These days, I think Microsoft's web-based desktop apps mostly use WebView2 directly instead of Electron, so they don't have to bundle a browser. I think for Teams it happened at the same time that they moved from Angular to React.
The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET.
Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.
Ive been building these apps (cross platform web based ui, C# backend) for years, and yes its finally good to see MS catch up and validate the architecture ive pushed since Xamarin. I wrote once wrote an electron version of this archand thought wtf are people doing? Things can be so much easier when you use a platform that knows how to multi-thread. At stages i had to build adapters/upstream patches for Chromeiunium directly onto Mac and Linux, and its was a major pain having to debug C calls.
Ive been using the same framework now for 10+yrs on apps in the stores, i wrote a small layer infront of the webviews and can swap out webkit, chrome, edge on demand. You really dont need much, just a constand way to boostrap logic and UI. 90% of code is shared across all platforms, there are def differences in WebView engines that you sometimes come across but those parts just get swapped out with browser specific JS. Ive found bugs and worked with browser teams at all vendors doing this and to see how simple this is with Dotnet these days compared to when i started is refreshing. Its easily the most stable cross-platform framework around, if you are stuck using something like flutter i pitty you, its just eletron with another skin. I can swap out and integrate directly with OS libs when i need to do stuff that the dotnet team hasnt gotten around to yet without re-writing. This has mean i really havnt used MAUI at all, but if i need to or could take advantage of it i can mix it on an Ui element by element basis. I prefer webUIs though, i have the chose to handle anything with either JS, WASM, or a combination. I can use traditional JS frameworks or traditional Native UI frameworks.
If i had started this process later, avalonia seemed to have the closest thing i required. It was just a bit a more complex /based on WinUI (which i dont really enjoy) but it supported all platforms and gave lower level api access. MS were smart, that canabalanised all these community effort and brought them into the fold. Every dotnet webview impl was a successfull community driven project before. They didnt write anything themselves from scratch.
This looks like it could be a sensible way to use LLMs in programming, although I'm not convinced AI-generated documentation can give meaningful explanations rather than paraphrase. However, since the generated wiki is editable, it seems it can be used to give a kick start to internal documentation and let the actual devs step in when it's required. I'm skittish about genAI in the workplace (or anywhere really) but this could be valuable.
However, and this might have been naïve of me, but I expected some sort of local model. And I see that you have to bring in your own vendor API keys, which implies that you let AI companies mine your codebase. Isn't that a no-go for most companies? So far I've only worked in places that banned ChatGPT over IP concerns like these. Is it already common for businesses to feed their codebases to third party LLMs?
Exactly. The wiki is editable so AI gives a first draft, and developers refine it. Some companies are fine with vendor APIs, but we’ll add local model support for full privacy.
But what if you edited a section about code piece A and then you change that code?
Does it have permission to overwrite?
Seems like a fairly hard problem to solve.
Not by any serious outlet. It's a Twitter rumor started by a nobody... Another reason why letting people pay for blue checks was an incomprehensibly stupid idea.
Not to mention most of those use ILM Stagecraft which, despite being Unreal-based in its first version, has been using a custom engine for some time now.
Anecdotally, I've heard the same thing. Lots of articles will say things like, "ILM increased the resolution of StageCraft with its in-house renderer, Helios" but never explicitly say they dropped Unreal or exactly what changed.
Pokémon isn't a Nintendo first-party title, it's not developed internally and often considered third-party by the company, as they only own part of it. But nitpicking aside, the titles developed by Nintendo look and perform fine, they're often some of the most advanced titles on the platform, so I'm not sure where you got that idea.
The ownership of Pokemon is an interesting little rabbit hole in general. The property technically isn't owned by Game Freak or Nintendo. Its instead owned by a holding company called quite literally "The Pokemon Company inc."
TPCi is owned in equal parts by Nintendo, Game Freak and somehow the manufacturers of the card game, Creatures Inc.
So you'd think Nintendo owns 33% of the Pokemon IP through TCPi, except they also have a significant amount of stock (not a majority of shares) in Game Freak. The exact amount isn't known but the result is that Nintendo most likely controls TCPi entirely.
Also, just to head it off - the anime (the other most popular Pokemon product after the video games and card games) is made by Studio OLM (which also did the 1997 Berserk adaptation as well as a truckload of other anime based on Japanese video games) and they have no controlling stake in TCPi whatsoever.
> So you'd think Nintendo owns 33% of the Pokemon IP through TCPi, except they also have a significant amount of stock (not a majority of shares) in Game Freak. The exact amount isn't known but the result is that Nintendo most likely controls TCPi entirely.
I think we have good evidence that Nintendo has very little control over the development of Pokémon games. They do not at all adhere to their quality standards. My assumption is that they agreed that their shares each get them specific benefits:
- Nintendo gets platform exclusivity for the games,
- Creatures gets exclusivity for any merchandise,
- Game Freak gets creative control over game design.
Creatures Inc. has been involved with Pokemon since the beginning, prior to the introduction of the card game. Their name is present on the boxes, carts and in game of the original 1.0 release of Pokemon Red and Green in 1996. I believe they helped out with some of the development a few months before Red/Green went out the door.
I'm sure Disney was disappointed in Lightyear's performance given its marketing push and brand appeal, but I don't think you're listing the movies that are central to Disney's strategy anymore. Ever since COVID, Disney has pretty much banished Pixar to Disney+, not as "premium" releases that cost extra, but just included day one on the service. If they had theater runs, they were limited or international-only. That includes such films as Soul, Luca and Turning Red, whereas Encanto from their other animation company (Walt Disney Animation Studios) got a wide and successful theatrical run. Turning Red's box office returns are irrelevant because of this. However, due in part to people going back to theaters and (largely) to the film's brand recognition, Lightyear became the first Pixar film since 2019 to be given a real theatrical release. And the main reason it bombed was, I believe, because everyone and most importantly families had gotten used to being able to watch those movies on Disney+ for a lot cheaper. Even if that one waited two months to come to the service.
As for Strange World, it was widely observed that Disney didn't give it any marketing push and a majority of people weren't even aware of its existence. To me, the main reason is that Disney doesn't bother to hype up movies that they don't really believe in. Strange World was one such film, a WDAS movie that isn't a fairytale or a musical (and isn't safe from the kind of conservative hate campaigns that Disney tends to avoid). Disney has a long history of letting their studios make films outside of the cookie cutter but release them with little fanfare. They can now easily be written off as Disney+ fodder.
Disney absolutely still relies on their animation studios for blockbusters, but they've noticed which formula works best for each. Pixar is never as successful as when it does sequels. WDAS routinely hits the 1 billion mark when it makes new additions to their fairytale canon, or bombastic musicals (see Encanto's massive success). It's no surprise then that they're now pushing WDAS, a notoriously sequel-averse studio, into making a third Frozen and a second Zootopia, and that a _fifth_ Toy Story is suddenly in the works at Pixar alongside... Inside Out 2. Any other project is bound to get buried in the release schedule or dumped on Disney+.
So what kind of movies are core to Disney's strategy? Star Wars is on a kind of hiatus and lives on Disney+. We have Marvel of course, which isn't in the healthiest state but still produces frequent hits. Avatar is now a big one. Any animated movie that fits their preferred formula. And of course, the depressing string of live-action remakes which, if they're all quickly forgotten, often hit the 1 billion mark, and I've no doubt that their lifeless Little Mermaid clone will do the same. I think Disney is now suffering from the same "we grew too big, too quick" realization as every other tech and entertainment giant, and they're definitely reeling from a few recent failures, but I wouldn't use Strange World or Turning Red as the poster children of their troubles; they never bet much on those anyway.
Unfortunately, when Disney makes the most bland and forgettable nostalgia bait, they still make the "movies people want to see".
(Apologies for the wall of text, I've had thoughts about the state of Disney for a while!)
I feel like the Yuzu project is just as exciting, they make progress reports just like Dolphin and it's always a pleasure to read. It might not have the level of polish of Dolphin, but give it time.
I can't speak about the other major Switch emulator, Ryujinx, because I haven't used it much. They're just as enthusiastic though, and also write regular progress updates.
Originally made by Bob Nystrom [1] who now works on Dart, it is now maintained by ruby0x1 who is a game developer and most importantly creator of a game engine that uses Wren as a scripting language [2]. Unfortunately Luxe is still not publicly available (closed beta), which I admit is a bit of a frustration for me as I've been following development for a few years, but it does show a lot of promise and in the meantime I've become a happy user of Godot. I keep Wren in the back of my mind as an easy-to-embed scripting language in cases where you could integrate Lua (which Wren outspeeds) but not LuaJIT.
The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET.
Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.