Matt Birchler throwing a few punches at the state of Wear OS:

Google may not have said a word about Wear OS in either their keynote or technical state of the union, but they did hold a single session on the platform on the first day of the conference.

I’ve done enough for v0.4 of Slate I think, so I’ll upload that to TestFlight now. And then I can start working composing for v0.5!

Here’s the raw release notes:

• The vertical spacing in the post cell, and also separating them has been adjusted.
• Names are now slightly bold, with the username being less distinguished.
• Inline images now load for urls with https.
• Fix scenario where login fields would not adapt properly to the keyboard height.
• If you view your own profile/author view, it will hide the follow button.
• Inline images are resized vertically, if they are in landscape orientation. However they will not be resized vertically as that could lead to a very bad reading experience.
• Tapping anywhere on a cell for an author will now open their profile.
• The Favourite and Conversation swipe actions now have images.
• Started localising the text for US english.
• Fixed relative dates being completely inaccurate!

Feel free to sign up to the beta.

It’s time for me to push another beta version of Slate!

Honestly, I didn’t complete everything in my plan for this version. But versions don’t really mean anything at the minute, as it’s probably better for the whole process if I just release more often.

Here’s the raw release notes for this build:

• Added pull to refresh on the profile and author views.
• Profiles and author views now have the name as the title.
• Times on posts are now relative.
• Links are no longer underlined.
• Instead of verifying the app token every time the app is launched, it moves straight to the timeline, and checks in the background.
• There are now no separators in the post tables.
• The light theme is slightly lighter.
• The menu adapts to the theme as well now.
• Fixed the issue where some tables were not getting their background colour changed when a new theme is selected.
• Line height is now slightly bigger.
• You favourite posts now by swiping from left -> right.

Feel free to get in touch about joining the beta, it’s compltely open to everyone.

Build beautiful, usable products using Material Components for iOS. – material.io

Or how about you follow the Human Interface Guidelines by Apple, which is what all iOS apps should be using.

(Image: NASA)

Mallory Locklear, writing for Engadget:

Being able to generate power will be essential for long-term space travel. Powering a stay on Mars, for example, will require a lot of fuel, way more than we can pack onto a rocket. That’s why NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and a number of other groups have been working on a small, transportable nuclear reactor that can reliably generate power on the go. The reactor they’re developing is called Kilopower and earlier this year, they announced that they had conducted successful tests of the system. In March, the team ran the first full-power tests and during a press conference today, they reported that those tests went extremely well.

Lower power Kilopower systems, like the one kilowatt version, can power a basic toaster, while the largest version, a 10 kilowatt model, can do a bit more. Four or five of the latter could be used to power a habitat on Mars and importantly, they don’t rely on the sun, meaning they can be used on planets with less sunlight than ours, in shadowed regions and during light-blocking dust storms. “Kilopower’s compact size and robustness allows us to deliver multiple units on a single lander to the surface that provides tens of kilowatts of power,” NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said in January.

It’s certainly not Iron Man’s Arc reactor, but this is still pretty cool!


Los Alamos National Lab made a video to explain the whole thing.

Straight from his sixth AMA on Reddit:

When I code I use tabs because you want the columns to line up. For some word documents I use tabs. You want things to adjust when you go back and edit them and tabs help.

🔥

Reddit Comment
Full Reddit AMA

Google have announced another top-level domain from Google Registry, specifically for apps:

Today we’re announcing .app, the newest top-level domain (TLD) from Google Registry.

A TLD is the last part of a domain name, like .com in “www.google.com” or .google in “blog.google” (the site you’re on right now). We created the .app TLD specifically for apps and app developers, with added security to help you showcase your apps to the world.

This just makes sense. It’s obvious that this had to happen one day, and I’m very glad it has. Especially when you mention apps on things like Twitter like “Mail.app”, so technically there’s a possibility that url may actually work.

One security benefit is that HTTPS is required for all .app domains:

Your security is our priority. The .app top-level domain is included on the HSTS preload list, making HTTPS required on all connections to .app websites — no individual HSTS registration or configuration required. The result is built-in web security for you and your users. – get.app

You can check if a .app domain is available on get.app right now, and the general availability will be on 8th May 2018. Although some domain registrars are selling “early access” to domains, which means that you will essentially reserve a name, so a registrar will try to purchase it as soon as it’s available. I’m not exactly a big fan of this, but what can I do. What’s worse is that GoDaddy are selling multiple levels of priority.

I would like to get Slate.app, but the cheapest I’ve seen it €145 per year. Not exactly what I wanted to spend.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Today at our F8 conference I’m going to discuss a new privacy control we’re building called “Clear History”.

In your web browser, you have a simple way to clear your cookies and history. The idea is a lot of sites need cookies to work, but you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. We’re building a version of this for Facebook too. It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook — what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on.

Seems pretty reasonable. Nothing amazing about it though, of course you should be able to clear your history.

However, just a few paragraphs below, his true lizard-self comes out:

To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back in to every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won’t be as good while it relearns your preferences.

Daniel Caffrey writing for Selected Intelligence:

I was recently trying to check a reference on an article I’d read on Medium about 2 years ago. It had been removed from Medium by its author. So I checked the link on The Wayback Machine and there were plenty of snapshots. However when I click on any of them I get immediately redirected to the Medium.com homepage.

I’m not exactly sure of the benefits for Medium with this, but it seems pretty aggressive to me.

(Image by LEGOLAND Japan)

Guiness World Records:

It’s springtime in Japan, and what better way is there to commemorate the season than by setting a Guinness World Records title for the Largest LEGO® brick cherry blossom tree (supported)?

This successful attempt was achieved at LEGOLAND® Japan – the Nagoya-based theme park wanted to celebrate its first anniversary with style by creating a Japanesque work using LEGO® blocks.

The resulting beautiful plastic sakura tree measured 4.38 metres tall, 5.42 metres long and 4.93 metres wide – over 800,000 LEGO® bricks were needed to pull this off!