1042: Is the Jev Hype Overblown?

Scott Tolinski (0:01)

What's up, everybody? It's time for another Syntax Weekly. We're coming at you with all kinds of stuff. It's Jev Temper, folks. We're talking about Jev.

We're talking all about the cool stuff that we have been doing, Jev Alternatives, local hosting, Jev, all kinds of stuff. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, and with me as always is CJ Reynolds and Wes Bos. What's up, guys?

Wes Bos (0:26)

Hello. Just Jev'd up. What a week. Super exciting. We're going to talk about it, like if it's overblown and whatever in a couple of minutes, but like super fun.

I had a lot of fun seeing everybody's demos and everybody getting really excited about it. And it's just it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Scott Tolinski (0:43)

Yes, I know the demos were fun, even if they weren't all practical and lovely. I thought it was just a fun time to do fun demos. CJ, how are you feeling?

CJ Reynolds (0:50)

I like it. Like I posted my fun demo and honestly, it made me feel better about the state of AI because at least the demo that I build, it makes you think about your chat bots or the way that you use LLMs more structured way instead of just throwing everything at an LLM. So yeah, I like it.

Scott Tolinski (1:07)

The techs can just do it. We just tell the LLM to use my computer and it just does it somehow. So yes, I do think it definitely aided to that.

Let's get into it. We had the iPhone Duo Simulator came out recently.

Wes Bos (1:23)

Last week on Monday, we said Xcode 27.1 Beta, it will be coming out hopefully this week. And it did come out last week. And with that, it included the very first look at the iPhone Duo Simulator. Initially, I had said there has been no peep from Apple or anybody about supporting the two CSS APIs that are needed, right?

There is the Viewport Segment API, which is essentially, if your website has more than one viewports, meaning like a folded display or multiple screens, then you can decide where things will go. You maybe have a CSS grid and you want to put them on different parts of the fold. The other one being the Device Posture API, which is basically a media query that tells you if the iPhone is folded or not or your mobile phone is.

Now, there is a flag. So if you go into the, I've got the simulator open here, you go into apps, settings, scroll all the way to the bottom. I'm only showing you this because of how ridiculous it is. Then go to advanced, then this is all the advanced settings. But no, psych, nothing there, nothing there. Oh, feature flags. It was hiding. You got to click it. And shout out to Bramis on Blue Sky. He figured this out. If we scroll, you scroll all the way down in here, there's some kind of exciting stuff in here, but somewhere in here there is, I've turned them on already, the feature flags for turning on those two APIs, right? Yeah.

Scott Tolinski (2:55)

Wes, this is the exact same thing that happened with the Vision Pro release. Oh, really? And these flags, like the WebXR flags remained unchecked for like a year.

Wes Bos (3:07)

I mean, who knows?

Scott Tolinski (3:09)

Who knows when they'll do this for this and actually ship this into Safari because for some reason Apple makes it so you got to wait for a dang OS update to get one of your apps updated. But yeah. Yeah.

Wes Bos (3:20)

So here's a little demo from Bramis. He's a DevRel works at Google on Chrome, and he basically whipped this up, which is like an example of what you might want based on if something is folded or not, you might want different layouts. Then of course you can fold the entire thing. This shows you both. You can set up two different viewports, right? This is viewport one on the left and viewport two on the right.

It's not to say that you can't do this with CSS already. I know that people are already typing that, but it just allows you to know if there are multiple viewports, and if you are in a continuous posture, meaning that you are in flat mode here, or if you are in a folded state, which is when you obviously have it folded. If that's the case, I think you would want to know if it's folded or not, because you can't just swipe your finger across the screen as easily when the thing is in folded. So something as simple as a button that you want to click, or something that you want to swipe away, like I think of a notification you might put in the bottom middle of an application, and you want to be able to swipe that away, you can still do it, but it's going to be hard when you have a little valley in the folded thing. So you may want to decipher when you are folded and throw that into a corner that stretches that viewport.