Hi, I used to work at gdgt and unfortunately when we were acquired by AOL in 2014 it, and the podcast MP3s got lost in the fray. Unless they're on Archive.org somewhere they're likely lost to time.
The IRC gateway was there to mollify people who said "IRC is better! I refuse to switch!"
Slack advocates could say, "Don't worry, you don't have to switch. You can just keep using your IRC client with Slack. Everybody else will have a web UI, which they prefer, and you can keep using Irssi. Everybody wins."
Right, and now that everyone is hooked the loud minority (if we're being honest with ourselves) have to choose between speaking the Slack protocol or losing access to our contacts.
Are we doomed as a community to be surprised every time a company with power squeezes?
Embrace IRC. There are some excellent IRC clients, such as IRCCloud[0]. With web & mobile versions. I'm on IRC all the time, and there's still lots of good stuff there. I've been an IRC user for 15 years, and haven't lost any contacts due to arbitrary corporate decisions.
Offline maps allows you to save all of the streets in a large radius, the size of a medium-size city. You can also save an area in advance, such as if you're going to an area on a trip.
Caching just saves the streets you get routed on, after the face.
Most of these utility functions are fairly straightforward and will rarely require any changes or maintenance. Testing should therefore be straightforward as well. Having the whole community back something doesn't mean it's bug-free, and sometimes it makes it harder when their release cycle isn't as frequent as you'd like it to be.
Having said that, it's all about tradeoffs. Whether your project needs something as big as <insert JS framework or lib here> or if you can live with just needing a few utility functions, you make those choices, doesn't mean one is better than the other as it all depends on context and situation.
jQuery has become the defacto must-use library for javascript now which IMO is unfortunate, as a lot of sites and apps include it when they barely use most of what jQuery offers. I'm guessing most use jQuery for only a few things - Ajax, DOM querying, and events. I hope that sometime in the future jQuery would be more modular.
That's true, but that sounds more like an additional layer to communicate charging info, negotiate which devices should get more power, etc.
I do half-suspect Apple probably tried coming up with a better solution (e.g. one not involving a charging mat), but ran into technical (probably laws-of-physics) challenges and went with Qi instead, because otherwise there's really no reason they couldn't have done this earlier. Or perhaps they just needed the time to re-tool for a glass case, who knows.
Airpower is exactly that and they said it during the keynote. They promised to work to make some of it a part of the standard eventually. You know how that goes...
Why did they not name it Apple Juice instead of Airpower? :)
If you're referring to the FaceTime announcement, it was a third party that forced them to keep it closed (from memory).
