General Development Archive

Apple's App Store design is a big part of the problem. The dominance and prominence of "top lists" stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won't happen to 99.98% of them. Top lists reward apps that get people to download them, regardless of quality or long-term use, so that's what most developers optimize for. Profits at the top are so massive that the promise alone attracts vast floods of spam, sleaziness, clones, and ripoffs.

Quality, sustainability, and updates are almost irrelevant to App Store success and usually aren't rewarded as much as we think they should be, and that's mostly the fault of Apple's lazy reliance on top lists instead of more editorial selections and better search.

As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces.

I always find it more effective to learn new programming concepts by building projects using them, so I decided to do the same for Apple's new Swift language. I also wanted to see how well it would interact with my open source GPUImage framework. As a result, I made GPUImage fully Swift-compatible and I've built and committed to the GitHub repository a couple of Swift sample applications. I wanted to write down some of the things that I learned when building these.

The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM was a ground breaking game released in early 90. ZPU is not only a russian AA gun but also a 32 bit open source CPU.

I gave a talk in 2007 that explained 8088 Corruption in detail, and in that talk I explained that displaying FMV using CGA in graphics mode would be impossible. This is because CGA graphics mode uses 8x the amount of video memory that 8088 Corruption was handling. Even a simple calculation assuming 24fps video reveals that the amount of data needing to be updated per second (24fps * 16KB = 384KB/s) is outside of the IBM PC's capability: CGA RAM can only be changed at a rate of 240KB/s, and most hard drives of the era operate at roughly 90KB/s. It sure felt impossible, so that's why I said it.

Then I thought about the problem for 7 years.

The hardest thing about learning a new programming language is that there are usually at least one or two novel features that break the mold of our current mental framework. If not, the language may not be worth learning in the first place.

So, given that learning new languages can be challenging, I would like to share a tip that has served me well over the years.

One of the best ways to really understand a new or novel language feature is to think of ways to twist and abuse it.

A large research project in the physical sciences usually involves experimenters, theorists, and people carrying out calculations with computers. There are computers and terminals everywhere. Some of the people hunched over these screens are writing papers, some are analyzing data, and some are working on simulations. These simulations are also quite often on the cutting edge, pushing the world’s fastest supercomputers, with their thousands of networked processors, to the limit. But almost universally, the language in which these simulation codes are written is Fortran, a relic from the 1950s.

I find the "everybody should learn to code" movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.

In this article my goal is to take you along for the ride.

Admittedly, this started out as an April Fools' joke. But we quickly realized that we actually could make a really good issue about this. After all, it's interesting to Objective-C developers to learn something about what development on the other major mobile platform is like, as well as what we can learn from it.

While Moonstone and Spotlight are certainly highlights of Enyo 2.4, you may be just as interested in the robust new data-layer support you’ll find in this release. Enyo 2.4 has support for observers, one- and two-way bindings, computed properties, models and collections, and a set of new data-aware UI controls.

A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and here I will tell you how.

ZFS is the world's most advanced filesystem, in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this open community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms.