Linked List: June 4, 2014

Wednesday, 4 June 2014

Tepid 

Yukari Iwatani Kane, about ten minutes after Monday’s keynote ended:

Well… that may have been the most tepid response I’ve seen to a #wwdc keynote in the last six years.

At this point Kane is starting to come across as a kook, detached from reality, living either in a bunker or in a parallel universe.

Baseball Icon Don Zimmer Dies at 83 

Marty Noble, writing for MLB:

He had the jowls of Dizzy Gillespie, the chins of Alfred Hitchcock and the forearms of Olive Oyl’s favorite sailor man. For most of his 83 years, he had a haircut that required minimum maintenance and a quick, disarming smile that significantly widened his face and belied his sense of purpose. Well before his time came, he had developed a silhouette like no other in the game. If nothing else, Don Zimmer was distinctive, a ball of distinction, you might say — no corners, no angles, no edges. So round he almost was spherical.

Update: An amazing baseball life, indeed.

Misunderstanding Swift 

Matt Baxter-Reynolds, writing for ZDNet:

When I first heard about Swift I was pleased as I assumed that Apple would look to solve the key problem faced by mobile developers — specifically that there is little overlap between developer toolsets making cross-platform mobile development extremely difficult. […]

What software developers need is familiar tooling that builds on open standards and well-understood approaches. What they don’t need is a bunch of know-better-than-thou engineers sitting in their ivory tower coming up with something that feels almost deliberately, intentionally different just because they think they know best.

When you look at Swift, that is what you get. Something that has been designed in a way that shows no empathy at all for what the greater community of software developers actually need. It looks to serve only Apple developers, and even then it doesn’t do it in a way that actually helps Apple developers be part of the broader and richer community outside of the Apple bubble.

He’s right that Swift is geared specifically to developers writing apps for Apple platforms, but deeply misunderstands Apple’s motivations and needs. Apple succeeds by creating great products. To be better necessarily means to be different.

(Via Marco Tabini.)