Archive for September 4, 2025

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Atlassian Acquires The Browser Company

Atlassian (tweet, Hacker News):

We’ve entered into an agreement to acquire The Browser Company of New York, the team behind the incredible Dia and Arc browsers.

By combining The Browser Company’s passion for building browsers people love with Atlassian’s deep expertise on how the world’s best teams operate, we have the opportunity to transform how work gets done in the AI era.

David Pierce:

Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.

Manton Reece:

As a VC-backed company, perhaps The Browser Company was always going to need to sell. My initial reaction is Atlassian seems a weird fit. But maybe not?

Adam Engst:

Overall, I believe this is a positive move for users of the Arc browser. The acquisition gets The Browser Company out of the venture capital rat race and moves it under the oversight of Atlassian, best known to TidBITS readers for its 2017 acquisition of Trello, the task management tool we used extensively during the Take Control days (see “Trello Offers Compelling Collaboration Tool,” 9 July 2012). Atlassian also develops Jira, a project management platform, and Confluence, a collaborative documentation tool, both primarily targeted at developers.

Previously:

ASUS ProArt 6K Display

ASUS:

ProArt Display PA32QCV is a 31.5-inch 6K HDR monitor designed for professional content creators. This Calman Verified display boasts a wide gamut with 98% DCI-P3 coverage and Delta E<2 color accuracy. The ProArt Preset feature now includes the new M Model-P3 mode to deliver seamless and consistent colors when working with MacBook devices. Dual Thunderbolt™ 4 ports support daisy-chaining and enable superfast data transfers and 96-watt power delivery via a single cable.

Unlike the LG and Dell 6K displays, this has the same 6016x3384 resolution as Apple’s Pro Display XDR, which hasn’t been updated since it was introduced more than 6 years ago. The ProArt costs $1,399, whereas the XDR is still priced at $5,999 (with stand).

Juli Clover:

ASUS doesn’t have the same design aesthetic as Apple, so the ProArt 6K’s design isn’t impressive. There’s a square-shaped base, an arm that attaches to the display, and thin bezels at the top and the sides. There’s a thicker bottom bezel that houses some quick access control buttons.

ASUS’ display has the same 218 pixels per inch as the Pro Display XDR, and text looks crisp. Colors are accurate out of the box and can be further tweaked in the Settings menu with different profiles. HDR10 support is included, but peak brightness maxes out at 600 nits, which limits HDR performance. It also does not have individual local dimming zones, which means it is lacking several of the pro features that set Apple’s XDR display apart.

The ProArt 6K has a matte display coating that’s meant to cut down on reflections, but it does impact some of the color vibrancy and contrast.

Fabien Sanglard (2023, Hacker News):

According to Intel’s Thunderbolt-3 technology brief, the interface has a bandwidth of 40 Gbps. With the 6,016 x 3,384 @ 60Hz / 10bpc plugged into a calculator, the display requires roughly 38.2 Gbps.

This means Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth is nearly maxed out with only 40-38.2 = 1.8Gbps left.

[…]

Thunderbolt 4 was released in 2020 along with Intel’s 8000-series controllers called Maple Ridge. It did not increase the bandwidth, which stayed at 40 Gbps, but it made support for DisplayPort 1.4 (and therefore DSC) mandatory.

This version allows supporting display configuration such as 8K@60Hz.

Previously:

AppKitUI

Darren Ford:

An AppKit UI toolkit help you create and manage NSView content easily

  1. Remove dependence on using XIBs when creating UI views
  2. Reduce boilerplate code when manually creating NSView UI content.
  3. Easily bind data between controls
  4. Easily attach actions to your controls (no more delegates or target/actions!)
  5. Use Xcode’s preview pane to view your designs!!

There’s a demo.

Previously:

Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult

Brent Simmons (Mastodon):

A scripting language plus key bits implemented in C was more than fast enough for an app. Even all those years ago.

[…]

I’m not writing this article to praise Frontier — I’m talking about it to make a point, which I’ll get to.

But I wanted to bring up a second aspect to this: it’s not just frictionless iteration that was so great, it was also the scripting language and environment.

[…]

I’m not saying apps these days need to be Frontier-like in any details. But it seems absolutely bizarre to me that we — we who write Mac and iOS apps — still have to build and run the app, make changes, build and run the app, and so on, all day long. In the year 2025.

I was just listening to a Larry Tesler interview where he talks about live editing the Xerox Alto’s Smalltalk code in the middle of a demo to Steve Jobs. This was in 1979.

And it seems retro in the worst way that we’re still using anything other than a scripting language for most of our code. We should be using something simple and light that can configure toolbars, handle networking callbacks, query databases, manage views, and so on. And maybe with a DSL for SwiftUI-like declarative UI.

[…]

And at some point I suspect these things are going to be table stakes for any platform that wants to attract developers. If you were a new developer right now, would you pick Xcode’s build-and-run, edit, build-and-run, edit — plus the growing complexity of Swift — over something like Electron and JavaScript?

Manton Reece:

I also used Frontier a lot during that time. It was great. Personally, instead of Swift, I would’ve loved to see RubyCocoa taken to the next level.

Frontier was great, and I was excited about Apple’s initial embrace of PyObjC, RubyCocoa, and other bridges, but they’ve now gone completely in the other direction. AppleScriptObjC is still there, but it doesn’t work with the newer Swift-based APIs, and the initial hopes that Swift would lead to a successor scripting language seem to have completely evaporated.

Kyle Howells:

This idea, a higher level, live reloading, scripting language built on top a compiled, fast core language you can drop down to when needed was my hope when Apple released Swift.

Previously:

Substack IAP

Substack (Hacker News):

The Substack app drives more than 30% of all paid subscriptions, making it a major source of discovery and discussion. Until now, however, it hasn’t always been possible to upgrade to a paid subscription directly in the app.

That’s changing. Apple now allows Substack to include external links for paid subscriptions in the iOS app in the U.S., while also requiring that all publications offer in-app purchase (IAP) as an option.

Subscriptions purchased via Apple’s IAP have different fees, payout timing, and billing controls compared with web-based subscriptions. This FAQ explains those differences and the tools Substack has built to help you protect your revenue, maintain your subscriber relationships, and stay in control.

[…]

To protect your earnings, Substack will automatically set your price in the iOS app higher for subscriptions purchased through Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) system. This increase offsets Apple’s fee, so you receive approximately the same payout you would for a web-based subscription.

You can opt out of the price adjustment, but you can’t opt out of IAP. So payments that go through Apple will be delayed, and there’s a bifurcated refund system.

Previously:

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