Enjoying the last few days before getting back to work.

At home chilling out watching Season 1 of Law & Order – starting from the first season and moving forward. I was going to have a small holiday away from Wellington but winter has been so crappy I decided to stay at home and enjoy the warmth and familiarity of home. The temperatures so far have been getting down to as low as 6°C – hopefully there won’t be too many wet days, I can handle a cold dry days because you can still get things done with an extra layer of clothing to keep warm but rainy days are just horrible.

Monday I’m going to get my kitchen sorted out now that I’ve given the splashbacks a good 72 hours to dry but I’ll check with my sister whether it’s ok since I’m not an expert in that area. Once given the all ok I’ll put everything back to normal then complete the backlog inn washing that needs to be done. At the moment it is raining so what I’ll do is put the clothes on the clothes horse then have the dehumidifier running to dry the clothes quickly and avoid the damp smell and making the house damp.

Watching some of the more recent videos put out on the WWDC 2022 sessions page – I think the larger theme that one can deduce from the videos is:

1. Swift is the language of macOS development going forward – Swift is to macOS like what Objective-C and Objective-C++ to Mac OS X. Not all the frameworks may not be 100% mature and ready such as Swift UI but when it comes to where Apple is heading then it is best to get on board the Swift bandwagon.
2. Metal, updated to Metal 3 in macOS Ventura, is being pushed and Apple is addressing the shortcomings to fill in the gaps that OpenGL developers need filling. Long term eventually Apple will remove OpenGL support particularly as big names like Adobe move their codebase over to Metal.
3. End of the line for traditional kernel extensions – the future are userspace drivers based on DriverKit. DriverKit is not only available on macOS but also on iPadOS running on M1 iPad – I wonder whether there is a difference in the kernel settings which makes DriverKit support a M1 only feature rather than available to all iPadOS devices.
4. Apple has consolidated the improvements that have been made available via the Safari Technology Previews into Safari 16 but even with the improvements I can’t help but feel that Apple is dragging their feet to protect their App Store interests by crippling the browser from being able to run complex Progress Web Applications (PWA).
   There is also ‘The Competition and Markets Authority’ in the UK who are concerned about Apple stifling competition in the browser space on iOS due to Apple’s refusal of allowing browsers vendors to bundle their own web engine with their software and thus forced to use Webkit – the concerns have also been voiced by European regulators as well along with Apple’s vice like grip on the App Store by blocking cloud based gaming platforms to distribute one app for their whole library which is accessible via their streaming platform.
5. The operating systems are maturing, if you have a look at the API changes (link) the focus appears to be on laying foundations and optimising for Apple Silicon rather than flash new features. The focus appears to be about nurturing the third party ecosystem a lot more as a way of propelling hardware sales.

I’m going to keep track of how things progress while experimenting with different content blockers. What I hope is that as Manifest V3 that issues raised will be resolved although interesting discussions are being had behind the scenes at Google about the possibility of pushing back Manifest V2 support being removed as concerns are being addressed but time is running out for the 2023 deadline.