Longevity 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleOptimizing 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...
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