Web & AI Analyst
Richard MacManus As developers begin to shift away from post-Musk Twitter and contemplate building apps on federated social media protocols, many are asking themselves: what can I do with ActivityPub, the key open protocol of the fediverse? ActivityPub enables different applications to federate content between themselves, which both enables and encourages the open web. The specification from … Read more
While Web3 has been overtaken in the tech news flow by the rise of decentralized social media, the long-running effort to strengthen dApp infrastructure continues. Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft has now joined the Web3 revolution, albeit in a low-profile way. Donovan Brown, a partner program manager on the Azure incubation team at Microsoft, told The New … Read more
“It’s happening,” blogged Evan Prodromou, whose pioneering work inspired the ActivityPub protocol on which Mastodon runs. “I have not been this excited about federated social networks since we published ActivityPub,” he wrote. “The shift has started.” He’s referring, of course, to the migration of hundreds of thousands of users from Twitter, a centralized social media … Read more
Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a physicist academic turned startup entrepreneur, believes that developing software using quantum computing is equivalent to programming computers in the 1940s or developing for Arpanet in the 60s. In other words, it’s still early. But his company, Horizon Quantum Computing, is about to launch a software development platform that will, he says, … Read more
Do we want to stay on a social network that shows such callous disregard for its own people? That is the question many of us have been asking as news hit this morning that half of Twitter’s employees have been unceremoniously sacked. Twitter, the company, styles itself as a platform for “public conversation.” Even if … Read more
Ever since the $20 billion Figma acquisition in September, there has been increasing interest in the cloud IDE market. The thinking is, if even design tools can become web-native, then surely it is high time for developers to move to fully web-based tooling. After all, even Photoshop — once thought to be incapable of shifting … Read more
Sizzy is pitched as a “browser for web developers,” and its creator, a Macedonian developer, known simply as Kitze, is hoping to turn it into a thriving business. Currently, the product is available on a 14-day free trial, but after that, you’ll need to sign up for a monthly subscription ($15 per month for an … Read more
Headless content management systems have turned the traditionally staid CMS market on its head over the past few years. In a headless CMS, the frontend (aka the head; meaning presentation and publishing) is decoupled from the backend (the content) and managed outside of the core system. WordPress vendors like WP Engine now put headless offerings … Read more
“It reminds me of the feeling when Netscape first added JavaScript to the web.” So says Matthew Hodgson, the creator of the Matrix network and now building a web-based metaverse client called Third Room. He thinks he and his team have cracked the solution to creating user-generated content (UGC) for the metaverse. Last August I … Read more
Aurora is a popular name for tech projects, it seems. Following on from Amazon Aurora and Twitter Aurora, Google’s Aurora project is a collaboration between its Chrome browser team and open source web frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular. It was announced last June, and at the recent Infobip Shift developer conference we received … Read more
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is one of a number of 3D development engines competing in the thriving online gaming sector — not to mention the nascent metaverse market. Unlike its more well-known counterparts, Unity and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, O3DE is open source. It began as an Amazon product with a typically terrible Amazon name … Read more
“StackBlitz is very much the development analogy of what Figma did for design,” StackBlitz co-founder and CEO Eric Simons told me in an interview. Today, StackBlitz is announcing a new GitHub integration product called Codeflow, along with what Simons says is a “strategic investment from Figma,” which began just weeks before Figma was acquired by … Read more
It’s been over two years now since Twitter resurrected its developer API as “version 2” and optimistically welcomed back all the third-party developers it had rug-pulled at the end of Web 2.0. To find out what progress Twitter has made with its API v2, I caught up with Amir Shevat, Head of Product for the … Read more
Shawn Wang, aka @swyx, is a feature of the developer conference circuit and also has a knack for making thoughtful, forward-looking projections for web technologies. His latest theory is that we are about ten years away from developers dropping desktop files completely — it’ll be “the end of localhost,” according to Wang. To find out … Read more
Last week I attended the Infobip Shift developer conference, in the lovely coastal city of Zadar, Croatia. The speaker list was top-shelf and popular topics included cloud integrated development environments (IDEs), generative AI, modular blockchains, and using CSS to create books. The Shift Conference was started in 2012 by Ivan Burazin and acquired in January … Read more