This will be an interesting Intellectual Property fight between creators of property (DragonLance) and the company that purchased the rights (WOTC).
The claim is WOTC recent “public outcry regarding Defendant’s other properties by effectively killing the Dragonlance deal”. Nothing against DragonLance specifically.
A Facebook bug in their iOS SDK crashed iOS programs that didn’t use the kit! Here is how it happened.
Developers complain about managed and protected environments, but there are advantages to closed systems.
Craig Clayton gave this remote talk on SwiftUI for this month’s DC iOS Meetup.
I like how he handles different size screens & portrait/landscape modes. This was always a pain with IB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwxozoFJ72c
An explanation of why Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro with the ability to shoot ProRAW is such a big deal.
Here is a Harvard Business Review article regarding Apple’s different business structures.
Change just to change is rarely good, but when there is reason to stop coding a certain way, you should embrace it.
This article was written with Kotlin in mind, but the ideas transfer to all, especially Swift.
https://medium.com/swlh/the-7-coding-styles-that-are-dated-90eff1408d6e
In a surprisingly short time, Quest 2 has been hacked to allow Jailbroken features.
Among other things like non-app store apps, this frees the user from the Facebook account requirement.
https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quest-2-jailbreak-success/
SF Symbols was a surprise success story at WWDC 2019. The new 2020 version has updated images & a display app.
Geoff Hackworth talks about what Symbols 2 on iOS 14 will bring.
https://hacknicity.medium.com/sf-symbols-changes-in-ios-14-4731937c5dc7
Since 2014, Kent Bye has regularly posted his Voice of VR podcast.
He states he is a “spatial computing oral historian”. I like the topics he picks.
Top 10 episodes: https://voicesofvr.com/top-10-voices-of-vr-episodes-to-get-started-into-vr/
I won’t be giving a talk on the State of VR at MagFest this year due to COVID, but if I did, I would have talked about this.
Road to VR list of best 2020 VR buys, with Pros & Cons on popular headsets.
https://www.roadtovr.com/best-vr-headsets-in-2020-buying-guide/
I never knew how important Square Root of 2 was. Thanks to Numberphile, now I do.
I grew up listening to his comedy music on Dr. Demento, without knowing who the Professor of Math was. Tom Lehrer is an amazing guy!
Mostly out of view for years, he is in the news because he is putting all his creations in the public domain before he dies. An interesting idea.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/10/21/satirist-tom-lehrer-put-his-songs-into-public-domain/
His Public Domain songs: https://tomlehrersongs.com
His songs on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/6funswede
His wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer
Fitts Law is a rule of human movement that predicts how quickly a user can select a user interface element. This might be useful for developers!
Yevheniia Nikitina of UXC gives real examples of how to size your buttons and views.
Zafar Uvaev uses Combine to interactive with an App’s UserDefaults.
It is good to see real-world uses for Apple’s new tech. The code is simple, but the details are important.
https://medium.com/better-programming/observe-userdefaults-using-combine-in-swift-5-4177ae62360d
Where/when did the first { } bracket appear? I thought it was C, and I was wrong.
An entertaining stroll in computer history, back when BEGIN & END were replaced by Curly Braces.
https://medium.com/better-programming/the-curly-story-of-coding-49a348a31cf2
A new article by Antoine van der Lee of Swift Lee exploring error handling with Swift.
Matthew MacDonald has written 38 books on coding, maybe he has learned a thing or two.
Another explanation of why the new Lidar sensor on the iPhone 12 and new iPads are so important.
This Ars Technica article gives the background of this innovative tech, along with how Apple was able to miniaturize it.
The best competition against Apple’s iPad Pro may well be the latest version of the iPad Air.
At $200 less and almost all the same features, the Air may be the better pick.
https://medium.com/@rgb.raghav/ipad-air-4-vs-ipad-pro-2020-97a76d396e40
Reinder de Vries gives us a Tutorial on the new Swift Keypaths.
“Keypaths in Swift are a way of storing a reference to a property, as opposed to referencing property’s value itself”
https://learnappmaking.com/swift-keypath-how-to/
Keypaths have been an important part of Mac development with Objective-C, so it is nice to see them available under Swift, and iOS.
For four years, Apple’s AI group has been blogging what they are working on.
Dave Gershogorn explains some of the work publicly being done by Apple’s team.
https://onezero.medium.com/apples-a-i-research-team-is-playing-catch-up-with-siri-ab94684deb13
I came across this site that proposes using an iPad as a computer, using traditional Unix shell tools.
Project Aria is Facebook's test platform (no displays) for the sensors needed for a true Augmented Reality device.
Soon the SCOTUS will decide what elements of computer code can be copyrighted. This has huge ramifications.
This case has been dragging on for 10 years, but an end is in sight.
Followup: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21504715/google-v-oracle-supreme-court-hearings-android-java
There are almost too many URLs to look at, but this list by Danny Sapio is very helpful.
For years now, I have been using design tools for Web UI to develop desktop & mobile apps.
https://uxdesign.cc/29-of-my-favorite-websites-most-designers-have-never-heard-of-d7d99179cda7
One method to run Go programs within mobile iOS or Android Apps
Roger Chapman shows how to create shared libraries that run on server & mobile apps.
https://rogchap.com/2020/09/14/running-go-code-on-ios-and-android/
A team of hackers took up Apple on the Apple bug bounty program. Here are the results.
The bad news, they found 55 vulnerabilities in core portions, the good news, Apple fixed them as soon as they were reported. In some cases, within hours.
You got to love this one. When Facebook shipped the Oculus Quest 2 Developer kit, they camouflaged the box.
Instead of showing the VR headset, the box showed an Iron. And reversed the Oculus name to Suluco.
Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro event had one VA/AR feature, the LiDAR Scanner.
RoadToVR explains the importance of this hardware for Augmented Reality.
https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-iphone-12-pro-max-lidar-instant-ar-depth-mapping/
A follow up to yesterday's Splash Screen, this article by Suson Thapa explores Android versions of them.
I like how Suson breaks Android Splash Screens up into types (fixed time, themed, etc.).
https://medium.com/swlh/splash-screen-in-android-8ab250e40190
SwiftUI under iOS 14 provides a new way to animate the transition from one view to another.
Simon Ng of AppCoda gives us a needed demo of matchedGeometryEffect.
https://www.appcoda.com/matchedgeometryeffect/
This may be one of the most obscure postings I have made. In 1984, Christian rock band Prodigal encodes a Commodore 64 program on their record album.
This video shows how to retrieves this Easter egg, and execute the program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_CZpFqvDQo&t=867s
(SPOILERS: it is a message from Einstein & Jesus).
Emanuel Marques's exploration of why Kanban is better than SCRUM for Agile development.
Starting in 2021, some Amazon delivery drivers will sit behind the wheel of a new electric delivery truck.
These Rivian designed trucks use a Skateboard layout, with electrics & batteries below, and custom chassis above.
https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/amazon-electric-delivery-van-rivian/
The creator of the VOID has a new attraction that simulates Skydiving.
Watching the video, it appears to also simulate Base jumping (cliff) and Wingsuit flying.
https://www.roadtovr.com/the-void-james-jensen-jump-vr-skydiving/
Personally, I am curious how they are going to combat nausea, something common in VR when your personal sense of motion does not match the VR scene.
Sean Allan’s Youtube channel on all things Swift & iOS.
Adobe has retired PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build, the cloud web service, for Hybrid App development.
Originally called Cordova, it used web technology for creating cross-platform mobile apps.
https://blog.phonegap.com/update-for-customers-using-phonegap-and-phonegap-build-cc701c77502c
Article by Ivano Di Gese explaining the impact: https://medium.com/better-programming/adobe-discontinued-phonegap-d0770179ba3c
Owen Willams helps descramble the confusion over USB-C.
Yes, programmers have a sense of humor. We just hide it within comments people rarely read.
These are hilarious.
https://medium.com/better-programming/56-funny-code-comments-that-people-actually-wrote-6074215ab387
I never wrote anything this funny, though I did once put in the code “// If you do not understand how this work, go ask Charlie”. There was no one named Charlie on the project.
Dave DeLong has created an 18 part series of articles on writing HTTP in Swift
It is a great review of both Swift and HTTP! Now I just wished he would put it into a Swift Package!
https://davedelong.com/blog/2020/06/27/http-in-swift-part-1/
The folks at Mad Machine are about to release SwiftIO, a microcontroller designed for Swift.
Due out at the end of Oct, SwiftIO is comparable to an Arduino, but with a full Swift compiler and framework environment.
Documentation on MadMachine SwiftIO: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arm/mm_swiftio/doc/index.html
Git is the source repository standard, while GitHub is the well-known service. Every developer should understand both.
The Swift consortium announces Swift Atomics.
A new open-source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code
https://swift.org/blog/swift-atomics/
To celebrate 35 years of Mario, Nintendo is releasing a free 35 player version of Super Mario Bros.
VR Programming is hard. Very hard. Oculus just release a tool to help.
Oculus Developer Hub is a cross-platform app that supports a collection of common VR tasks.
https://uploadvr.com/oculus-developer-hub/
Oculus page: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/tools/odh/?locale=en_US
This is just funny. Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator has a massive hole in the Earth.
A small airport in Brazil had its elevation inverted. No one noticed, so now you have a pit to hell!
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/microsoft-flight-simulator-abyss/index.html
Video of landing: https://youtu.be/wasJWrt7mQQ
First stabilized & sharpened, then color adjusted, and finally upscaled using a neural network to 4K resolution, here is a video from 1890 Paris.
Some of the faces are very clear. I wonder what they would have thought if told 100 years in the future, we would see their living, moving faces in such detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc&fbclid
1911 NYC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw
Abinand Sivakumar suggests using Scheme, a rather old language, to learn Functional Programming.
Some insights from Jean-Louis Gassée regarding Apple's recent event/press release.
Jean-Louis was an Apple Executive during the 1980s, including the head of Mac development after Jobs was pushed out of Apple.
https://mondaynote.com/apple-september-2020-event-hint-hint-a3754ffb7a12
Does anyone know any mid-senior python developers, preferably cleared (but not required) that are looking for work in the DC/VA area?
If you are going to use Color in your design, you need to know the Psychologic effects of different ones.
I believe color should not be the only indicate purpose of an item in your UI, but it can be used to enhance.
https://www.onepixelout.com/psychology-for-designers/the-psychology-of-colour/
Numberphile explains the flaw that Alan Turning and his codebreaking team used to break the Enigma machine.
