attila

[attila]

Tomato flavor is broken. Can it be fixed? – Vox

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Here’s the thing. When you leave them in peace, let them grow off the ground, tomatoes are really good. It lasts 3 months per year, the tomatoes my parents are growing in their garden are… something else.

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[attila]

Xcode 8.x is killing me

Let’s start by doing something apparently nobody dares to do at Apple: open the Mac App Store, and delve into the Developer Tools category. The first app is also the one with the lowest ratings, about 2 stars if we’re generous at the time of writing. It is: Xcode. Read the first 10 or 20 reviews, and you will get the general feeling: a piece of shit. I work in Xcode everyday. Every. F$&@ing. Day. The pain in now so intense I feel like I’m back on Eclipse some 10-12 years ago. I don’t want to speculate on what is happening in Cupertino, it is just not understandable for common mortals how a multi-billion dollar company has released a turd like that while claiming to love its developers. How did it pass QA? Are Apple engineers even eating their own dog food?

it shouldn’t be hardware related

I do travel a lot. And spend a lot of time in traffic. For that reason, I went for a MacBook One last year, high specs, it is highly portable and, honestly, powerful enough for what I am doing. That is, developing xRapid, which is based on digital image processing and artificial intelligence. If i can crunch those 500 or so files in Xcode, I guess that it is good enough for any app that does not involved heavy OpenGL computations, i.e. most modern games. Thinking about the current shortcomings of Xcode, I came to one conclusion: it should run on the lowest spec’ed computer that Apple sells at the moment. And by running, I mean it should be comfortable. So, going to QA questions, who is running a 11″ MBA at Apple and testing Xcode on that machine? No one. It’s just not possible someone is doing that and letting it go through, version after version. You will argue this is not a development device? I can assure you I know more than one developer who has gone with the ultraportable solution, because… it’s ultraportable. And those are some damn good laptops.

Charybdis and Scylla

One of our biggest collective woes is always ignored it seems. When we get comfortable working around the kinks and shortcomings of a Xcode version, probably around February or March, we enter hell again during the summer. I defy anyone at Apple to name me one single developer who hasn’t gone through a partial or total loss of his storyboard by updating from version 7 to version 8 of Xcode. I personally waited for the final release of Xcode 8 before installing it, to see that 1- I got a whopping 150 new warnings by opening my project which had zero before, and 2- all my constraints in IB had gone missing. I wish I could say I was surprised, but the same crap happens every year. Has anyone anything good to report about IB/Storyboard this year? No? Then I respectfully suggest you fix it.

It now takes some 10 to 30s opening a storyboard. It opened instantly in Xcode 7. And don’t get me wrong, Xcode 7 had its string of problems, so did version 6… I am not even discussing the interface which remains to this day clunky, but we have all learnt to deal with it and developed habits that let us “work” proper. Still. New is supposed to be better, so how come I cannot open a SB these days without digging deep into my Mac’s resources? To make sure, I tried to open the same file on my 2013 MBP. Know what? Apple did really good trying to reduce the fan noises, because when I’m opening a SB with some 5 view controllers in it, the fan kicks in like if I were converting a video in handbrake.

version control is broken

When you are competing for the title of the worst IDE of the year, breaking version control is a good thing. Otherwise, you should avoid it. Developers, please raise your hand if you have your project somewhere in /Documents, let MacOS deal with iCloud backup, and Git manage your version control? I thought so, I’m not the only one in that case. Now raise your hand if you need to push dummy commit because you’ve only opened/closed a storyboard, without making any changes to it? I thought so too. Same exercise if you get a spinning beach ball while pulling changes from your server? Yep. When we were discussing it with our team last week, I was bitching that Git was broken and then we quickly came to the conclusion that since it was running perfectly for us before Xcode was updated, we were looking at the wrong culprit. The culprit is our development environment. And hardware-software integration: my @$$.

When is the last time you did not have to force quit Xcode for a day? When did you last restart your computer because you couldn’t identify which process was locked irremediably in Monitor?

Here is one kicker: 5 years ago, I was restarting my Mac about once a year. Just once. To update OS X.

should we stop using Apple tools at all?

I have that problem: I am old enough to remember how painful it was to mount view controllers manually, fully in code. But I also remember that, even though it was long and tedious, once it was done and worked properly, it was done! I did not get some warnings telling me that my navigation bar was wrongly dimensioned even though nothing was changed, I did not get my springs and struts missing or their values changed… with multiple device sizes now, it seems quit impractical, if not impossible, to handle in the same way, but… is the time i am spending dealing with Xcode and storyboard generated errors worth it? Wouldn’t I be better off just spending the time coding the interface completely and be done with it all at once?

just fix it, please

Let’s be clear, I am not asking for a new version of Swift or objective C, nor new functionalities or options, all would be the proverbial bandaid on a wooden leg.

I am going to try two other tools for now: AppCode, from JetBrains, and Microsoft VS Code. That’s right. I’m that desperate. Or rather, I’m at the point where I can see no trouble with wasting time trying to learn another IDE because I’m wasting so much time on my current IDE. And that, my Friends, that, is probably the worse thing I could say about the current state of Xcode.

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[attila]

Just watched it, I'm bluffed. Excellent job, excellent movie. Whatever you may think about Di Caprio, he pulled more than I ever thought he could. Must watch

[attila]

Yahoo! sale

So it seems that Verizon is buying out Yahoo!, which I wouldn't care about normally, if not for two facts: - the sale price is rumored to be less than $5b, and I seem to remember they refused to sell to Microsoft in 2008 for about 45 (or was that 48?). In any case, well done for the shareholders... - and dammit, comes the exceptionally bad feeling that I should backup and migrate my blog. I've had that feeling several times already, and have kept it here, but... Who can assure what the future of tumblr may be under the new leadership of Verizon? To be fair, I'd have migrated already if it was not such a pain in the neck: I was planning to self host my blog in the end, but it seems that the only viable solution at the moment is to migrate to a Wordpress blog. Which I can eventually self-host. Sigh, I don't want to spend my vacations on this.

[attila]

Wow

“A woman was standing calmly, her long dress the only thing moving in the breeze, as two police officers in full riot gear confronted her in the middle of a roadway to arrest her. She had no facial expression at all. She just stood there.” ~ Jonathan Bachman, photographer

[attila]

The Art of Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzisław Beksiński was a renowned Polish painter, photographer, and fantasy artist. He was born in the town of Sanok in southern Poland. After studying architecture in Cracow, he returned to Sanok in 1955. Subsequent to this education he spent several years as a construction site supervisor, a job he hated. At that time he became interested in artistic photography and photomontage, sculpture and painting. He was a very innovative artist, especially for one working in a Communist country. He made his sculptures of plaster, metal and wire.

Images and text via

[attila]

Product Spec anyone?

Given the fiasco of [Parse.com](http://parse.com) (reminder: bought by Facebook, and now discontinued - has it been more than a year?), we need to replace that service and seize that opportunity to reduce our technical debt on [xRapid](http://xrapid.com). The basic advantage of Parse was that I could code both backend and front-end for a reasonably complex service in a day or less, and their syncing method was stellar - I can’t emphasize enough how convenient and powerful the `saveEventually` command was when it first came out. Nevertheless, I had to conform the data to their specific format, which was generic enough to accommodate the needs of the many, thus far from ideal. Now that the service is closing, we have, for once, the time to think about our specs and our tech stack, draft it to accommodate future changes, and all these things. Basically, do our jobs as engineers, which I love: think about what you need now, in the medium and long term, and execute on those specs. I always end up writing less code, using less resources, and just enjoy a minimalist coding approach. So, we’ll just be turning something bad into something good, removing external dependencies in the process. Which brings me to my travel thoughts, this time iTunes and Music. I don’t use Music on my iPhone/iPad that much, basically only when I’m traveling - I’m mainly listening to podcasts on my iDevices. And, this time, I realized that my libraries have been deleted on all my iPads, except for some U2 songs I cannot seem to delete (wtf?) — Edit: I’ve found that it can be hidden from my library, I assume the problem of having them in, being pushed by Apple, has been discussed abundantly elsewhere. If I remember well, my main iPad was always in sync with some 15-20Gb of music “just in case”, and I simply cannot fathom what has gone wrong. Nor do I want to enquire, nor have to when I realize that my library is missing at 20’000 feet above the Indian ocean. And therefore, one has to ask, _what the eff was the product spec for iTunes and Music_? I realize that both are barely functional now, as I cannot understand what anything means, basically. I’d wager that this is bad, since I’m a tech savvy user, but in the end I don’t think that I am the main target for this product — there isn’t an extensive collection of Wagner on iTunes. But, that doesn’t stop me from thinking this is a pile of crap, either badly specified, either badly executed. When I think about the wind some engineers took after MobileMe disappointed, I just cannot imagine the tension there must be in the iTunes + Music teams: if the standards at Apple are as high as they claim, they must be skinning alive one engineer every single day. So, here’s what I need, just in case someone needs help picking their next project. I might actually code it myself for the fun of it. I do need a music player that has zero chrome, zero social whatever, zero ads, zero genius bots or whatever, just one functionality: play my music from an iCloud drive, in most modern formats (mp3, mp4, FLAC, what-have-you…). Ideally, it should let me stream from the cloud, but a simple download with an indicator of what has been downloaded is good enough. Altogether, one single window with a table sorted by artists/albums/songs, tap on one line and it plays. And maybe playlists - they’re not that interesting to me anyway? In any case, it should not trash my library when it’s trying to up-sell me some streaming shit service that will not work for me because data is gold anyway. I cannot understand what was wrong with letting me sync my music using the iTunes “interface”: it’s not a good experience but at least it used to work… I have searched for the product I need in the App Store, and bizarrely it does not exist. I can find about 50 to 100 Chinese clones of a spam machine whose functionality is to push ads on my machine to be able to listen to my own music (not kidding, there’s a market for that? How fucked up is the music scene on iOS and Android to come to that kind of product??). I can find one that would sort of do what I want, like bottom of the list, because it’s not free, but it apparently does FLAC only and was broken by a recent update[^1]. For now, in Trent Reznor’s terms, we have reached an “All Time Low”. [^1]: And by the way, here’s a $ million idea for the App Store curators: allow me to search for “!free” or “NOT free”, that would be a huge time saver. In fact I think this could save the App Store - the quality one, I mean…

[attila]

Terrific paper by Nick Bilton, on our dependence on technology. > All it took during World War I was one shot. Maybe all it will take for World War III is one line of code.

[attila]

U.S. Federal Court Rules That Home Computer Users Have No Expectation of Privacy —Pixel Envy “Mark Rumold of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (via Michael Tsai): In a dangerously flawed decision unsealed today, a federal district court in Virginia ruled that a criminal defendant has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in his personal computer, located inside his home.” Like Nick said: unreal. Or maybe, unfortunately, that's all too real!

[attila]

Brilliant, as usual. As a reader I'd be interested to see the effect of Brexit on the universe of the Laundry files.

[attila]

Super Stickman Golf 3 spins you right round, baby, right round —Six Colors “by Dan Moren I know everybody and their dog is busy searching for Pokemon right now, but just in case that’s not scratching your iOS game-playing itch, it’s worth mentioning that last week also saw the launch of the latest installment in one of my favorite franchises: Super Stickman Golf 3.” Love it, it's a good franchise, really. I've played the first two, and they managed to add just enough functionality to make a third one interesting to play.

[attila]

0504

So we're on the run again, landed in Singapore an hour ago, and we're spending the night here before leaving to Europe tomorrow. Which means we're staying at the Crowne Plaza in the airport, again. I don't mind the hotel, it's clean, comfy and the staff is nice -- and we get free wifi, which should be compulsory for all hotels nowadays. But they have the worse reservation system ever. Here's the catch: we always ask for the same, two rooms with a connecting door, one with king size bed and one with twin beds. It's never ready, never available, even though the reservation goes through. That's either two non-connected rooms with the right specs or two connected rooms without. (They got it right once, so that we now know each other time they fuck it up). Which brings us to the Force. I have often fantasized a Vader way to solve this issue: 1- you find there's no twin bed in one room, and ignite your lightsaber, 2- zap-hiss, 3- you now have two beds where there was one, 4- you mildly force choke the bell boy who showed you to the room, while asking him "is there a problem?" I am quite sure that lightsaber+blocked windpipe would be a powerful motivator for them to get the next reservation right. Hence the fundamental question I am left with: why the fuck can't they get it right, now, when we've shouted a thousand times?

[attila]

So true, and priceless. The tools don't matter as much as what you do with them. Personally, I use: - pen and paper - PaintCode - Xcode That is all. That said I'm not an artist.

[attila]

"Tomorrow belongs to me" —Charlie's Diary “Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK. This is a book launch month and I should really be blogging about "The Nightmare Stacks" but British politics has just entered a nightmarish alignment and we're in CASE NIGHTMARE TWEED territory.”

[attila]

It comes out I should probably get myself in complete isolation on a boat, somewhere...

[attila]

Brexit (pending)

Living in a different time zone, I'm looking at he results as they come out. Our office in London has been interviewed many times by the French press to gauge what our response would be, since we're essentially a French startup abroad -- not a deliberate choice, it's just how things got up with one founder in London and one in Jakarta. Our position as a company: we are expecting some major inconvenience for a few months if the Leave wins. In terms of visas, first, and then it will cost us money (some of our cash flow dammit). That said we invoice our customers in dollars so everything will be back to normal soon enough. One thing is clear though: we are looking for places where we will set our R&D center -- basically where do I land when I get back to Europe -- and it cannot be a country where we cannot hire or have to wait for visas for 6 months. So that rules out Britain in case of exit. One additional remark. Cameron has in common with Hollande that they are both incapable cretins. You know that you've landed on a moron when your elected leader manages to divide the country instead of unifying it. Hollande did so with the LGBT law, which could have gone through quietly in congress. Cameron... Oh boy, was the guy so stupid he didn't realize he was putting his country at risk of implosion? What happens with Scotland, and crucially with Ireland? And when you look at the divide between educated and uneducated Britain, you just see two completely different countries. Same between London and the midlands. And so on. So, what happens now that people have realized they have nothing to do together? What kind of Pandora's box was that, Cameron? That said I'm biased. I'm educated. I've worked as a researcher for 7 years in England. And I know full well that for many of my fellow researchers, tomorrow morning may feel like a big hangover, with 50% or more of their funding leaving. Anyway...

[attila]

Apple Discontinues the Thunderbolt Display —Pixel Envy “Long-time readers will know that I like my Thunderbolt Display far more than I probably should.” Meanwhile, I'm still trying to assemble a Franken-cable to use my Apple Cinema Display 30" with the MacBook One.