Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
In which millennials try to recall kindergarten pre-iPhone
iPhone was nice, but not a big change to my lifestyle; I already had a Treo, and before that a LifeDrive, and before that a Palm III, and had Internet since before I was boinking those kids' mothers. I was basically the model for the Mondo 2000 "R.U. A Cyberpunk" poster (the joke being R.U.Sirius was… nevermind), and yes, I read Mondo2k & Wired before they were dead and/or uncool.
Indie game dev leads you to some dark and terrible places.
I so miss the App Store being an endless payout slot machine without spending $10M on advertising, and miss the 6-figure jobs for fixing peoples' apps because nobody knew Objective-C (even less know it now, but they're stupidly trying to rewrite code they don't understand into Swift, which will break again in 6 months).
Now I'm a poor but honest pixel farmer, forced to shovel shit to get to market.
Making a Mac binary for Reaper's Crypt was trivial (on a Mac, probably impossible elsewhere), and produced 1 file: "Reaper's Crypt.app" (a Mac application bundle, hiding all the mess so you don't see it).
Making a Linux binary was not much harder, and produced 17 files and directories, with libraries and data scattered all over, with the binary sitting in the middle where nobody could see it. So I'll have to make a little script to go launch that untidy mess. When I did Linux, there were at least 3 standards for icons, and by now I'm sure there are 13 more, so they get a raw image file.
Making a Windows binary required me to install WINE with MacPorts, which took hours, and the binary is in the middle of a similar mess of 20 files and directories. So for this I need an installer to make a .msi file, which nobody I know has done this decade; I think I have a handle on this. But now I don't know if I need 32-bit "win32" or 64-bit "win32" (what.); there's no fat binaries in Windows, so it's one or the other.
I am not Hercules, and these Augean stables are filthy.
Just a few minutes to DubDubDeeCee!
Despite that I'm currently not working on any iOS or Mac-specific software, and it hasn't been great since Steve died, I'm still always excited. Just a few years ago I was always in that keynote line, and then a week drinking from the session firehose, getting my apps problem areas looked at by engineers, and overdrinking at the parties and beer bash with usually shitty bands (but one year they had Barenaked Ladies!!!)
So this week I'll be watching sessions when they have something that isn't nonsense about IVE-1138's white room, or Swift the walking dead CPU-burner of a language. And then get back to work on a modern platform.
OK, what's going on in tech today?
Tech companies are powerless against coal/oil company politics. link
Google's ad-blocking everyone except Google ads. link
Nintendo wants you to pay $20/year for online multiplayer, still no backup, and an NES emulator (back when their games were good). link
(I don't expect to do this often, but my sarcasm levels are higher than my bullshit-tolerance this morning)
It weirds me out that people say "apps" for anything except iOS or Mac programs, because their application bundles have a ".app" extension inherited from NeXTstep.
Windows programs are exes. Linux (as if anyone uses Linux) are bins or binaries. Web pages that do something are CGI or DHTML. None of those have application bundles, a coherent structure for binary and support files.
And until the iPhone got popular, only the nerdiest of Mac nerds ever said "app". But most people can't remember their language changing, because they have no introspection.