Michmutters

The Rotom Phone is getting a big upgrade. Following its introduction in the Galar region three years ago, the updated version of the smartphone-that’s-inhabited-by-a-Pokémon is finally making the jump from one back camera to two. The handset will soon be available in the new Paldea region as well.

It’s difficult to tell exactly what kind of second lens is for — all I can really see is that the main lens remains blue while the new second lens is black. I don’t think that’s enough information to make an informed guess about whether this new lens is a telephoto, an ultrawide, or something else, though I’m hoping I’ll be able to use that second camera to take pictures of the new best boy Fidough.

Beyond that, it seems like this new Rotom Phone is a largely iterative upgrade from the previous one. One new feature is a mysterious glowing blue ring in the middle of the device. Maybe that’s for wireless charging? The ring is set pretty much exactly where you’d expect a wireless charging coil to be, after all. Though I don’t remember ever having to charge the Rotom Phone in Galar, I guess it’s nice that wireless charging could be an option while I’m at one of Paldea’s trainer schools.

Disappointingly, the large points on the top and bottom of the Rotom Phone have stuck around for this next generation. That means it’s probably still not comfortable to slip into your pocket, but in Paldea, backpacks seem to be all the rage — I guess I’ll have to pick one up as a place to stash my phone. (Maybe someday we’ll get a Rotom Phone Mini.)

Image: The Pokemon Company

No word on 5G support, which could make it easier to stay in touch with your friends while you’re traveling across Paldea. But I really hope the race to 5G doesn’t become a thing in Paldea like it has in other regions.

The company that makes the Rotom Phone confirmed in a press release that the Pokédex and a map will once again be loaded on the device. But we’ll have to wait and see what other new functionality might be available until we can try the new Rotom Phone for ourselves on November 18th.

Fitbit hasn’t announced any new products this year, but good times are yet to come for fans of the brand. Three unannounced Fitbit wearable devices have just emerged, which suggests the Google-owned company is close to making them official.

It’s hard to tell whether or not all three will be announced at the same time, but we can safely assume they will be introduced throughout 2022. Fitbit Sense 2, Fitbit Versa 4, and Fitbit Inspire 3 will be coming soon and 91mobile has the scoop on all of them courtesy to @OnLeaks (aka Steve Hemmerstoffer).

Several press renders of Fitbit’s upcoming wearables show that little has changed for the company’s products in terms of design. All three unannounced devices look very much like the previous models, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Versa 4 will be Fitbit’s top of the line wearable device, so it’s safe to assume it will be more expensive than the other two. No details about specs are available at the moment, but based on the leaked images, the Fitbit Versa 4 will be available in Graphite and Rose.

IRL Studios announced that Gym Classits popular VR basketball game on Meta Quest App Lab, has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Y Combinator.

Other participants include Founders Inc., Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund, Balaji Srinivasan, Zaza Pachulia, and a number of other angel investors.

named in Road to VR’s top 20 free games on Quest, Gym Class lets you shoot hoops and dunk on friends like you probably can’t on a physical court.

The free early access version is highly rated on App Lab for good reason, in part thanks to it’s physics-based gameplay and full-body kinematics, but mostly because it offers one of the most realistic basketball playing experiences that lets you go toe-to -toe with up to eight other online players. Gym Class has also claimed the number two spot on Meta Quest App Lab, garnering a [4.9/5] user rating from more than 14,000 reviews.

The studio hasn’t specified precisely what it plans to do with the funding, although the team’s mission includes building a digital sports ecosystem “indistinguishable from what you see IRL. One that delivers on deep needs for friendship, identity, entertainment, creation, fitness, fashion, and even competing to become a superstar,” its Y Combinator profile reads.

“Gym Class is more than a game, it’s a digital sport.” said Paul Katsen, studio co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gym Class. “It lets you dunk like a pro, become a basketball star, watch, compete, cheer, and get involved in the whole experience of the sport. Just like with real sports, we believe digital sports will see thriving global communities, leagues, entertainment and events, fashion, commerce, fitness, and more.”

“We are convinced that games, virtual worlds and digital sports will be the new social networks,” said Andrew Chen, partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). “Gym Class signals the dawn of digital sports. It has the traction, and has the right team behind it to realize the true potential of social VR. We are strong believers in the vision and the team who have already proven Gym Class has a massive audience and opportunity.”

Gym Class is slated to of the official Quest Store sometime in fall 2022.

JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language according to most surveys, has become a barrier to progress, according to Douglas Crockford, creator of the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) specification used everywhere for serializing data in web applications.

Crockford made this assertion in an interview last month:

“The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been a strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better. So JavaScript, like the other dinosaur languages, has become a barrier to progress. We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.”

According to a StackOverflow survey earlier this year, JavaScript is used by over 65% of developers, way ahead of second placed Python at 48 percent (ignoring HTML, CSS and SQL which are not general purpose languages). It is an unlikely achievement considering its origins.

Brendan Eich invented the language for Netscape in 1995, apparently in just 10 days. “In May I did 10 days of hard work, I didn’t sleep much,” Eich told the dot.JS conference in 2018. In 2012 Eich told Computer’s Charles Severance that: “I went in to do … a programming language for HTML , for web designers and programmers to use, embedded directly in the web page … not like Java which was a professional’s language where you would run real code with type declarations, and you’d have to write in a way that compiled.” I have added that, “the name is a total lie. It is not so much related to Java so much as to a common ancestor, C, in syntax.”

Eich called the work “a rush job” but also said that “I knew there would be mistakes, there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language. That has enabled web developers to make it be what they want it to be.”

Why has JavaScript been such a wild success?

There are multiple reasons, including Eich’s foresight, ease of learning, and tolerance of code that would be mistakes in many languages, like comparing strings to numbers and getting a common-sense result – though Eich later called this “a big regret, because that breaks an important mathematical property.”

Another big factor is that Google’s determination to make browser-based applications competitive with the desktop gave the world the V8 engine (2008), which along with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey and Apple’s JavaScript Core gave the language amazing JIT-compiled performance. In 2009, Ryan Dahl came up with Node.js, enabling V8 to run outside the browser. Dahl had server applications in mind, but today Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager) are also essential to the development process for most web applications.

Development process? Part of the problem referenced by Crockford is that along with increased capability JavaScript has acquired lots of complexity, and a typical application today includes a build process using WebPack, Rollup or some other bundler, a long way from Eich’s original concept.

Further, many web developers do not write JavaScript; rather, they write TypeScript, which compiles to JavaScript. TypeScript was invented by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft, the rationale being that JavaScript’s malleability and lack of type safety made it unsuitable for large applications. TypeScript is now the number three language in the survey mentioned above, and it is evidence that JavaScript is not altogether loved. The advent of WebAssembly, a binary format that can be targeted by languages ​​including C, C++, C# and Rust, is another innovation that may undermine JavaScript’s dominance.

“JavaScript has exploded in popularity in just a few years and yes, the ecosystem is horribly complex. It’s a running gag even among full time JS devs how crazy it’s gotten. None of us can keep up,” confessed a developer in a recent discussion on Hacker News.

JavaScript is evolving with many new features and progress can be tracked here, though the demands of compatibility means that some flaws cannot be corrected, and at the other end feature bloat is a constant risk.

Crockford’s pick to replace JavaScript, E, is an outlier. Created by Mark Miller, Crockford and others, E is an object-oriented language designed for secure computing and in Crockford’s words, “eliminating many of the bad parts of Java.”

Crockford also notes though that JavaScript will be hard to shift, in particular because it is the language supported by every browser for DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation. Asked about what can replace it there, Crockford said: “There are two difficulties. First, we don’t have the next language yet. It needs to be a minimal capability-based actor language that is designed specifically for secure distributed programming. Nothing less should be considered.

“Second, we need all of the browser makers to adopt it and to simultaneously replace the DOM with a well designed interface. Good luck with that.”