jSnively

mknelson said:

Japhey said:

You go into great detail describing the new note overlay windows, but only a brief mention of the acceleration Mac users can expect. Why even mention it in the title if you weren’t going to explain it with more detail? You do know that’s the reason most people on an Apple News site are going to click on the article, right?

"The technical work in this update makes it possible to enable hardware acceleration for the Mac & Linux versions of Steam, bringing them up to par with Windows. You should see snappier animations, scrolling and more responsive UI." This is for the Steam application, not games installed by Steam.

Exactly. The most popular way of getting games on a computer got a full UI refresh that brought the mac to parity with Windows in terms of the Application itself. This doesn't change the way any games run. It's just about the Application, which had languished on Apple platforms in a poor state for a very long time. These updates are extremely welcome. 

Here are the full release notes if anybody is actually interested
https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/195171

Games are a hits-driven business and when 95% of hit titles don't even run on your platform then you're not a "great" gaming machine. Once in a blue moon you'll get a AAA title years late, but even in the most recent case, the Mac version of RE:VIII is one of the worst looking versions of that game you can play. 

Also, Bloober team is... rough. Layers of Fear was a great horror game (some may say the best), but the 5 or so titles they've done since have been pretty mediocre-to-bad. Observer probably gets a nod, but that's about it. I don't think anybody has faith they will do a good job with the SH2 remake.

The MetalFX stuff is good (and needed for the resolution Apple pushes in their monitors), but it's generations behind what DLSS offers at this point. If Apple were serious they would bootstrap a solution based off the work being done on the Linux side of things (Wine/DXVK/VKD3D etc.) instead of trying to get developers to port to their proprietary APIs which will never happen en masse. 

Apple has *never* actually been serious about gaming, but it would be cool to see that change.

Mike out here leaking our development plans forcing me to mark this article with the in-progress meter >: { 

For a bit of context, even on a site like ours (whose primary audience consists of apple fans, so you would assume it would skew higher in iPad use than most), tablet usage overall last year made up ~4% of traffic according to analytics.

JustSomeGuy1 said:

[...]

To ensure the integrity of existing gendered emoji and to preserve a long runway for future additions, "person" based emoji should never be encoded with a sex symbol. As such, the "person" and "man" variants' are in the process of being added as atomic characters

In other words, due to the legacy use of the emoji and the importance of gender in its meaning, coupled with no modifier for non-binary because it's supposed to be the default, we are instead getting two additional independent variants. "Pregnant Man" (U+1FAC3) and "Pregnant Person" (U+1FAC4) will live alongside the original "Pregnant Woman" (U+1F930), breaking with convention.

This is where you lost me. I've read this a bunch of times and I still don't understand. What does "legacy use of the emoji" have to do with anything?

Why did they not simply add a new symbol for "pregnant person" and allow modifiers for "male" and "female", as (I think, if I'm reading everything else correctly) is the usual course of action? Then they would presumably deprecate use of the old emoji, without ever removing it. To make this clear, you might explain in detail how they handled other initially gendered emoji like the "turban" or "bunny ears" cases mentioned in the ESC comments.

First off, thanks for actually taking the time to read. My big fear is I accidentally whiffed something technical while I was writing this up at 3AM 😬

As per the last bit, I think the two things are connected. Maybe I can think of how to re-phrase it. "legacy use of the emoji" here is referring to backwards comparability. The standard action is not to create a new base emoji and deprecate the old one, but to replace the old one and then create the modifiers on top.

What you are suggesting would certainly be possible, but (from what I can tell) would be a further deviation from the norm. The other caveat to keep in mind is that they themselves do not unanimously consider 'pregnant man' and 'pregnant person' to be the same thing as 'pregnant woman.' So even if they did address it in that fashion (and this is speculation) I'm not sure it would satisfy everyone in the working group.