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I never understand how someone can write an article about their very first foray into something and then, at the end, assert that they know more than the expert
by mrshoe 11y ago
I never understand how someone can write an article about their very first foray into something and then, at the end, assert that they know more than the experts already.
> In the end of the day, the watch battery is there just to shuffle these .PNGs around. When Apple realizes how to avoid that, the watch will last for a week instead of hours.
Drawing every frame using CoreGraphics is a terrible idea, on any iOS device. Just like any platform, you have to understand at least the basics of the underlying architecture if you want to write efficient code.
I happened to make the built-in Stopwatch app on the watch, which displays an animated graph very similar to his. Suffice it to say, I did not use a CADisplayLink and CoreGraphics at 60fps. Especially considering my graph is horizontally scrollable by the user.
Even if WatchKit still doesn't provide a more efficient way to do this (I don't know; I've never used WatchKit), rest assured that Apple's apps certainly don't use this method, so the week-long battery life claim is just a dream, unfortunately.
- dilap 11y agoHi, 3rd party watch dev here! WatchKit is really limited. It would be impossible, I believe, to make an app anywhere near as good as the native Stopwatch using WatchKit. So this comment is pretty frustrating, actually: "you have to understand at least the basics of the underlying architecture if you want to write efficient code". What basic architecture? WatchKit is all we've got as a 3rd party devs! And it sucks. It seems insane and very ill-advised to me that Apple isn't using the same SDKs for their own apps as what's available to 3rd parties.
- mrshoe 11y agoYour point is actually orthogonal to the OP's. The OP was claiming that Apple's architecture is flawed and that once they realize the error of their ways, battery life will improve dramatically. That's just not true. Your point is that the public SDK limits 3rd party developers from doing some stuff that Apple can do with the private SDK. That is, of course, absolutely true. Letting the public SDK (or at least parts of it) lag behind the private SDK, while certainly frustrating to 3rd party developers, is the right thing to do. The situation is exactly the same on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Apple has employed that strategy from the beginning with iOS, and they believe it to be the correct strategy, so they will almost certainly stick with it. I don't work at Apple any more (pushing toward launch on a startup!), but based on over 8 years of iOS history, I think it's safe to say that the public watch SDK will get more powerful over time, as private-only features are deemed ready to release to 3rd parties.
- dilap 11y agoYeah, OP's claims about battery life are manifestly silly. The HN headline makes it sound like the article is making claims about the Watch in general, but it isn't, just that one dev's app. I understand and take your point about public APIs lagging behind private ones, but in this case it's not that the public SDK is lagging, it's a totally different beast. The fundamental execution model is the same as watchos 1 -- you don't get to write code that runs in the app process, you write code that runs in a separate extension process and get to twiddle ui elements in the main process using a very limited API. Which is why if you're trying to do anything dynamic, you have to resort to generating and beaming over images. Besides this fundamental limitation, the management of app process vs extension process vs network daemons is still buggy (contributed to, probably, by the fact that apple isn't dogfooding), which means it's hard to impossible to make your app stable. I think this has been a huge contributor the general perception that 3rd party Watch apps are slow and buggy. Obviously, I can only speculate about Apple's motives for going with WatchKit vs exposing native development, as on the iPhone. My guess is they were very worried about an initial public perception of the watch being "battery life sucks," so they didn't want to open up 3rd party code to run on the Watch. Hence WatchKit and OS1. Then there was a huge public negative perception about not having native apps, so they rushed out OS2, which has 'native' apps, but still following the (now nonsensical) 2-process model of WatchKit. I do hope Apple opens up true native dev on the watch at some point. It won't be "the public SDK getting more powerful over time," though, it will be making a qualitative change to the SDK itself. P.S. If you haven't and are curious, I encourage you to take a look at WatchKit. I think you will be surprised at how limited it is. P.P.S. I think Apple may have been better served by doing something akin to the original iPhone model -- just saying, "no 3rd party apps yet, but it's coming," rather than having a half-assed SDK on day 1.
- dilap 11y agoActually, thinking about it, they are doing something akin to the iPhone model -- initially iPhone development was supposed to be done as html+js web apps, and devs revolted, and then we got a real SDK. WatchKit is the html+js of WatchOS development. OK, not that bad, but the situation is analogous.
- primitivesuave 11y agoI too was expecting a technical article from an expert, so I closed it after reading the first sentence. While reading the first sentence, a Flash plugin on the page crashed my browser, making the author even less credible of an authority on performance benchmarking.
- mynegation 11y agoIt is a hosted blogging service and author has no power over what they do with the flash