"Building on improvements like smooth scrolling and expanded cell limits in Sheets, today we’re announcing that we’ve doubled the speed of calculation in Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers,"...
I assume this is 2x the speed of their current JavaScript code.
I'm sorry I'm bad with translating numbers. This means originally the new version ran at half the speed of the JS version, but ended up running at double the speed? Pretty cool.
Yeah, exactly. The initial prototype turned out to be quite slow - a lot of optimizations are needed to be fast. The version as of now is 4x faster than that initial prototype, and 2x faster than the JS version. And we are working to make it even faster.
The good news is that most of those optimizations weren't specific to Java, like work in V8 (that helps any Chromium-based-browser running WasmGC) and work in Binaryen (that helps any Binaryen-using toolchain, like Kotlin and Dart).
Yes, tried tunnels too. There is significant variability among individual requests, but when benchmarking at scale I found no meaningful difference in p50 and p90 between “Worker -> CF Tunnel -> EC2 -> backend app” and “Worker -> AWS Global Accelerator -> EC2 -> backend app”
> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.
Unfairness is at the heart of so many antitrust lawsuits (whether successful or not). Anyone old enough to recall Microsoft in the 1990s would say that many people (not at MSFT) were pointing out how unfair bundling Internet Explorer was. You may disagree but it was one of the reasons MSFT got sued.
Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.
While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.
Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.
> Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses.
It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions.
The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs).
> Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself.
Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.
They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this.
The DMA did not mandate that they decouple their commission structure. That is Apple’s interpretation of the DMA which seems to change every few weeks so far. PWAs on home screens were disallowed and then allowed again. Apple looks like they do not have legal and execution discipline and is being caught flat footed. It is somewhat alarming that they have made so many mistakes (see Epic being revoked from their third party marketplace and then Apple being strong armed to re-allow because of a EU comment about investigation).
The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.
I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.
> Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.
Amazon Prime was originally an add-on to regular Amazon accounts that provided expedited delivery as a flat rate subscription. Later, Amazon got into the streaming business and bundled access to films and shows into the Prime subscription. For a while it was kind of a useless perk since the available content was old or low quality.
Later, as Amazon acquired more popular content and then created an in-house production studio, they added the ability to rent or "purchase" (rent) streaming video content on a per-episode/season/film basis without requiring the full Prime subscription service.
This was designed to address Amazon customers who were primarily (pun intended) interested in the video content, not the physical goods.
I wonder if this will have a trickle down effect on other app stores, specifically gaming consoles. Would XBox Live or Playstation Store, for example, be on the hot seat if they rejected an application or "game" that was basically a storefront for streaming other games?
I don't think so, at least not as a consequence from this case if Apple loses. Antitrust cases are usually very limited in scope. Microsoft's loss required many actions (documenting Active Directory and other protocols/formats, browser choice screens, etc.), but no one else in tech were required to do so.
John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.
Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.
IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.
As much as I like Swift, the tooling has been and still is subpar. Swift package management is barely viable.
You have to use Xcode. You can try other IDEs but LSP equivalent features are at the most basic level. Xcode is the kitchen sink of IDEs which has led to many negative opinions as it struggles under its own weight. Every other year there’s new UI for things like debugging which is fine but what would be really nice is if the actual debugging worked. Technically there are reasons why you can’t print a local variable sometimes when stepping through a program, but in practice, I do not care and I want to know what the value is.
If you don’t care about the “optional” tooling like the dependency manager and LSP or a linter (which is closer to ESLint versus Rust Analyzer), the required tooling leaves much to be desired. The compiler sometimes gives up when it takes too much time to process a complex type. It would be understandable in some cases but most people encounter the problem when just writing seemingly simple SwiftUI. Error messages and auto fix-it suggestions are improving but still disappointing. I remember when Apple switched from GCC to LLVM and everyone was praising the error messages as a reason to switch.
Swift is actually ambitious. The generics system is world class. It has to support the legacy of a huge ecosystem on multiple platforms. SwiftUI is one of those bets that you might be surprised that Apple can still make. But whenever I fire up that SwiftUI Preview, I am crossing my fingers that maybe I’ll see something instead of an error. Swift lives up to its name in terms of moving quickly and the language design is probably fine, but outside of that, the tooling is still very immature for a decade old language which tons of resources are invested in.
this has been my experience as well. After being one of the five people who liked using Objective-C I was eager to have this new, incredible language to work with, and pushed to adopt it as soon as reasonable on all the codebases I worked with.
That enthusiasm has since waned when stuff happened like compilation times slowing to a crawl because somebody used ternaries extensively. I still think it's a great language, but the tooling really makes it hard to love
I don't believe Apple has released empirical data, but Apple has optimized phone charging built into recent versions of iOS (Settings > Battery > Battery Health and Charging). It will stop at 80% and then resume charging to 100% about an hour before you start using your phone every day. iOS tracks your daily habits to determine the start of your day.
In the most recent iOS versions, if it can determine when "clean energy" is available near your location, it will also try to charge only during those time periods. I don't think any 3rd party has determined if it is effective.
This feature exists in Macbooks too, but it's useless to me - it never works because apparently my usage pattern doesn't convince the smart system to limit charging, and it gives me no manual control whatsoever. I think I'd have to always keep charging the laptop for it to kick in.
Just gimme a slider that lets me tell it to only charge to 80% and be done with it.
At least some Android devices have the same, it keys off your alarm if you have one set. My Pixel 6 Pro will also take advantage of chargers' ability to supply different amounts of power to not charge as quickly as it's physically capable of doing if it thinks I've put it on charge for the night.
My iPhone 12 mini spends 95% of its life on a MagSafe charger and has never charged to 80% after a year with this setting enabled. I wish Apple would add an explicit option like "Protect Battery" on Samsung devices.
Samsung, OnePlus, and other phone manufacturers have all been accused of throttling phones and have acknowledged the throttling and/or released patches to give more user control. You can google "<manfacturer name> throttling" and get new reports of throttling as recently as last year for Samsung.
Blame bad Samsung fab. Things like the Qualcomm 888 chipset were notorious for overheating like crazy requiring throttling (used in both Samsung and some Oneplus devices). Need TSMC. Apple had issues all the way back to like 6S era when they sourced from both and the TSMC ones just ran better.
You can override it with a custom rom and messing with EFS on those devices but it's already flirting with battery dangerous temps doing gaming. Better to buy TSMC or strap an icepack to the phone lol.
Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).
I don't know if most people consider skeuomorphic designs obsolete/outdated, but the costs would be far greater today compared to when iOS was only for a handful of different resolutions for the iPhone and iPad. Not only do you have to consider the physical screen size differences with possibly different PPI, but all of the sidebar/split-screen/multi-window modes would require additional work.
It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.
I think it depends on the level of skeumorphism — a button doesn’t need to be a bitmap a-la Bryce or Kai’s Power Tools or Poser to be skeumorphic, it can be a bevelled rounded rectangle like MacOS 8 or a more complex but still procedurally generated 3D effect of the Aqua UI.
ok, yeah. Was thinking of the original Notepad, where the frayed yellow tear-off sheet border drove me nuts! Anything tied to the "desktop metaphor" - bits are not atoms
As far as the Coinbase marketplace, it may have “seasons” but the margins from fees will probably shrink over time regardless. A recent episode from Crypto Critics’ Corner ( https://anchor.fm/cryptocriticscorner/episodes/Cryptocurrenc... ) covered some of the headwinds facing Coinbase. Coinbase (at least the CEO) claims this is not a problem so it will be interesting.
https://workspace.google.com/blog/sheets/new-innovations-in-...
"Building on improvements like smooth scrolling and expanded cell limits in Sheets, today we’re announcing that we’ve doubled the speed of calculation in Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers,"...
I assume this is 2x the speed of their current JavaScript code.