Richard MacManus

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

When news broke of Adobe acquiring the web-based collaborative design tool Figma for about $20 billion — one of the most significant internet M&A deals over the past twenty years — you could almost hear the anguished cries of web designers the world over. Their collective response was best summarized in a brutal tweet by … Read more

It’s a milestone week for blockchain technology, as Ethereum moves from the environmentally damaging proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to the energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS). In a project nicknamed “the Merge,” Ethereum will first bring together the two consensus mechanisms, and then drop PoW completely once PoS has taken over. The Merge is predicted to complete … Read more

A Canadian startup called Wonder Interactive is creating a platform to turn Unreal Engine apps into HTML5 apps, which it claims will have “near-native performance and lightning-fast load times.” To find out why an Unreal Engine developer might want to create a browser version of their app, I spoke to the founders, Robert Stewart and … Read more

The metaverse has largely been promoted in 2022 as a potential successor to the consumer internet — certainly, that’s the vision Meta (née Facebook) is pitching, but it’s also true of dozens of blockchain-based metaverse projects (like Decentraland and Voxels). However, there are also various flavors of enterprise metaverse projects emerging. One of the first … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, then avatars will be a crucial building block for developers. Even better if those avatars are interoperable — meaning, able to be used across different virtual worlds and online games. One company early in the race to provide a platform for interoperable avatar technology is Ready Player … Read more

Some of the world’s biggest companies are going all-in on the metaverse. One you may not know about is Ansys, a US public company that makes engineering simulation software and has been around since 1970. Dr. Prith Banerjee is its Chief Technology Officer, and I spoke to him last week about his vision for the … Read more

WebOps is a portmanteau of “web” and “operations” and, at first glance, appears to be a close cousin of DevOps. As the name suggests, WebOps focuses on the deployment and operation of websites and web applications. The term has been around since at least 2006, when its Wikipedia article was first published (indeed, that page … Read more

Brain.js is a JavaScript library for deploying a neural network in the browser or on Node.js. It uses a computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) for calculations, or pure JavaScript when GPU isn’t available. The lead developer of Brain.js is Robert Plummer, by day a full-stack engineer at iFIT. I reached out to him to find … Read more

Nvidia is going all-in on the metaverse. At this year’s SIGGRAPH, an annual conference for computer graphics, Nvidia announced a range of new metaverse initiatives. These include the launch of Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a “suite of cloud-native AI models and services” to build 3D avatars; new neural graphics SDKs, such as NeuralVDB; plans … Read more

IBM is one of the leading companies in quantum computing hardware, with its roadmap targeting more than 1,000 qubits by the end of 2023. That’s the so-called “quantum advantage” level, when quantum computing will out-perform classical computing in certain use cases. So we know IBM is innovating on hardware, but is it as ambitious on … Read more