auxio
About
- Username
- auxio
- Joined
- Visits
- 110
- Last Active
- Roles
- member
- Points
- 2,985
- Badges
- 1
- Posts
- 2,561
Reactions
-
Rogue Amoeba quits 'restrictive' Mac App Store
lkrupp said:asdasd said:crowley said:Illusive said:So they want us to buy untested rubbish so then can alter it as they see fit with every update? No, thanks. Long live sandboxing!
In recent years Apple has locked down macOS more and more (kernel extensions, browser extensions, etc.) so we see it less. Developers rage.
I worked at a company which made wall-mounted touch displays that were used in education. Since they're used in classes with smaller children (or special needs students), we needed to put the toolbar at the bottom of the window so that children (or people in wheelchairs) could reach it. There was no way to do this with the standard Mac toolbar. We could have just created our own toolbar, but we wanted the app to have the standard look and feel of a Mac app (especially since Apple changes it slightly on every new version of MacOS). We talked to Apple about it, showed them photos, and they actually provided us a private API to do what we needed.
Sometimes there genuinely are cases where you need to do something which isn't possible with the standard APIs. -
Google ships first beta of Flutter framework for developing both iOS and Android apps
gatorguy said:lkrupp said:Just what we need, Android ports to iOS. Remember those Windows ports to Mac OS...? Let me guess. Google will encourage developers to build their Android apps and then port them to iOS using Flutter where they will look goofy and not perform as well.
So basically you develop in a programming language which isn't native to iOS (Dart), which then requires you to bundle a special engine with your app to translate the application UI + logic from Dart into the native iOS APIs. Sounds a lot like programming in Java. I've used a few of these types of cross-platform runtime translation engines over the years, and the problem for me is that you'll never get access to the latest platform features because you're always waiting for the engine to support them. And, of course, if such features aren't available on every platform the engine supports, then you may never get access to them. Or you'll have to do a bunch of work to get access to them -- e.g. create your own JNI libraries in Java.Developers create the code of the app in Dart, which is then passed through Flutter's rendering engine and framework, with both tools used to make the code work on each platform natively. The engine is shipped as part of the app package, along with the developer's code, which is used to run the app on the target device, like an iPhone or an Android tablet.
EDIT: Found the process for how to get access to native iOS features (looks a lot like creating JNI libraries): https://flutter.io/platform-channels/
These engines are perfectly fine for simple apps which are doing common things, but not-so-great once you want to get outside of that sandbox and do more interesting things which require platform features which don't fall in that platform common denominator scenario. But since most of Google's apps just go out to the web/cloud for everything they do, it works for them. -
Google really is evil, claims ex-employee lawsuit
red oak said:All of these millennial or Gen Z snowflakes are torpedoing their careers. They are going to wake up 10 years from now wondering how the f* everything up so bad -
Google faces $9 billion in damages after ripping off Java in Android
For all of the people who are splitting hairs over whether code was copied or they just created compatible APIs, you're missing the point.
Sun invested hundreds of millions of dollars creating the Java platform and marketing it. In doing so, it became well known to software developers who created a large ecosystem of server-side and mobile applications for it (not to mention having a ton of experience with it). Andy Rubin and company come along with Android and realize that they need a good software development environment for it. As stated in an email exchange between Tim Lindholm and Andy Rubin, they understood well that the only option was Java, but they simply didn't want to pay a licensing fee for it. So they effectively cloned and owned Java by taking advantage of open-source projects at the time which had special licensing terms for Java. Thus gaining all the benefits of the money invested in the Java platform by Sun within Android (which went on to help Google make a lot of money), but not paying a dime for it.
If you work in the software industry and somehow think it's cool that they found this loophole and exploited it, then I sincerely hope someone does the same to any products you happen to work on. It's not right and I refuse to use Android because of it. I love Linux, and have contributed to it over the years since it was my learning ground during my formative years as a software developer, but I won't touch Android.
And if you think that simply because Oracle bought Sun, it gives them a pass, it doesn't. -
Android executive offers to help Apple deploy RCS messaging
There was a previous article on here which linked to an overview of RCS and how different carriers have branded it with different names, with varying levels of support for different parts of the specification. From a technical standpoint, it looked like a hot mess at this point. Google is fine with that because they're not the ones providing technical support for Android-based phones. They can live in lala land and implement it so that it works perfectly fine with other Android phones running the very latest version of Android on Wifi, and not have to worry about being inundated with support calls from confused customers when conditions aren't perfect: cellular connection from a carrier which doesn't fully support it, phones stuck on older (incompatible) versions of Android, other types of phones, etc. Apple OTOH has to worry about providing tech support when an iPhone using RCS encounters less-than-ideal connectivity situations which are outside of their control. -
Snap stock plunges as Apple privacy changes impact revenue
KTR said:Damn, and they pay the 30% App Store tax -
Xcode Cloud subscriptions now available for developers
crowley said:The article didn't mention it, but the costs are:
From: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/25 compute hours/month
Free (through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.)
100 compute hours/month
US$49.99/month
250 compute hours/month
US$99.99/month
1000 compute hours/month
US$399.99/month
I'm not sure why this is particularly useful unless it is substantially faster than on a local machine, and Apple don't seem to be making any claims about that. -
Apple backs down on CSAM features, postpones launch
elijahg said:MplsP said:gatorguy said:MplsP said:How many of the people screaming about CSAM have Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and google apps on their devices and an Amazon or google smart speaker in their home?xyzzy-xxx said:MplsP said:How many of the people screaming about CSAM have Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and google apps on their devices and an Amazon or google smart speaker in their home?
Everyone makes the obligatory statement that they're against exploiting children, but somehow they're not willing to put their money where their mouth is. But they are willing to give up their privacy for the ability to brag about their vacation, post conspiracy theories and snoop on their neighbors. I find it a very sad commentary on people's values.
Ceasing to use FB/IG/Twitter doesn't cost a penny. Ceasing to use an iPhone could cost a lot of cash, especially if you are deeply invested in the ecosystem. -
New MacBook Pro models limited to HDMI 2.0
Xed said:entropys said:Yes it should. Hardly anyone has USBc projectors. But they all have hdmi.
https://www.amazon.com/Thunderbolt-Compatible-MacBook-Samsung-Surface/dp/B07TLMZK6S/
For myself personally, I can't count the number of times where having an HDMI port on my 2015 MBP has come in handy. Sure I'm doing work on it 90% of the time, and I always take adapters on work trips. But often I take it on vacation with me and don't bother to pack adapters since I figure I don't need them. Then I end up wanting to show photos & videos to friends/family and simply need to hook it up to the TV in their living room (as opposed to having to pass my phone around the room). It's not a "pro" use case, but it's a "real life" use case.
-
Blender update adds support for Metal GPU rendering on Mac
OutdoorAppDeveloper said:Here are two predictions based on this news:
1. Blender will render at around 1/10th the speed on the top end Mac Studio compared to a top end GPU.
2. Apple fans will blame Blender's developers because they don't know how to use Metal correctly.
Apple themselves wrote the Metal backend for Blender.The addition of a Metal GPU backend, which was contributed by Apple
Having actually written shaders in both GLSL and MSL, I can say that Metal is an absolute pleasure to work with by comparison (passing data from CPU to GPU is much easier). The performance in my experience was about the same on equivalent GPU hardware, but then I wasn't writing a full blown 3D design application. I'll be interested to see a comparison for Blender.