Matter, the upcoming standard that’s attempting to give the smart home a single unifying language, is almost here — and I was just treated to an early demonstration of the kinds of cross-platform compatibility that it should enable in the future. The demonstration was given by Eve, which produces a range of smart plugs, radiator valves, lighting, and security devices.
I’m not going to tell you what language or framework to learn. If you’re good at the basics you can learn anything you want. Until then, you can be bad at whichever one you want. That’s what I did, anyway.
Instead I’ll talk about things that didn’t make sense to me when I started, and now they’re the guiding stars in my sky. That means it’s not about specific technologies. Technologies come and go. Languages come and go. They can’t be your sky.
Let’s start with this: software is young.
With all that going on, we thought it would be a great time to put a spotlight on the latest and greatest generation of USB. We've whipped up a handy refresher for all things USB4, breaking down the various key aspects of the spec, from how it differs from other specs to protocol tunneling, Alt Mode, and power delivery.
As I scrolled the App Store results for “earthquake” recently, attempting to sort through the options, I was struck by how bizarre and frustrating of a dilemma they present: How to know which is best, most trustworthy, most likely to keep you alive?
And once you’ve finally chosen an app, sorting through the data it serves up is also difficult. Should I give the app access to my live GPS location?
Apple doesn't give different names to laptops, tablets, and watches that are only different in screen sizes, except to differentiate them with the screen diagonal dimension. Hopefully this year Apple will finally follow suit with the iPhone's naming, and not double-down with iPhone Plus and iPhone Pro Max, as rumored.
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Thanks for reading.