Ramblings of a ridiculously cynical developer
If you’ve got an M1 Mac you might have noticed that when you run Xcode in native Apple Silicon mode, when building for the simulator it’ll use the arm64 ARCH. This is good, except if you’ve got a lot of legacy dependencies that haven’t been updated to support XCFrameworks. Most binary dependencies out there still assume SDK = iphonesimulator means ARCH = x86_64 , which will result in linker…
FINAL FANTASY XIV is an MMORPG for Windows, macOS, and PlayStation. The Mac version is essentially an identical build of the Windows version, except it runs in a customised version of Wine . The launcher / patcher for FFXIV is pretty famously disliked, and for Windows users there’s a very good custom one , but unfortunately it doesn’t work for Mac. So I made my own . One of the more interesting…
I bought a HomePod. Here are my impressions. 1. It’s expensive. $500 is a lot of dollarydoos for what this thing is. And what it is, is an OK sounding music player. Think of it like a modern version of a 1980s boombox, but with a lot less functionality. 2. The sound is pretty good. Though for the money it ought to be. I’d say, for the money, the sound is not good enough . Audiophiles beware.…
It’s now been almost exactly one year since Apple Music was announced, so I thought I’d give a bit of a retrospective of that time. People have been mostly critical of Apple Music since it came out, and Apple is obviously quite aware of the criticism, since at WWDC 2016 they announced a major overhaul of the young service. Outside of the diehard Apple faithful the criticism has been pretty…
I inadvertently kicked up a big stink two months ago by pointing out how slow Swift was, which was version 1.1 at the time. Apple has since responded with a new beta version of Xcode which includes a shiny new version of Swift, version 1.2. Since it promised to: … produce binaries that run considerably faster, and new optimizations deliver even better Release build performance. I thought it would…
Much and more has been written about Apple’s new programming language, Swift. I even did a talk about it at Yow: Connected 2014 . If you saw me there, you’d know that I’m not the biggest fan of Swift. I think the rollout of it has been an absolute disaster: the compiler is a shambles , the language design is inconsistent in places 1 and it’s stupidly difficult to get working in libraries,…
Just as it is with coding standards, everyone thinks they have the answers when it comes to hiring new people. I’m under no such delusions. I don’t pretend that this method will work for everyone. It won’t. This is simply the mechanism that I used to hire the team I currently work with. The team in question has turned out rather spectacularly, thanks in no small part to the effectiveness of this…
It’s no secret that the rhythm game genre is dying, or at least wheezing its last wretched breaths. From 2008 to 2009, both the Guitar Hero franchise and Rock Band franchises saw up to 50% declines in revenue – Activision responded by releasing even more games, to the collective sigh of the entire games-consuming public. The last major title in the genre, the venerable Rock Band 3, released in…
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened a .plist file in Sublime Text only to have it come up with binary goobledegook. It’s pretty standard in the Apple universe to see binary plists with the standard .plist extension, so there’s no way to know whether they’re binary or not without trying to open it first. The common answer to this is “just use Xcode!” – however, anyone that’s actually…
It’s become painfully obvious to me recently that developers tend to be really, really bad at setting up a decent build environment. Xcode is shonky at the best of times, but it certainly doesn’t help if you let carelessness or ignorance lead to complexity creep. Eventually, you’ll end up with a project requiring 10 different build scripts, all with their own sets of assumptions and dependencies…
My first mistake was buying a cheap server from CloudAtCost without knowing beforehand if I’d have any particular use for it. As is usual for nerds like me, I immediately had to find something to put on there. Owncloud My first port of call was to try out OwnCloud . I’d heard rumblings about it on the interwebs previously and figured – despite having a premium Dropbox subscription – that I should…