7 ms·
The chain all in one place, such that it's readable: > Before the iPhone existed, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones": Doom RPG 1&2,
by MaxBarraclough 5y ago
The chain all in one place, such that it's readable:
> Before the iPhone existed, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones": Doom RPG 1&2, Orcs&Elves 1&2, and Wolfenstein RPG.
Qualcomm's native-code BREW platform had better versions, but I haven't seen any emulators and archives for it, so they may be lost at this point. The J2ME (java mobile) versions are still floating around, and can be emulated.
> My son wanted to get O&E2 running, so we set out on a little adventure.
Kemulator ran the game, but audio was glitchy and it hung after you died in game. Well, we are programmers, we should be able to fix it. Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware, so we moved over to freej2me, which is a live github project.
> The hang didn't happen, but audio was even worse. Missing sound effects was a simple bug fix -- MIDI sounds weren't seeking to the start on replays. We will submit a patch. Still, everything was glitchy with audio underruns.
We noticed that the emulator was taking an absurd amount of CPU, despite the game being built for <100 MHz mobile CPUs.
> We spent a frustrating afternoon exploring java profiling tools, but finally, Flight Recorder and JDK Mission Control pointed out the root cause: explicitly invoked garbage collection. A vague memory of having to call system.GC() every frame to avoid problems on some mobile phones bubbled up. We couldn't change the source on the game, but the jvm has a handy option -XX:+DisableExplicitGC that fixed everything right up.
> This is an interesting case where an operation is >10x slower on a modern computer.
> A GC sweep on a phone with 128k of heap is a very different thing than a desktop with a multi-GB heap.
> Some old writing about the early cell phone work: https://web.archive.org/web/20060502175605/http://www.armadilloaerospace.com:80/n.x/johnc/Recent%20Updates/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060502175605/http://www.armadi...
- brianberns 5y agoThank you. Twitter's user experience is the worst.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- david422 5y agoHas someone written an extension to aggregate tweets into 1 large tweet yet?
- beaconstudios 5y agoYeah, @threadreaderapp
- bonoboTP 5y agoThe worst is when lots of people each reply "unroll thread!" to a thread. So much noise and junk.
- abnercoimbre 5y agoIt's unfortunate. I'm guessing it's because people need that dopamine hit of getting a notification, just for them.
- bscphil 5y agoI detest it for this reason. Well, that and the fact that it's a closed source service leaching off content on another website and slapping ads on top of it. The only thing worse are those awful video downloader bots. I have opted out and blocked their bot on Twitter which apparently currently suffices to prevent their scraping. I'm more than happy to point anyone who asks to a text file. God, I miss blogs. Sorry about the rant.
- iudqnolq 5y agonitter.com is an alternative ui that shows the whole thread on one page without needing js
- RaoulP 5y agoThe correct link seems to be nitter.net
- 5y ago
- ricardobayes 5y agoAlthough there is no reason why he didn't post on say medium and post the link. He chose to use a 140-char-limit site to write a novel.
- judge2020 5y ago280 now ;) But I’d rather him use Twitter than the centralized broken mess that is medium.
- genericone 5y agoBetter the centralized broken mess you know than the centralized broken mess you don't
- mestoslaw 5y agoThey are working on it
- ComodoHacker 5y agoIs it really Twitter or the habit to write everything there, even lengthy posts?
- ALittleLight 5y agoIt's interesting to think about why that habit exists. It seems like a low barrier to entry to me. If Carmack had wanted to post to Medium or something he would've had to write and edit the whole essay and get people to come read it. On Twitter Carmack posts a paragraph as it comes to him. Could do the whole thing at once. Could take days to complete the thread or longer. It could be as long as he wants. One tweet or one thousand. No real expectations of edits. No one would be surprised if it's only a three paragraph thought whereas going to read an essay that might feel a little brief. Nobody expects really profound or serious insight, just the thoughts on top of his head. Readers also have the same low barrier to entry. No need to go to a separate page or app. Look at the first or first n paragraphs. Scroll by anytime. The user experience for something like this may not be perfect on Twitter, but I think Twitter has a lot to recommend itself as the appropriate tool for sharing thoughts like this.
- UnpossibleJim 5y agoReading Carmack's thought to text style writing (a la Joyce's Ulysses) might be the only thing the get me to wade into the sess pool that is Twitter .... Holy crap, that was the most arrogant, self agrandizing post I've ever made =( I wish I didn't feel that way, but I do =)
- sidewinder128 5y agoAwesome thank you!
- delecti 5y agoI'm curious how the UI looks to other people, because "all in once place" isn't really a complaint I can understand about the Twitter UI I'm seeing. There's buttons and stuff between tweets, but with 280 characters per tweet (140 was definitely less readable) they're not significantly more difficult to read on Twitter than they are in the paragraphs you posted.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoYeah, I prefer threadreaderapp over Twitter's native UI for reading long threads all day everyday, but don't find the native one difficult to read. My only complaint is when the thread is long, Twitter will start not showing it all at once. You have to click the last tweet to see anything after it. But again, threadreaderapp itself also has trouble to feed all the parts of a super long thread.
- flanbiscuit 5y agoThank you for this! I have seen this before but I forgot the name. Bookmarking it and I'll probably create a simple bookmarklet so that I can quickly open it up on the current tweet edit: in case anyone is interested, here's the code for the bookmarklet to turn the current tweet into a threadapp thread. This is not very deeply tested but it worked with the current tweet above so YMMV: javascript:(function(){window.location.href = 'https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/' + window.location.pathname.split('/').pop(); })();
- bonoboTP 5y agoAnd you have to click on "Show this thread" at the end to see more, otherwise you only see some of the tweets. And yes, it's absolutely horrible that there are all those buttons and a repeated profile pic intruded at random points in the text, like in the middle of a damn word. I get that you need to tweet to get views and nobody reads blogs any more but this "Twitter thread" concept is a UX horror.
- aeyes 5y agoAnd "Show this thread" takes me to the comments first, I have to scroll up to see other messages by the author and the order seems incorrect.
- ups101 5y agoYou could also insert the Carmack’y “ah-ehm” between tweets :-)
- CodeGlitch 5y agoI wish John would move over to a proper blogging site like medium, rather than a Frankenstein string of tweets. He has enough material to gain a good following.
- IvyMike 5y agoBring back .plan files!
- posharma 5y agoYes, I've wondered if there's any advantage to using twitter if you've to say something more than a single tweet. Is there any blocker to using good old blogs for this? There's no rule that a blog should be at least a page long; it can be short.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoHe used to use Facebook for these things, back when he worked there.