Technology Update

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

When talking about the software I used for programming last year, I mentioned Zed as a potential follow-on to Atom. Well, according to this article, it appears that Zed is now in beta. I’m slightly surprised that they are going with a Mac-only release for their first release, but only slightly. At any hacker/programmer conference a lot of the presenters are using Macs (even at Linux-specific conferences). The article seems to imply that Zed is going to charge as a subscription application and Mac users are, generally, a group with more disposable income if they can afford Apple hardware. They seem to be doing some innovative stuff, like making use of hardware graphics acceleration and using a custom UI toolkit. Depending on whether they end up having a free tier, I may check them out once they have a Windows and/or Linux version available.