sarsway
People don't buy a new phone every year.
A lot of people buy $300 Android or previous generation iPhones.
A lot of people still do multi year contracts.
Most years the phones are just slightly updated versions of their predecessors, not complete new developments.
Console sometimes release updated versions as well.
Consoles need to be affordable for younger people.
Phone money is in hardware and micro-transactions. Console money is in game purchases. Consoles do best with a fresh slate every handful of years.
Inter-op with various web-services is often quite a headache too. Sometimes there's support for Swift or even an official SDK, but it's often not so straightforward to actually get it working. You're definitely in untreated territory here, and it shows.
So we moved NodeJS. I feel Node is a meme at this point, but man does it simply work. There are code snippets for everything and usually it doesn't take longer then 30min to figure out how to do something.
The quality bar will be raised, but if you want an audience, you will still need to produce something that stands above the rest. And the way to do that is the same as today, put in more effort than the others. Make something that's better, that's worth peoples time.
My first impression is it seems a lot more useful then DALL-E, because you can quickly iterate on prompts, and also generate many batches, picking the best ones. To get something that's actually usable, you'll have to tinker around a bit and give it a few tries. With DALL-E, feedback is slower, and there's reluctance to just hammer prompts because of credits.
And you seriously can't see the problem? The Steam Deck is direct competitor to the Switch, that also just happens to be the best Nintendo console ever made. Valve profits from it, but can deny any wrong doing. I think you just don't want to admit that intellectual property is a thing - something we hold in high regard in western economies.
Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified database editors is what it was really good at.
These days.. things changed. UIs need to be flexible, reactive, reusable, adaptable. UIs that can handle uncertain states, asynchronous data flows, change dynamically and so on. SwiftUI / React / Flutter all ended up at the same paradigm, it's a much more advanced way of doing things. Also, high level languages are much more pleasant to work with.
Hope though, when AI is becoming increasingly useful and seamlessly integrated, they not gonna take an arm and leg for it. It's just gonna be way too good to pass, people won't really have a choice but pay.
But realistically, what exactly is the appeal of it? The Metaverse? I mean, if no one can figure out how to make a fun MMORPG these days, what makes you think the "Metaverse" will actually be something people will want to spend time in? And why would Facebook be the one who actually figure out how to build some super appealing virtual world, they have 0% experience in doing this. It's gonna be boring, in immersive VR, still boring. And who really wants to wear these headsets? They always gonna be somewhat bulky.
But even if you could make it super immersive, and super fun, and totally appealing, you always gonna be one thing that's holding you back: Your real body, yes unfortunately we are all tied to these meat bags, so our dream of moving into our self created Matrix is always gonna be somewhat limited.
I mean you gotta be realistic here, no matter what we do, life will always be best experienced without a VR headset on. It might have some cool fun uses, but that's about it.
We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out on life, chasing something, but what exactly we don't really know.
But maybe you just don't need to? Most of us are exactly fine with where we are. Of course you should always strive to improve, but truth is "killing time" is a big part of life. Especially for top of the food chain animals like humans. Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it. People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to kill time.
This whole notion that you need to make the most out of every moment, live life to the fullest, see all the places, chase the uncomfortable! - I don't think it's necessarily the best advice, the happiest people I've met tend to have very simple boring routines.
Obviously evolution should be taught as well, but it's a narrow mindset to assume we actually have it all figured out, can proclaim an objective truth about our existence, and everything else is just non-sense.
Because you have to admit, there are so many things we don't really know, and we can't be pretentious, like nothing ever could possibly challenge the paradigm of our current understanding. Like for example the picture of the pyramids in the blog post, how did those exactly came to be? Well nobody knows. Another thing that nobody knows, is how exactly atoms and particles work, and it really demonstrate the fragile legs on which we're standing here. It means we don't actually have working model of our reality. Which is pretty big deal if you want to proclaim things as true.
Not to come across as too wacky, but some of these old spiritual texts are really interesting, they don't have to be taken at face value, but there's some buried wisdom there that makes them worth mentioning in schools I think.
Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here's the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it's going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It's all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.
Some apps also fail by trying to emulating native UI so hard, when it would be better advised to just adopt a more abstract style. Today's flat UI is just simple shapes after all.
From technical a standpoint, Flutter definitely is performant, capable of delivering smooth scrolling and 60 fps. Your experience may vary of course, but I've been shipping an app with it for 2 years now and things been working out well. Can only really say great things about it.
Flutter's UI can't match native components exactly, but they do a very good job, and I don't think the vast majority of users would be able to notice the difference or cares that much.
The reality is, the native UI homogeneity is long dead anyway. Every app, website, brings it's own set of UI components and styling. It's all inconsistent and people are used to it.
It really does not matter whether your modal dialog is native or not, as long as it follows basic abstract UX conventions of looks and behavior.
Node.js + Postgres
Most flexible, biggest ecosystem of all, runs everywhere, talks to everything. Bonus: Get Github Copilot, it knows Node very well, and you don't even have to code most of the time, just tab, tab, tab.
About time other studios get a chance to work with Blizzards IPs, they did well creating all those beautiful universes, but they struggle so much making just one new game every few years.
But now it's a lot better. There's more consensus on what should be used, and most frameworks seem somewhat stable. Tooling is straightforward, in part thanks to VSCode I guess. Things like ESLint, JSHint are now standard. Altogether it feels more robust.