A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.

Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!

What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.

I have been working on a new media player for some time. It is a fully web based media player (PWA). It plays local files on your system and does not upload them anywhere.

- Can play video and audio files - Supports mp4, webm and some mkv files for video and supports most of the common formats for audio like mp3, flac, ogg, wav - Because it is a PWA, you can install it to your system using the install button on the browser URL box, or on mobile by adding the web page to your home screen - Once installed, it works fully offline - Uses GLSL fragment shaders via WebGL for audio visualizations and supports importing custom shaders (API explanation is in the settings if you want to create a custom audio visualization!) - Supports creating a basic playlist - Can show subtitles (via .srt files or embedded subtitles) - Can show lyrics (via .lrc files) - Picture-in-picture mode for videos - Different playback speeds - Settings for customization - Keyboard shortcuts - You can assign it as the default app on your OS for the media file types you want. Then you can just double click on a file to open it using EMP - Works with the media buttons on your headphones or keyboard - I tried to make it responsive, so it should work on different screen sizes, having said that, I mostly had desktop users in mind.

There are plethora of media players out there, I guess what makes this app a bit different is that it is fully web based, so it is cross-platform and you can simply go to https://essentialmediaplayer.com and start playing your local media files. Also if you have restricted access on a computer and not able to install desktop applications, this might be an alternative.

This app only supports the formats/codecs the browser supports. This is probably the biggest limitation but I chose this route to reduce implementation effort significantly. So this app is definitely not a VLC replacement.

Technologies used: Vue, TypeScript, Vite, Material Web

I would be happy if anybody has a Chromebook and can try this app and let me know if it works well, and whether it feels native or not.

This project started as a way to improve my web coding skills and also learn more about PWAs and to see if it is a viable option for creating native-like app experiences. Turns out PWAs are indeed very capable!

Especially the GLSL fragment shader based audio visualization (and creating an API for it) was not something on my mind when I started this project, but it felt natural when adding audio playing capabilities and it was fun to work on that part.

Looking forward to your feedbacks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794025

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shouldn't have completely abandoned those markets.

2) They did not back 1 UI framework for a long time (I mean 10 years+), instead they did significant changes to their UI framework strategy every 3-4 years. It takes a huge time for developers to trust, learn and develop complex and polished apps in a UI framework. Also it takes a long time for a UI framework to become mature. If you change your UI strategy every few years, you will never have complex and polished apps written with it.

To be honest I am not sure if Windows will ever be able to recover in the long term and keep its market share. The only reason it seems to be alive is because enterprise runs on Windows and it is hard to change that.

I feel like an Apple + Google dominance will be more likely in the long term for desktop operating systems. I am not sure if Google will be able to avoid the first mistake I wrote above but they are working on bringing Android to desktop. It is a good idea but it requires at least 10 years of supporting and polishing it despite not getting much traction. But if Google persists, we might be all using MacOS and Android on desktop 20 years from now.

Nice abbreviation.

I agree with losing faith in Intel chips though.

Similar laws existed in EU countries long before US, and EU countries also saw a decline in life expectancy during those years: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...

I wonder what was it like to go through that timeframe, as the management and the employees, where the floppy disks were becoming obsolete. Did they purposefully took the decision to not pursue CD, flash memory market? Or was it just a shortsightedness of the management where they fell behind and eventually had to exit that market?

Of course 3M still managed to be successful and today it is one of the big market cap companies...

But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-...

X2 Elite shouldn't be that different I think.

I used laptops with both Intel and AMD CPUs, and I read/watch a lot of reviews in thin and light laptop space. Although AMD became more power efficient compared to Intel in the last few years, AMD alternative is only marginally more efficient (like 5-10%). And AMD is using TSMC fabs.

On the other hand Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon X series CPUs are significantly more efficient then both Intel and AMD in most tests while providing the same performance or sometimes even better performance.

Some people mention the efficiency gains on Intel Lunar Lake as evidence that x86 is just as efficient, but Lunar Lake was still slightly behind in battery life and performance, while using a newer TSMC process node compared to Snapdragon X series.

So, even though I see theoretical articles like this, the empirical evidence says otherwise. Qualcomm will release their second generation Snapdragon X series CPUs this month. My guess is that the performance/efficiency gap with Intel and AMD will get even bigger.

- I donate to Wikipedia every year a small amount.

- It is not related to programming directly, but I try to donate to https://u24.gov.ua every month.

I don't know if they are doing it, but I always thought that it should be easy for regular citizens to see the historical reasons why a law or regulation exists. Because there is sometimes a good reason why a regulation exists, but nobody knows it.