Month: July 2019

When Netflix's Stranger Things initially burst onto the scene in 2016, the surprise summer hit struck a national nerve. There was, however, one small, repeated bit of pushback: Haven't we done this before?

The bikes. The supernatural. The kids saving the world with Walkie Talkies in hand. And if nostalgia indulgence, built upon allusions and influences from King and Spielberg, initially turned off some viewers, season two may have turned the repellent up to Eleven (ahem) by doing the sequel thing. The series' second run had the same primary victim, another D&D-inspired type of lurking evil, and one more kids-save-their-friend-after-a-science-lesson bit.

Now two years and a Thrones-ian amount of anticipation later, the Stranger Things 3 premiere arrives in mere days (July 4). Netflix has already shared the season with some TV critics alongside an extensive list of 17 embargoed facts (that an editor graciously read through so I could stay as ignorant as Hawkins adults while a dark plague sneaks up on their small town). After previewing the first two episodes this weekend, there's at least one specific that needs to be shared right now: any fears of a stale sequel can be put to bed. It's a strange new world in Hawkins.

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  Orion and its solid rocket on the launch pad Monday morning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Nearly five years have passed since NASA first launched its Orion spacecraft to an apogee of 5,800km above the Earth, completing a successful test flight of the capsule intended to carry astronauts to lunar orbit in the 2020s.

Now, NASA is preparing for its second Orion launch, although this flight will be considerably shorter. On Tuesday morning, NASA intends to launch a boilerplate version of Orion—essentially a well instrumented vehicle without any life-support equipment or many other critical systems—on top of a solid rocket booster built by Northrop Grumman.

The rocket is actually an old Peacemaker intercontinental ballistic missile, now refurbished for commercial purposes. It will launch the Orion to an altitude of nearly 9.5km above the Florida coast in order to test Orion’s launch abort system at the point of maximum dynamic pressure. This will occur about 55 seconds after launch.

Enlarge / Twitter returns to the Mac via Apple's Project Catalyst. (credit: Apple)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—When Apple revealed macOS Catalina at WWDC this month, one related announcement drew considerable interest from Mac users and developers alike: a new way to turn iPad apps into fully native Mac apps.

Dubbed Project Catalyst, it promised to increase the number of quality native apps on the Mac platform by leveraging developers' existing work in the arguably more robust iOS (and now, iPadOS) app ecosystem. But it does raise questions: what does this mean for Mac users' future experiences? Will this change the type of software made for Macs? Is Apple's ecosystem a mobile-first one?

Then there are developer concerns: is Catalyst just a stepping stone to SwiftUI? What challenges can devs expect when adapting their iPad apps for the Mac?