iainmerrick

242 ms·

2611.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
That's a nice soundbite, but not really fair. Modern Smalltalk-style languages can be fast. Look at Javascript! And in Obj-C, you can drop down to plain C when you need the speed. It's possible to get your types mixed up when usin
2612.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Yes, I used Obj-C to port a game from iOS to Android. Mac and Windows versions coming soon, also in Obj-C! I use Clang, GNUstep and my own rewrite of UIKit. Possibly this is just Stockholm syndrome, but the more I use Obj-C, the more I like
2613.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Amazon aren't being particularly underhand here; a tiny bit of googling will explain how Underground relies on app usage tracking ( not location tracking). I agree that "Joe Average" may not question the free lunch, and that
2614.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
That's the sort of stuff I mean when I say "horrible". :) It'll just run the script every time, rather than doing anything smart with dependencies. Output from the script might or might not be picked up and tracked prope
2615.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
This is a great writeup of what I think is an unfortunate trend. When your compiler, build system and IDE are all tightly coupled, you end up locked into a single language. It's hard to develop pieces of your code in multiple languages
2616.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Why doesn't it work? Ninja should work with any tools that you can run from the command line.
2617.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Gzip encoding works great to shrink JS (and CSS and HTML). Obfuscation adds almost nothing on top of that. Dead-code stripping is still useful but you can do that without obfuscating.
2618.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
It's true! Google Maps is really fast on some computers and impossibly slow on others. The only fix is "Lite Mode" as mentioned above, and unfortunately there's no link for that on the main page. They aren't testing
2619.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Ha! If anything that sounds like a good way to irritate the pirates. Though I'm sure it adds a lot of support headaches, yeah.
2620.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Google announced smart updates and then enabled it. There is absolutely nothing any developer or user has to do, so there is no documentation on it because none is needed. OK, that's good news! I stand corrected. It would still be gr
2621.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Is there an up-to-date official doc or blog post about that? I haven't been able to find one. It seems like in practice expansion files never use deltas, and (as far as I can tell) APKs generally don't either. I could be wrong abo
2622.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
What does "too little, too late" mean? Is Android now doomed? I'm just frustrated that they're just doing tweaks, rather than any deep fixes. Obviously the platform isn't doomed, because the competitors aren'
2623.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
I wish I knew! I've used Google Play, iTunes Connect (i.e. the App Store), the Amazon Appstore, and the Humble Mobile Bundle. iTunes Connect is overall a bit nicer to work with (but often fails with completely incomprehensible errors,
2624.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Apple at least are finally trying to address this, with their new "app slicing" feature. It's just surprising it's taken so long.
2625.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
Too little, too late. Google Play makes you jump through a bunch of hoops to ship an oversized APK, and the tools they provide are totally inadequate. (For example, see this years-old bug affecting expansion files: https://code.g
2626.
by iainmerrick 11y ago
For apps that use native code, you typically ship a "fat binary" with ARMv5, ARMv7 and x86 binaries. Maybe even ARM64 and x64 for the adventurous. Also the set of stable native APIs on Android is pretty small, so you typically inc
2627.
How Google (and Amazon) could make Android developers happy(medium.com)
1 points by iainmerrick 13y ago|1 comments