<a href="" class="button">Learn More</a>
</li>
<li>
<h2></h2>
<p></p>
<a href="" class="button">Learn More</a>
</li>
<li>
<h2></h2>
<p></p>
<a href="" class="button">Learn More</a>
</li>
<li>
<h2></h2>
<p></p>
<a href="" class="button">Learn More</a>
</li>
<li>
<h2></h2>
<p></p>
<a href="" class="button">Learn More</a>
</li>
</ul>
Take a peek at the readme for more details.
Well, as it is right now, the project is only catering to the HTML market, but hopefully one of you fine folks out there will fork it and get to work.
[Source on GitHub] & [Video Demo]
We’ve covered a number of web console tools like Webshell, a nifty HTTP console for Node.js, and Twurl, the Twitter-specific tool for Ruby.
But when Nils Jonsson created an incredibly useful HTTP console with some old-school flair, we took notice. HTTY brings HTTP to a handy terminal shell in what Nils describes as a combination of curl and lynx.
HTTY is installed as a gem:
sudo gem install htty
You can then fire up the console with your API or web site endpoint:
$ htty http://github.com/pengwynn.json
*** Welcome to htty , the HTTP TTY. Heck To The Yeah!
http://github.com/pengwynn.json>
To make a request, just use the get command
get
*** Type cookies-u[se] to use cookies offered in the response
200 OK -- 10 headers* -- 27206-character body
http://github.com/pengwynn.json>
To see what we got back from the server, just use body:
$ body
[{"repository":{"description":"(Mac OS) TVShows 2 "Phoenix" is the next iteration of the easiest way to download your favorite TV shows automatically.","has_issues":false,"homepage":"http://embercode.com/tvshows/","fork":false,"has_downloads":true,"watchers":78,"pushed_at":"2010/08/16 14:39:36 -0700","url":"http://github.com/mattprice/TVShows","private":false,"name":"TVShows","owner":"mattprice","forks":10,"has_wiki":false,"created_at":"2009/09/15 17:44:46 -0700","open_issues":7},"created_at":"2010/09/05 21:04:43 -0700","sha":null,"public":true,"actor":"pengwynn"
...
HTTY is incredibly well documented, and the help command lists the full power of the console:
$ help
Navigation
a[ddress] address Changes the address of the request
cd path Alias for pa[th-set]
fol[low] Changes the address of the request to the value
of the response's 'Location' header
fragment-c[lear] Alias for fragment-u[nset]
fragment-s[et] fragment Sets the fragment of the request's address
fragment-u[nset] Removes the fragment from the request's address
history Displays previous request-response activity in
this session
history-[verbose] Displays the details of previous request-response
activity in this session
ho[st-set] host Changes the host of the request's address
pa[th-set] path Changes the path of the request's address
por[t-set] port Changes the TCP port of the request's address
query-c[lear] Alias for query-unset-[all]
query-s[et] name value Sets a query string parameter in the request's
address
query-unset name Removes a query string parameter from the
request's address
query-unset-[all] Clears the query string of the request's address
r[euse] index Copies a previous request by the index number
shown in history
sc[heme-set] scheme Changes the scheme (protocol identifier) of the
request's address
userinfo-c[lear] Alias for userinfo-u[nset]
userinfo-s[et] userinfo Sets the userinfo of the request's address
userinfo-u[nset] Removes the userinfo from the request's address
Building Requests
body-c[lear] Alias for body-u[nset]
body-req[uest] Displays the body of the request
body-s[et] Sets the body of the request
body-u[nset] Clears the body of the request
cookie-a[dd] name [value] Alias for cookies-a[dd]
cookie-r[emove] name Alias for cookies-remove
cookies Displays the cookies of the request
cookies-a[dd] name [value] Adds a cookie to the request
cookies-c[lear] Alias for cookies-remove-[all]
cookies-remove name Removes from the request the last cookie having a
particular name
cookies-remove-[all] Removes all cookies from the request
cookies-u[se] Uses cookies offered in the response
header-s[et] name value Alias for headers-s[et]
header-u[nset] name Alias for headers-unset
headers-c[lear] Alias for headers-unset-[all]
headers-req[uest] Displays the headers of the request
headers-s[et] name value Sets a header of the request
headers-unset name Removes a header of the request
headers-unset-[all] Removes all headers from the request
Inspecting Responses
body[-response] Displays the body of the response
headers[-response] Displays the headers of the response
st[atus] Displays the status of the response
Miscellaneous
e[xit] Alias for qui[t]
hel[p] [command] Displays this help table, or help on the
specified command
qui[t] Quits htty
As many readers know, I’m a sucker for embedded humor, so I also got a chuckle from the exit message:
$ quit
*** Happy Trails To You!
Today we talk to Mark Ericksen about all the things that we could be doing on the new platform - this is a follow-up to episode 50.
Mark specialises in Elixir, he hosts the Thinking Elixir podcast, and he also helps make Fly.io the best place to run Phoenix apps, such as changelog.com. In the interest of holding our new platform right, we thought that it would be a great idea to talk to someone that does this all day, every day, for many years now.
We touch up on how to run database migrations safely, and how to upgrade our application config to the latest Phoenix version. We also talked about some of the more advanced platform features that we may want to start leveraging, like the multi-region PostgreSQL.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Gerhard Lazu: I’m also thinking about the specific versions that you use, because if you develop on a Mac, and I think the majority does, on Mac OS, you install Erlang, for an Elixir application - which version do you install? How do you install it? How does it link against the system libraries? OpenSSL - how do you solve that problem? Do you even test with OpenSSL in development, even configure that? And if you do, how does that version of OpenSSL correspond to the production version? And then you have a database, or maybe you have other systems. And before you know it, you have like this huge setup that every single developer has to figure out on their machine, and it’ll be different maybe even between other developers. You have different Mac OS versions… Maybe someone wants to develop on Linux, and before you know it, you have like this sprawl, like these different ways of developing things. And we all know that if it works on your machine, it doesn’t mean it works, right?
We’re joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari’s plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Jerod Santo: I don’t even know how you orchestrate something like that, especially across – specifically I think of iOS to Mac OS, because those Safaris seem to be pretty different, except for the rendering engine; I’m sure there’s a bunch of shared code, but… Is there some technical infrastructure, some magic that y’all are doing to make those things merge at the right times? Or is there feature flags? How does it shake out?
We’re talking with Mike McQuaid about Homebew 2.0.0, supporting Linux and Windows 10, the backstory and details surrounding the security issue they had in 2018, their new governance model, Mike’s new role, the core team meeting in-person at FOSDEM this year, and what’s coming next for Homebrew.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Mike McQuaid: Yeah, it’s been really exciting. It seems to have been received pretty well. People have been really positive about it and it’s a nice buzz in the community since doing so as well.
A funny thing - the distance between 1.0 and 2.0 has been 2.5 years I think, and then 1.0 and original Homebrew was seven years, so it’s definitely a slightly faster iteration, but it feels like it’s a kind of good balance between – there were some deprecations and big changes we wanted to make that we’ve been kind of holding off on for a while, but then also some kind of big features in there at the same time, which like you mentioned, that kind of Linux stuff being a notable example. So that’s been quite cool.
There’s been another project that’s been running for quite a while now that was called LinuxBrew, that was basically just a full-on fork of Homebrew centered around Linux. The Homebrew project – we’ve had a little back and forth and collaborating with those folks a little bit for a while, but maintaining our own independent forks… And it was maybe about a year ago we started thinking like “Well, maybe we can actually bring these projects together, because the code is getting more similar”, and things like that. I’d kind of started working a few ago about trying to almost do a proper cross-platform port based on (I guess) cross-platform work I’d done previously in my career, to try and build nice abstraction layers, so you don’t just end up with “if OS Linux/if OS Mac” all of your code.
So basically we did that, and we got all the Linux code back into Homebrew, done in a nice, properly abstracted fashion, and we’d actually been running Homebrew on Linux for some of our CI stuff - stuff like uploading packages, and generating our package browser, our data, and stuff like that for a little while now. So yeah, it kind of segued in nicely, and it was fairly smooth, and it’s been a nice transition and selling point for Homebrew, I think.
Adam, Jerod, and Tim get together to talk about Plex! Plex is a media server which allows you to store your movies, TV shows, music, photos, etc. Turns out, you can actually use it together with an antenna to watch live TV and DVR content. They chat about what has Adam so excited, the pros and cons (or as Adam said, “trade-offs”), and how to get started.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Adam Stacoviak: [56:03] And I’m sure you could probably just have that installed as an app, even on like a Mac OS, and point it at a drive and say “This is the drive I want you to watch, or these drives”, and those things sync to, say, different sources or endpoints inside of Backblaze.
Jerod, Nick, KBall, and Chris pre-party for JSConf by testing out some brand new segment ideas: Story of the Week, What the WHAT… WG, and Protip Time. What do you think of these segments? Like ’em? Love ’em? Not sure why we even? Please let us know!
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Christopher Hiller: I have some pro tips… I use a Mac. If you use a Mac, maybe a thing you need to do is copy and/or paste text files (source files or what have you) in their entirety. I discovered not too long ago - maybe this is one of those things that everybody knows except me, but I discovered that there were actually a couple command line tools that come in Mac OS that help you do just this thing. They are pbpaste and pbcopy.
[52:16] Pbpaste outputs to a STDOUT. It takes whatever is in the clipboard, and it sends it to STDOUT so you can pipe it to whatever you wanna pipe it to. Maybe you wanna pipe that to a file, and so if you copy some source and then you go to your command line and you say pbpaste, and then you do a write – I don’t even know if that’s less than or greater than [laughs], but you’re piping to the right with the direction, and you say foo.js… It will paste the contents of your clipboard into a new file, foo.js.
I wrote a little tiny Zsh function called Paste, which does just this - it takes its first parameter and it says ‘pbpaste’, and it writes to this new file. So I say ‘paste foo.js’, it takes whatever is in my clipboard and throws it in a new file, foo.js.
Likewise, pbcopy - you can cat a file and then pipe it to pbcopy and that file’s content will end up in your clipboard. Again, I wrote a little function to help with that, so it just accepts its first parameter, and it cats it (this file) and it pipes it off to your clipboard, which is really cool.
Along the same lines, there’s another little thing called z, and people may or may not know about z; maybe we’ve talked about z before, I don’t know… But there’s this command line tool for your shell called z. Just search GitHub for z.
It basically looks at all your shell history, it looks where you’ve been, and if you say something like “z node” or something, it will find the last directory that you were in called Node and it will just pop you right back there. It’s a great way to navigate to frequently visited directories or working copies, and it’s really neat.
Another tool I use is called – and apparently there’s science behind this; I can’t say whether or not that’s true, but it’s brain.fm. It’s a service that you pay a nominal fee for and they give you a mobile app and a web app. The best way to maybe explain it is it’s generative music; there’s many different styles, but… There’s some science behind it that says “If you listen to this music, it’ll help you, for example, focus on a task, or it’ll help you relax because of various tones and tempos and frequencies in the music.”
I don’t know about that, but I wanted to try it, and so I did try it, and I found out that it’s really helpful when I’m trying to focus on coding, and it helps me get and stay into the flow.
I feel like if you do a lot of coding, maybe you recognize that sometimes you get into this flow state and I feel like the music generated by brain.fm may help you do that; maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll find it boring, but it’s supposed to be actually kind of – it’s not supposed to engage to engage with you. It’s supposed to be kind of in the background.
A lot of popular music, or even maybe you listen to – I don’t know, techno, or trance, or something with that beat… It kind of drives you forward to help, but maybe sometimes that type of music is a little too engaging, and the brain.fm music is like Techno Elevator music, or something… It’s really interesting; you just throw it on the background, forget about it… And it helps me focus. Check that out, it’s cool.
[56:31] The last thing - there is a thing called Astral. If you’re like me, you have a million GitHub stars and you may be like “What was that thing I was thinking of? How do I find it?” I don’t even know how to do that with GitHub… So there’s this app called Astral App. It’s astralapp.com. It’s just like an OAuth style GitHub app, and it helps you manage and view all your stars, and you can even tag your stars into categories, and it sorts stuff by language, and it’s really neat.
So if you are like me and have a lot of stars, check out Astral App, and that will help you manage them and find things. Those are my pro tips.
Kball and Feross talk with Shelley Vohr and Jeremy Apthorp about what Electron is, why to use it, and what comes next for the platform.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Jeremy Apthorp: I think this is, let’s say, a mistake in operating system design that happened in the ‘70s, that we’re still paying for. I think that there has been some good progress on that front in the models that iOS and Android use about sandboxing every app by default. Mac OS is starting to get this with the Mac Appstore sandbox, but still not a lot of apps use that.
So I think there’s something there to – there’s a fairly fundamental question there of like the computer is supposed to be an agent of the user, and there’s an inherent obfuscation of like, “If I do these things with my computer, if I open this app, if I click this button, there’s this level of trust, because I can’t see the electrons that are moving around inside the processor and see the packets that are going out the network. I can’t directly perceive what’s going on”, so there’s some level of trust that needs to be established between the operating system and the user.
[19:44] I think it’s really the operating system’s responsibility to provide that trust, which is a long way of saying it’s a complicated problem, and we need complicated tools to attack it. And I think this lies – certainly, some of that responsibility lies in the hands of Electron, but it also crosses over into operating system authors and publishers, like Apple, Microsoft and Google, as well as back up the pipeline into app authors and how they design and build their apps and publish their apps.
Break: [20:30]
Carmen Andoh joined the show and talked with us about inclusivity, the 2017 Go Developer Survey, visualizing abstractions, and other interesting projects and news.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Carmen Andoh: Sure, yeah. I’m on the build infrastructure team. I’m one of the junior… I don’t know, we don’t use that language, so I’ll stay away from it, but we basically – if you’ve ever used Travis, whether you pay for it or you use it as part of your open source projects on GitHub, we try to give you an environment in Linux and Mac that’s going to be a clean slate every time and help you run your tests, and every time you push a commit or push a PR, you can be confident that that won’t break the build when you finally deploy it to production (so hosted CI). And the part that we work on is the build environment and also the infrastructures that the build environment run on.
So there’s platform, and then there’s build infrastructure engineering. I’m one of the people in the build infrastructure engineering.
The thing that I work on is the Mac – recently; I used to work on the Linux part of things, but now I work on the Mac infrastructure, and the Mac is a special beast, if you will, because – I can go on and on about it in terms of the engineering that’s involved. Brad Fitzpatrick does a somewhat similar thing to what I do at scale, but just for Golang… Sort of running the binaries of all the Go runtime versions for the Darwin architecture.
So we do that at scale, and we use quite a bit of Go microservices to do that within the infrastructure, and a lot of the Go microservices help mediate, or are levels of abstraction to mediate between the worker or the agent that runs the builds, and the hypervisor that we have to use, which is vSphere’s VMware.
[35:58] And the reason why we use vSphere… “Oh, why are you using vSphere? Why don’t you just use Docker?” We get that a lot in issues… It’s because when you have Mac - OS X or macOS, if you will, you have to run it by licensed-on-Mac servers; you can’t run it on Linux servers, and so all of the wonderful container ecosystem that we have is no longer available to you, so you have to get really creative… And sometimes it’s frustrating because you can kind of see where Linux is kind of evolving in this space (the container ecosystem) - I know Brian and Erik work directly on this Azure with [unintelligible 00:36:36.13] So having to mediate that with multiple microservices and the vSphere API is a lot of what we try to do in our day-to-days for the Mac infrastructure.
And our worker agent, which is the largest codebase at Travis, if you will, or the largest kind of one-service, that’s very mission-critical, is also written in Go, and all the back-ends for Docker and for GCE, all the different clouds, as well as our Mac cloud is written in Go.
In this episode of The Future of Node series recorded at Node Interactive 2016 Adam talked with Gaurav Seth (Lead Program Manager of Chakra & TypeScript) and Arunesh Chandra (Program Manager of ChakraCore) about the backstory of Node at Microsoft, their polite fork of Node to introduce the community to ChakraCore (the high-performance JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge), why Microsoft is so interested in Node, the future of Chakra and ChakraCore, VM neutrality, and more.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Gaurav Seth: I think one of the biggest things that we are working towards is really taking Chakra cross-platform. When we open source Chakra back in January, it was a Windows-only platform and at that point in time it was clear that even to come true to the mantra of “any developer, any app, any platform”, we have to make sure that this technology is not Windows-only and it is available on other platforms, as well.
We’ve been making pretty good progress, and Chakra is now available both in Linux, in the Ubuntu x64 version, as well as we did a preview on the Mac OS X yesterday, that is available. So on these other two platforms we have a fully functional Chakra engine now, but it is still not as optimized as we would like it to be so that it is sort of on parity with the Windows version. There’s still some work that is pending in the JIT compiler and the garbage collection pieces, which we are working on.
The big thing for us is to make sure that Chakra goes cross-platform and is almost on par in terms of what functionality, performance, and of course, the fundamental characteristics across all of these platforms. So that’s one of the biggest things that we’re working on.
Outside of that, I think there are a bunch of innovations that continue to happen on the engine there. We’ve been working very closely with the Microsoft Research team to advance or innovate the state of the art of JavaScript debugging, and they have been experimenting with their stuff on the Chakra engine. We call that technology time-travel debugging.
Sam Boyer joined the show to talk about dependency management, building community consensus, and other interesting Go projects and news.
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Brian Ketelsen: I love seeing all of the graphs that people are posting on Twitter of their Go 1.8 garbage collection time as compared to 1.7. The way they used to joke when the new Mac OS came out - “It feels faster already”, and Go is actually making that, too. I love that. It makes me happy.
Mike McQuaid joined us to catch us up on the latest in Homebrew and the recent 1.0.0 release. We talked about no more /usr/local — Homebrew moves to /usr/local/Homebrew to keep /usr/local cleaner, auto-updates, the growth of the Homebrew community and how it has grown to almost 6000 unique contributors, and more.
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Mike McQuaid: Yeah, exactly… And nicely now, after the migration we then tell people, “Okay, you can actually now change this back.” That’s now the last time. So when Sierra +1… I’m still hoping for Mac OS Sea Lion to come out, [laughter] and when that comes out, then hopefully these permission issues will just be gone for good at that point, which will be lovely.
Justin Searls joins us for hot takes on Apple’s 2024 WWDC keynote. Apple Intelligence stole the show, but did it steal our hearts? Oh, and we learn all about Justin’s Vision Pro Life and how he hopes/expects Apple’s latest device to improve in future iterations.
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Jerod Santo: Yeah, exactly. I think that’ll be really great, because I’ll be able to see more, and I’ll be able to move more stuff around… And why not, because you’ve got infinite space around you. But it almost felt – my first reaction was like this is almost an admission that having a little sidecared Vision OS app, which is what I’ve been doing next to the Mac displays, is not worth it. Like, I would throw that overboard in a minute to get the ultra-wide, just give me more Mac stuff… Because even just trying to context-switch between the Vision OS app and the Mac display is just enough friction that it’s not worth it most of the time… Which, you know, has got to be frustrating to Apple. They’ve built this whole frickin’ operating system, this whole app architecture, and this whole way to do things… And it is really good, it’s just like there’s not that much to do with it.
This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.
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Adam Stacoviak: Technically the CEO… [laughs] Okay. Well, I love Raycast. I forget what I used before. I think I used LaunchBar before, and several others over the years… And there’s always been some sort of launcher for Mac computers. Now macOS. It was OS 10 back in the day, now it’s macOS. I almost said some other operating system name. There’s always been some sort of launcher for it, and I think that – I wonder what makes a launcher important for any user, especially like a productive user. I feel like launchers are for the few. They’re not really for the many, and maybe that makes you sad in a way, and maybe you sort of want to expand that to many… But I feel like not everybody wants to use a launcher, or feels they need to. They just like clutter their bar down there, whatever that bar is at the bottom of a Mac. I forget what even it’s called.
Perry Mitchell joined the show to talk about the importance of password management and his project Buttercup — an open source password manager built around strong encryption and security standards, a beautifully simple interface, and freely available on all major platforms.
We talked through encryption, security concerns, building for multiple platforms, Electron and React Native pros and woes, and their future plans to release a hosted sync and team service to sustain and grow Buttercup into a business that’s built around its open source.
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Perry Mitchell: Yeah, of course. That’s a big concern of ours, as well. I think that both of us are very perfectionist in terms of getting the best out of it we can, and obviously sometimes to our fault of not being able to release things fast enough; we’d like it to be as perfect as possible, and one pain point as such is definitely the UI. We feel like we love the look of it and love how it responds, but in terms of the resource usage, it’s a huge pain. That would be something which would be great to get rid of, but at the same time, having this unified deployment and build process and everything means that we can also release fixes and updates much quicker. It’s maybe like half a day to get a brand new feature in, all cleaned up and released, instead of spending a couple days on one OS, and then going across to Mac and Linux and doing the same build process, which would be a huge pain.
You really need a team to do that simultaneously, especially in terms of security of releases, and stuff like that… You can’t afford to have a long release cycle at this early stage. Electron has kind of helped us with that, but I can see that we might outgrow it at some point, but at the same time I can see Electron improving by leaps and bounds in the not so distant future… So I’m optimistic that it will get smaller and faster and lighter and more secure all the time, but of course, that’s just a pipe dream at this point, so…
Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.
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Brendan Eich: [01:11:15.03] It’s pretty easy. First of all, we’re an ad-blocking browser, and browsers see all your browsing data in history. People wouldn’t trust us if we were closed source. They’d think, “If you’re talking about anything, even if it’s opt-in at first (like ads), you could be spyware, you could be this class of scummy toolbars that does ad injection.” Very dirty business, we don’t wanna go near it.
Being open source lets us be auditable, both in terms of the code being all readable and auditable, and we can have audits… We’re having least authority audit our payments system right now. We hope to have the Tor folks audit us, we also can have verified builds, at least on Debian. It’s hard to get verified builds… They might come to Windows and Mac through the toolchains from the OS vendors. Verified builds means you know the bits don’t contain a backdoor, because you can prove that they came from a certain vintage of all open source.
Open source is pretty darn important just for optics and trust, and I think it should be. I think people should audit us, and we welcome it. We just launched our HackerOne security Bug Bounty Program too, and open source makes that just a lot easier and better, even though you can… You can do black box bug bounties, but it’s just a pain.
Proprietary code doesn’t really work for us. What I think matters beyond trust and, as you say, eventual standardization, is our brand is really tied to our users. It’s not like we’re gonna have a partner who keeps us going. It’s really our users growing to tens of millions and maybe beyond, and that brand value is sticky. I think if they trust us and our code is auditable and we do a good job in our ultimate suite of micro-donations and ad-blocking, tracking protection, anti-fingerprinting, maybe even optional ads that share revenue with you that are matched privately and confirmed anonymously - all that stuff happens. We’ll have a huge, good kind of lock-in just from the user trust. Other browsers could implement what we’ve done. It could become web standards - I don’t care, they’ll be late to the party and they’ll be competing with us on a footing that users will benefit from, which is “Are they trustworthy? Did I get a good revenue share? Am I getting my micro-donations through to my publishers with a low fee?”, things like that.
This week we’re talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.
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Daniel J. Barrett: Oh gosh, I’ve used pretty much every OS out there at this point. I used to be a big Commodore Amiga fan, so I used that for many years. A lovely multitasking operating system on MPC format. So that was a lot of fun. Before that I was a Windows user, and also after that… Because you know, when you work in the industry, you don’t always have the choice of which OS is on your desk. Today I’m using Mac, Linux and ChromeOS every day.
Today we have a very special episode, where Gerhard gets to share his favourite learnings from Steve Jobs. If it wasn’t for his determination to build a better personal computer, Gerhard would have most likely continued with a career in physics.
We know what you’re thinking: it’s crazy and impossible to interview Steve Jobs, but on his 10th memorial anniversary, Gerhard was determined to combine the things that Steve said with his passion for computers, automation, and infrastructure.
Live your life and ship your best stuff because there’s nothing like the present.
Thank you, Steve.
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Steve Jobs: One of the keys to Apple is Apple’s an incredibly collaborative company. Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a startup; one person is in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person is in charge of worldwide marketing, another person is in charge of operations. We’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for three hours once a week and we talk about everything we’re doing, the whole business. And there’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they’re going to come through with their parts. And that’s what we do really well. We’re great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have, and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well.
[28:09] And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.
ReTweetie is a SIMBL plugin for Mac that makes Tweetie use Twitter’s native Retweeting functionality. No longer do you get a “RT @username: ” tweet, but instead a real #NewTwitter Retweet. Just Retweet your tweet as usual, and let ReTweetie handle the rest.
We give thanks to Nick Paulson of Linebreak, developer of CloudApp and BaseApp, for open sourcing ReTweetie and letting folks peak under the hood of a SIMBL plugin.
Also, special thanks to Christina Warren of Mashable for mentioning this on Twitter.
/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/PluginsThis week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.
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Jerod Santo: I’ve been on macOS for so long that I don’t know probably the intricacies. I don’t work too much in Linux anymore, like I did back in the early aughts. I do notice some of the – I have to send different flags… So like in my bashrc I’ll have slightly different aliases, depending on if the OS is Darwin or not, if I’m on a Mac or not. I don’t remember what they are; I think maybe even ls might have a slightly different way of coloring files, or something like this. The DNS flushing, the DNS cache is slightly different… So that is interesting, and it’s based on the roots of the operating system, the BSD side versus the Linux side.
