Posts by Andrew Hodgkinson

> Secondly, and emphatically, WebAssembly is not "grossly inefficient"

I can only assume you're trying to be correct by being as narrow and pedantic as possible in the consideration of 'WebAssembly' by itself.

Every single person that's tried this particular example - which ostensibly consists of probably the highest ever ratio of pure WebAssembly to any other kind of code - has observed that it's glacially slow and uses truly stratospheric amounts of RAM.

You're trying to argue that something isn't grossly inefficient, right next to a great demonstration of that thing being, emphatically, grossly inefficient.

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

All other engineering disciplines are using software tools to make their lives dramatically easier, whilst the software industry keeps messing it up. Why?

I don't know, apart from perhaps blaming the two easiest targets - the general dubious competence levels in newer software development, coupled with the "NIH" syndrome that has always seemed to be present.

From a once-RISC OS, now MacOS (macOS) / iOS developer perspective, Interface Builder's fast and simple operation went backwards with the much slower and buggier Storyboard stuff in XCode, but at least it was still graphical. IMHO Apple's more recent move to Swift UI seems to have been a big backwards step, at least if a graphical design approach were to be dropped and leave only the code-writing option - which bewilderingly, many people seem to want to happen. Notwithstanding the dreadful documentation and bugs, it's just *much* more effort and producing something that actually looks good is, uuh, challenging to say the least.

I've frequently read a rationale concerning code reviews. You can easily diff UI-written-in-code, but can't easily diff the output of a visual tool. This is a shortcoming of the diff engine of course, not a shortcoming of the generation tool. In any case, if you've ever done a code review where someone's modified a bunch of XUL, or CSS, or even Swift UI code, you'll know that for all but the most trivial changes, you're very unlikely to have any clear idea of exactly how those changes will manifest visually, or whether or not this will produce a desired outcome; nor can you be too sure if there are reuses somewhere which could mean that the innocent looking change in a diff actually has wider impacts. There are no silver bullets. A diff tool that understood the output of the visual editor system and could respond with an appropriately visual diff, on the other hand - that would be valuable.

There are times and a places for UI components expressed in hand-written code or markup languages, of course, but the lack of good tools for things like desktop or mobile app development outside of the Apple ecosystem has always surprised me.

*Unless*

Innocent unless proven guilty, which looks like a small change but is really extremely important (otherwise, you're innocent until we prove you guilty - it's only a matter of time...). There are probably even fewer countries where that holds.

I think it's more a design issue

Many treadmills have the rollers and tread on a bed that is pretty close to the ground. It is very hard to get underneath it. The belt is often, though not always hidden underneath behind a cheap plastic bottom cover plate, mitigating a potential "on deep pile carpet" issue if used in the home. See e.g.:

https://d3fa68hw0m2vcc.cloudfront.net/01e/238032918.jpeg

...noting the plastic guard along the rear roller/base (to which a carry handle is attached, but that's incidental) and fairing around the roller edges.

The Pelotron units look different - the belt is fully exposed on all sides and around the rollers, and they have riser feet that bring the whole assembly some distance off the ground. These feet are *not* positioned at the far corners of the base, but inset and, further, there is no kind of guard bar or any other piece of plastic or other super-cheap stuff to guard the end of the roller. It's fully exposed (and has quite a large diameter).

https://media.self.com/photos/607dbcbfccaa575c60969918/4:3/w_2560%2Cc_limit/peloton-tread.jpg

This doubtless looks good in Photoshop and is doubtless cheaper than anything incorporating additional fairing or guards - and I Am Not An Industrial Designer - but I would wager that if Mittens The Cat, Fido The Dog or Mary Your Small Child happen to come running in (someone opens the door and they squeeze in quickly, dog, cat or child can open doors with latch handles, etc.etc.), one's view of the safety of the chosen product might change somewhat as Mittens, Fido or Mary brush inadvertently against that rear roller.

Some kind of cheap clip-on plastic guard, or even just a tray, that could live under the machine and rose up just enough to guard that rear roller might help, but Pelotron argue that it's all fine & nothing is wrong & everyone who's been injured must be holding it wrong.

Re: Can we all please...

Nope, dead right. As more and more photoshop monkeys think they're "UX Experts", the worse it seems to get.It seems as if the minute someone calls it "UX" instead of "UI", you know you're in trouble.

Flavour-of-the-month visual design (most of which seems to be poorly implemented, probably because designers are trying, without the requisite skills, to poorly copy something they saw someone else do better in a blog the previous day), a complete and comprehensive lack of coherence or consistency across every section of the interface (which we can probably ascribe to card-dev-myopia from the infection of poor agile application just as much as we can ascribe to "UX" designer problems), and an almost wilful ignorance of just about any feature beyond the most drool-level single-finger, single-click kind of interaction in the system.

The majority of the now-historic wider platform conventions for cross-application cooperation are not there. Keyboard shortcuts if you're lucky. Multi-select following platform conventions? Forget it. Any kind of power user feature is stripped away leaving a bland, tasteless, white-space-wasting canvas of crap that's as pathetically inefficient, clumsy and irritating to use as the awful mobile app UIs from which all design is now derived. Most modern designers don't seem to be able to conceive of, or understand the utility of, a system which provides a richer array of input options than a fat finger. And that'd be fine if engineers implemented the designer's "look", but now they've been given control of the entire feature set and engineers turned into dumb drones that just do what's on the card and nothing else. The engineers are treated as if - and accordingly, increasingly seem to exhibit - no particular skill, no deep expertise, no creativity, no initiative and no interest. The outcome is inevitable.

Inmates running the asylum.

Re: It was all downhill after Snow Leopard

Couldn't agree more. Snow Leopard was Apple's Windows 2000.

My first foray into OS X happened because of Vista, so I suppose I've got Microsoft to thank. Took one look at it and went "hell no", so got a 2011 Intel MBP, 4GB RAM. Fastest laptop I'd ever owned. Still working today, but it did need its discrete GPU re-soldering - early lead-free solder strikes again.

Speaking of "strikes again", suddenly, OS X Lion happened. I "upgraded" and everything ground to a halt - never mind multiple features being removed like the 4x4 desktop grid in favour of the hopeless horizontal-only strip-of-un-renameable-doom we have to this day, or the horrible linen background on any 2nd monitor thanks to the newly introduced, and thoroughly unreliable from app-to-app "full screen" mode, thankfully resolved in 10.8 - but the main problem was RAM.

Those days, you could upgrade RAM in Mac laptops. Imagine that! So I went from 4GB to 8GB. It was better, but still sluggish. So I went to the chipset maximum of 16GB and _finally_ Lion ran as well as Snow Leopard.

Four times less efficient. Four! And from a user-facing perspective, it seemed to have taken more features away than it added.

Similar story ever since - things Apple don't seem to have touched get more and more broken with each release, never to be fixed; occasionally some "big rewrite" happens and the new replacement is far more buggy, far bigger and slower and far less functional than its predecessor. Examples:

• Original iMovie rewrite tho that at least has improved over time

• iPhoto to Photos which hasn't improved over time

• Aperture to, well, what, Photos? Really?!

• iTunes to the incomprehensibly slow, buggy and feature-poor Music app which seems basically just stagnant

• The various incarnations of Messages which thanks to Catalyst have got more and more iOS-like, and less and less Mac-like, especially if you want to do something ground-breaking like selecting more than one conversation at once in its sidebar

So don't, for heaven's sake, ask for the Finder to be rewritten. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of bloated, dysfunctional horror story would arise (well - I guess I could look at the iOS Files app and have a pretty good idea... Shudder!).

Re: "see the capability gap between native and web apps closed as much as possible"

PWAs don't have any less security that a standard web page run through chrome.

YES. Exactly the point.

Reading every update note for every app to see what amazing new features it had. Doesn't happen anymore

Because thanks it large part to agile and in part to lazy change log writing, "nothing apparently changed" updates on a 2 or 3 week cycle with update notes saying something lame like "bug fixes and performance improvements" are the norm. That aspect of lazy development is only tangentially related at best to PWA vs native. People don't read them anymore because app updates are very annoyingly frequent and very rarely have anything interesting to say in the notes.

As for PWA vs Native it's often a different use case and a decent PWA doesn't have to be 'janky and slow'.

Compared to native, sorry, yes it does; the basic domain of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is simply a very poor and very inefficient toolset for constructing the kind of dynamic user interfaces we associate with apps, for which native APIs like Cocoa Touch are dramatically better optimised and designed.

People don't search for apps randomly, it is based on a real user need and most people would prefer not to download a full blown native app just to get information when staying at a hotel, or pay for their pizza etc.

So your argument here appears to be that a PWA is used when people don't want a "full blown app". This is surely a tacit admission of the limitations of the web based environment compared to native. Basically we're saying we just need web sites optimised for mobile a lot of the time. Agree! We don't need or want really to install things. Agree! So, um, wait. What's PWA for again? It's not to replace native apps, and it's a kind of installable thing...

...glorified home screen bookmark with an over complicated cacheing model that would've been better served just by the built-in web browser providing a first class ability to pin things to the home screen? Oh, wait, we have the latter. So, uuuh... All we've really got left is the ability to work offline. And of course, given that we recognise native is best unless you'd really want just to access what's on a web page, and the point of the web page is to be online, we're left with what? Crap games written in JavaScript that'll just about work offline because you jumped through the hoops needed to declare the resource collection in a manner that allows it to be accessed as a PWA?

If it's worth an app, treat your users with respect and make a decent native app that conforms to all your target operating system's best-practice recommendations, layouts, integrations with the rest of the system, accessibility features, and so-on. Have it lean on native frameworks as much as it possibly can to keep the app as small as possible and allow it to conform, often with little or no effort, with things like dark modes or system-wide contrast variations or animation styles or whatever.

If it's not worth an app, just make sure your inherently online web site is a best-possible online web experience on mobile and stop wasting your development money on PWA bundling.

Re: Use our code its always better

From the article:

He found flaws in rarely used specifications that browsers nevertheless have to implement in order to be compliant with other code, but which do not get the same level of attention as commonly used parts of the browser API.

Pretty sure there'll be variants of this found, if you tried hard enough, in Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Firefox, Edge, MSIE...

Yes, Apple's software quality is increasingly terrible, but rancid specs are the bane of the web world. There is a litany of errors, with increasingly absurd, edge case riddled and ginormous specs comprising a bad joke as we go from version to version. Look at HTML 4 or XHTML 1.1 versus HTML 5, for example, or even CSS 1 vs CSS 2.

It's a nightmare of a job to implement this stuff. I know, I've done it, many years ago now; HTML 4 was new back then. I'm glad I'm not trying to do it in an HTML 5, CSS 3 world, especially not with modern JavaScript / ECMAScript and the bazillion flavours of that along with its ever-growing list of ever-more invasive interfaces into the host operating system as lazy programming (and a deficit of half-decent alternatives) continue to make engineers hell-bent on some kind of 'write once, run everywhere' model that competes with native-written applications tailored for the host operating system. Lowest common denominator is the _best_ outcome you can hope for. As for security? Forget it.

Re: Genius, more like idiot.

If you read TFA - he has a T2 chip in the laptop and a password set. It turns out that PRAM reset doesn't work if you have that. People tried PRAM resets; they didn't make the backlight come on.

There are very many levels of fail in the whole sorry story, but it boils down to modern Apple - each major hardware iteration gets worse and more expensive; each major software iteration gets more buggy, gaining new bugs that are never fixed; the once-industry-leading documentation is getting sparse to non-existent.

Re: Possible solution...

According to news reports, yes, using a USB 3 audio interface, a Thunderbolt audio interface, or a USB 2 interface hanging off a USB 3 or thunderbolt hub should all work. Only USB 2 devices on the internal bus appear to be problematic.

Still a damned stupid bug!

Re: Now I'm Confused

But that's just it. I've bashed Apple's declining s/w quality relentlessly since the truly horrible days of the introduction of OS X Lion and iOS 7, but with High Sierra and iOS 11, the media is genuinely struggling to find anything wrong. Let's review the list:

* 32-bit apps stop working. Um, hardly a bug; that's been advertised since 2014, with non-64-bit app submissions to the store rejected for at least two years. iOS 10 started warning users about it, in increasingly strong terms. If you rely on a 32-bit app then yeah, it's crappy and you can't upgrade, but it's still a 3-year-old well advertised deprecation and means you are using an app that can't have had a single update or security patch in at least two full years.

* You can't turn off WiFi and Bluetooth! Panic! Uuuh, except you can, in Settings. Questionable UI for anyone but novices in Control Centre for sure, but the rationale is well explained in the Apple knowledge base article - it seems journos can't be arsed even reading *that* much these days though.

* An actual bug! The Exchange connection issue. I didn't experience it, but enough did that 11.0.1 is already out and fixes it. So, that's gone.

* Another bug perhaps? Some people report slow application launch times. I've not noticed it being slower, but then I've been on the beta a while before the final release and perhaps I got used to it. There could be a genuine issue here. The "double launch" UI animation bug is still present, so clearly something is amiss. This one seems legit.

* Worse battery life! Yeah, as with every update. Every single one. Spotlight reindexing and usage profiling data restarts each time. In 1-2 days, it'll settle as it always does. Doubtless a few people out of the many millions who can upgrade will have bad patches that don't function properly and need to restore, which sucks, but is that a reason to have screamed "do not upgrade" a day or two ago? No.

Aaaaand that's it so far. That's all. To me, that's basically mind blowing. I've never seen an OS release from anyone with so few headline bugs at release, even before iOS 11. There are little UI glitches all over the place, but nothing breaking the device functionality. Quite something, especially given the magnitude of changes on the iPad, which pretty much all seem to work properly.

High Sierra is a similar story and, very rarely for modern Mac OS, actually runs faster than 10.12 on some older hardware, allegedly thanks to Metal 2 and (for all-Flash storage devices) APFS. It certainly spend up my 2011 MBP. Again, very few significant bugs are evident, despite an entirely new filesystem; amazing. Yes, it's still a pale shadow of 10.6 thanks to ongoing absurd RAM requirements and such, but even the RAM problems are much reigned in compared with 10.12. Perhaps being stuck on 16GB max in laptops thanks to Intel limitations has been a motivator!

So I can say what I like about the intermediate years, but they seem to have genuinely knocked it out of the park on this one.

Re: Swarms of weaponized suicide drones

Don't worry, all you need to do is transmit some loud rock music over FM and the swarm will explode.

(Such a shame, that film had started quite well...)

A few have

A few Telsa vehicles have already caught fire. Stories that pop up in Google include one that burned after an accident, one that burned in a garage while the owner claimed it was *not* plugged in, and one that burned in Norway while connected to a supercharger.

Re: The Greatest Fear is Fear Itself

Amen. OP's analogy is ludicrous. The river can't be commanded to flood your home by a botnet operated by script kiddies 10,000km away, but the IoT boiler [1] can sure as hell be commanded to close its inlet valves, boil itself dry and burn your house down remotely. Good luck trying to get the insurer to pay out when they claim that it "clearly must have been your fault", because computers are perfect and the manufacturer claims the IoT boiler is secure.

[1] Y'know, so you can warm up the water from work before you get home, because, like, everyone totally needs that and a dirt cheap mechanical timer just wouldn't cut the mustard.

Re: Any one surprised?

The phrase you are looking for in relation to Microsoft is: "embrace, extend, extinguish". On this occasion, though, we might have skipped "extend" entirely.

Re: Ouch!

Amen. "Farewelling"? What the actual fuck, El Reg.

Open source these days

> For some reason the software on the Archimedes seemed to before much more advanced than that for Win/x86 machines

It is open these days - I'm involved with RISC OS Open Limited, which manages it. Emulators available for those who want the nostalgia and it'll run on things like the Raspberry Pi for those that want something a bit more practical :-)

https://www.riscosopen.org/

Re: 10KB for the OS?

- "Swtmr" objects (whatever they are)

Software Timer, surely.

Re: Wtf?

Plus the execs from Zimbra and VWMare probably knew execs from Microsoft from the get-go and after lots of dual-direction corporate wining and dining, the backhanders were all sorted so the sale could go ahead.

The idea that an e-mail client could be worth $200 *million* is absurd even by typical industry absurdity, so it's very likely that there's more to it.

Re: Still refusing to admit

Well yes, obviously, it makes a lot of sense.

If you upgrade on device, then the upgrade archive has to be downloaded to the device filesystem somewhere. So that's 1GB ish. Then you need a bunch of scratch and verification space, probably room to unpack files etc., and though 5GB seems excessive, you can certainly see how there'd be escalating storage requirements - especially with on-device checks and balances to make extra sure if anything goes wrong the OS isn't stuffed.

When doing it via iTunes, all the big files can be kept on the downloading computer, with only filesystem changes sent over the wired connection to the device. It may well be possible to be much less careful about keeping a consistent system state too, since if you're connected to iTunes, the upgrade process will already have made a restoration file in case things go tits up.

Re: Concerns

> b) let Apple/Google know all about your purchases

That's exactly what Apple Pay doesn't do, since Apple don't make money off user data unlike Google. They were able to bypass any notion of storing information about the purchase as part of a unique selling point - and point scoring! - against Google, which does make money off this sort of thing and does collect data.

Apple often seem behave in a nasty way but the interesting part is that with Apple Pay, they have a vested commercial interest in *not* collecting your data. They're financially motivated to be the least evil in this particular case.

CurrentC is a waste of time because it's such a myopic US-centric mess anyway; social security number? In 2014? Chortle. Meanwhile, Apple Pay might struggle outside the US just because the rest of the world was already onto Chip & Pin, and now PayWave etc. anyway. The US transaction market has always seemed pretty "quaint" to much of the rest of the world.

Re: Blah, Blah Blah

Yes, so it's a good thing that this is just the pointless summary done by a journalist, rather than the more useful and linked-to-information summary done by Apple.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/rejections/

Try reading the original material - then you can complain about what Apple *actually* said, rather than assuming The Register's language is Apple's language.

Re: So in summary

"Iphone 5s is 64-bit. Are there benefits to that?"

I co-wrote the following article which got journalistified :-P a bit but the gist of it is there:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/18/iphone-5s-apple-a7-chip-64-bit-explained

Re: Worked for me...

""MS control the hardware and the software" except this wasn't MS. Yes, the MS GDR3 update was included, but Lumia Black is a Nokia software update for Nokia devices... er... OK."

Given how closely MS and Nokia have been working together from the get-go with WinPho devices and given the ex-Microsoft man at the Nokia helm back then, it'd be pretty daft to think that they were genuinely separate or that MS didn't have stranglehold control of what Nokia were doing from the get-go. That's now irrelevant though, since Microsoft purchased Nokia's mobile phone business in September 2013. When it comes to phones, MS and Nokia are now one and the same.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/10283087/Microsoft-buys-Nokia-mobile-business-to-challenge-Apple-and-Google.html

Re: What happened to 7.0.1?

Version 7.0.1 was specifically for the 5S and 5C only, rolled out almost immediately after the hardware was released. The only widely discussed fix was a fingerprint sensor bug on the 5S; there's also a lot of talk of a number of regressions too. Rather an obvious sign that it was all pushed out the door a bit too early...

Version 7.0.2 is being used for everyone as a universal upgrade to bring the numbers back in sync. For most devices, there's never been a 7.0.1.