Optimizing Facebook for iOS Start Time
Natansh Verma: Our instinct was that cold start was dominated by network and that the rest would be mostly response processing. This belief came from the assumption that we spent much less time on the...
View ArticleSwift init()
Krzysztof Zabłocki: With Swift strong typing and immutability, there are rules that prevent you from accesing variables until an object is fully initialized. I do not like having a function do more...
View ArticleDone With iCloud Photo Library
Stephen Hackett (comments): Over the week of Thanksgiving, I decided to give it another try. I hadn’t really spent any time with Photos.app since OS X El Capitan, and I had heard a lot of good things...
View ArticleFavorite Terrible Programming Languages
Fogus: Write about your favorite programming language honestly, but make it sound terrible. Marcel Weiher: Objective-C is a car crash of Smalltalk and C, combining the type-safety of the former with...
View ArticleSurprising Complexity Inside Apple’s Power Adapter
Ken Shirriff (comments): This is a fantastic quote, but unfortunately it is entirely false. The switching power supply revolution happened before Apple came along, Apple’s design was similar to earlier...
View ArticleUsing the Old Remote and Keyboard With Apple TV 4
Rob Griffiths: Yes, that’s the third-gen Apple TV’s password entry screen, on my fourth-gen Apple TV. Just how did I get it to appear? Very easily, though it took me a bit to figure out exactly how I...
View ArticleMicrosoft’s Astoria Proves Too Complex
Steven Max Patterson (via Hacker News): Microsoft confirmed this weekend that it has delayed, if not killed entirely, Astoria, a tool designed to make it easy for Android apps to run on Windows 10...
View ArticleCovariance and Contravariance
Mike Ash: Covariance is when subtypes are accepted. Overridden read-only properties are covariant. Contravariance is when supertypes are accepted. The parameters of overridden methods are...
View ArticleThe Worst App
Allen Pike (via Federico Viticci): The app’s website link on the App Store went to an unrelated company, and the copyright credit was for another unrelated company. I contacted them, and they were as...
View ArticleLongevity of the Retina MacBook Pro
Mark Alldritt: I’m here to report that I’m still using this machine as my main development system. I think this is now my favourite Mac laptop ever, displacing the Titanium PowerBook which held that...
View ArticleQuicken 2015 Switches From Mac App Store to Direct Updates
Craig Hockenberry: To everyone who thinks the Mac App Store makes installing updates quick and easy[…] Intuit: Quicken Mac 2015 updates are no longer distributed via the App Store. To install the...
View ArticlePushing to the Git Working Copy on a Web Server
Rachel Worthington: With this in mind, the model that I thought would be best for me, would be a git repository on the server, and a git repository on my laptop where I like to write. I could then make...
View ArticleAn Ode to Kai’s Power Goo
Christopher Phin: Power Goo’s features—the ability to smear regions of an image around and paint bits of one photo onto another to create composites—seem unexceptional today, but in the ’90s, this was...
View ArticleRanchero SpotLight
Brent Simmons: Back in the ’90s I shipped SpotLight, a search engine that ran on Macs running WebSTAR (http server), FileMaker Pro (database), and UserLand Frontier (scripting system). It was the...
View ArticleHow Swift Implements Unowned and Weak References
Joe Groff: Unowned is faster and allows for immutability and nonoptionality. If you don’t need weak, don’t use it. unowned uses a second refcount in the object. weak refs are tracked in a global table....
View ArticleDangers of NeXTSTEP Plists
Sam Marshall (comments): Most of you are probably familiar with the fact that Xcode uses NeXTSTEP plists for the format when serializing project files. […] Xcode’s implementation of deserializing the...
View ArticleLightroom 6.3 Fixes Import Dialog, Flickr
Sharad Mangalick: Lightroom CC 2015.3 and Lightroom 6.3 are now available on Adobe.com. The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that...
View ArticleNot on the Mac App Store
Dan Counsell: The Mac App Store has been around for 6 years, but is still lacking some of the best software the Mac has to offer. You might be wondering why this is. Sandboxing certainly has a lot to...
View ArticleA Look Into Realm’s Core DB Engine
JP Simard: The whole point of Realm, or at least one of its very core ideas, is that it is objects all the way down. That was one of the driving principles that encouraged us to start fresh, rather...
View ArticleImproved App Store Search
Sarah Perez (comments): A number of mobile app developers and industry observers recently noticed a significant change in the way the Apple App Store’s search algorithms are returning results....
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