mightykan

Atlassian has become much less of a caring company since they’ve gone public (or are preparing to). They’ve completely ruined SourceTree on Mac (an unnecessary interface redesign that took functionality away which still hasn’t been fixed almost 9 months later) and have been very careless in HipChat iOS client’s updates (shipping crippling bugs and not fixing them). They also used to be very friendly to feedback on Twitter but now are completely silent and don’t help or comment at all. Atlassian might’ve been a good company at some point but they aren’t any more. I’d rather use a fully open source solution that is mostly developed in the open (GitLab) than to be locked into a proprietary package (GitHub) or a downright user-hostile option (Bitbucket).

It is 30% for the first full year of the subscription, which is reduced to 15% after that year.

This makes little sense to me. If this is done to boost sales, was Apple losing money before when the review times were longer? Why would they opt to lose money? Although the shorter review times are nice I don’t think the stated reason here makes much sense.

I’m not sure you’d really want the crap-fest that is Xcode’s code. It has so many bugs and issues that it’s a better idea to completely dump it and either start over or give up and adopt something like AppCode, like Google did with Android Studio. Making developer tools is just not Apple’s forte and Xcode’s sad state of quality and performance is clear indication of that.

I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. There is no way Apple’s engineers could get any work done if they use Xcode.

Or, they should start charging money for it so they could justify spending resources on the dev tools. One of the reasons (among many) that Visual Studio is still the king of all IDEs is because Microsoft charges money for the serious bits of it (Pro and higher).

You have ultra thin font weights on your site which is extremely difficult to read even to my, relatively, young eyes, and to add insult to injury, you’ve disabled sub-pixel antialiasing for these fonts! I don’t know if this is a new fad in the designer world to disable sub-pixel antialiasing but I’m seeing it everywhere and it needs to stop. OS X has had, and continues to have, superior font rendering capabilities much more advanced and better tuned than any other system. Regardless of how much “better” you think it looks, disabling sub-pixel antialiasing makes your super thin fonts impossible to read.

As an experiment, on a retina Mac, try disabling it and see how much more legible your already super-thin font weights look.

Having said that, I don’t think re-skinning of Eclipse promoted by a site with such poor legibility bodes well for the quality of the work.

It’s a concept — and in the automotive world a concept might as well be vaporware because most of the time the final product is nothing like the concept — and won’t be coming out until “early 2018.” By then, if things go smoothly for Tesla (they’ve had to delay both the Model S and Model X by several months), the Model 3, which should be much more affordable than this concept, would’ve been on sale for a few months.

I was skeptical about Tesla when the Roadster was announced and I never though they’d be able to pull it off. I should probably curb my skepticism about this announcement as well but judging by the previous such announcements from the automotive world, I remain cautions.

There is very much a technical reason that third-party rendering engines won’t work: JavaScript JIT. Basically, for JIT to work, a process has to be able to mark a piece of memory executable, which would cause all sorts of issues with sandboxing/security.

Apple did introduce XPC in iOS 8 and all the extensions use XPC extensively to respect the sandboxing rules. This is what they used to introduce the WebKitViewController whose JavaScript performance is on part Mobile Safari (UIWebView’s JavaScript performance is poor due to not having JIT). In fact, the new SafariViewController that was introduced in iOS 9, which is effectively an embedded Mobile Safari in third-party apps, is mainly possible because the OS has first-class support for XPC within the confines of the application sandbox.

I could see, although I’m not sure how likely it would be, Apple introducing a new Extension Point for rendering engines. Although it’s attractive to attribute malice to their intentions, I don’t think Apple are actively enforcing the “all third-party browsers have to use WebKit" for any other reason than security and battery life impact. If they could find a way to allow third-party rendering engines/browsers to work within the confines of the application sandbox, be secure and have insignificant impact on the battery life, they would allow it. They’re almost there technically, anyway.

From the About page for bitcoding.com[1]:

"bitmovin – the company behind bitcodin.com – was founded by Stefan Lederer, Christopher Mueller and Christian Timmerer. All founders participated in the MPEG standardization and made substantial contributions to the MPEG-DASH online video streaming standard.”

So, this is a sales pitch.

[1]: https://www.bitcodin.com/about/

"It can’t be at the same rate that Apple is paying them after free users become subscribers, since Apple is paying out a percentage of revenue once subscribers start paying. Instead, he says, Apple will pay rights holders on a per-stream basis, the amount of which he won’t disclose.” [1]

[1]: http://recode.net/2015/06/21/apple-says-it-will-pay-taylor-s...

Not to take anything away from the Serif guys, they’re doing a fantastic job, but most of the underlaying value of these software packages (Affinity Designer, Pixelmator, Sketch, iDraw, etc.) come from the strong frameworks in place on Apple’s platforms (i.e. CoreGraphics, Quartz, Metal, etc.). Moving to another platform would mean to either find replacements or having to roll their own, which they probably wouldn’t want to do. There is nothing bad about focus. I’d much rather have a platform-specific, focused tool that does a great job than having cross platform, half-assed set of barely decent tools like what Adobe does with their desktop apps.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [incompetence]."

“Some features require creating a free account. We won’t sell your email address or spam you, scout's honor.”

Thanks but no thanks. I’ll continue using Tower.

Some of the “glyphs” (is that the correct term?), like the arrows (->, =>) look nice but some of the other ones (!=, !==) look too similar and would require a double take to be perceived correctly.

It’s an interesting idea and I like the use of the “hidden” features of the True/Open Type System, but I think some of the symbols need a bit more help. Very cool though!

Great example of what to expect from the Edge browser. Well done!

This is a case of “works on my machine.” There are serious[1] documented[2] issues[3] with Yosemite[4] that were not there in the previous OS X release, and, after multiple point updates still haven not been fixed. Apple has dropped the ball. The general quality of the OS, apps, integration and fit and finish has decreased tremendously.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/12/why-dns-in-os-x-10-1...

[2]: http://osxdaily.com/2015/04/06/windowserver-high-cpu-usage-m...

[3]: http://osxdaily.com/2015/04/10/fix-finder-problems-mac-os-x/

[4]: http://osxdaily.com/2015/04/17/fix-slow-folder-populating-cl...

I wouldn't think so since, as far as I know, the Utopia network was never built out in SLC. Provo had their own and it was a very simple handover for them, but Google's apparently[1] going to build one out, either using dark fiber that's already there or laying out new fiber.

This is good news in that, at the very least, it'll light a fire under Comcast's business. Qwest/Century link were never a serious competitor anyway.

[1]: https://fiber.google.com/cities/saltlakecity/

Very impressive! It's so cool to see stuff like this. Great job.

The AAC files that you get from iTunes are DRM free so you shouldn't need to convert to MP3 and take a small hit in quality. Most devices _should_ be able to play the .m4a files.

Yahoo's rolling out a new interface for search for Firefox by the end of this year, and other browser beginning next year. The official Mozilla blog [1] has screenshots of the new design, which mimics the existing cleaner Google site.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...

It'll be very interesting to see what this does to Bing's marketshare in six months or so, since Yahoo's search runs through Bing.

Although we might never find out, I'm very curious to find out the terms of the deal. Did Yahoo pay more? What about Microsoft? Were MS as motivated since they, essentially had two horses in the race (Bing and Yahoo) vs. Google? Lots of fun little details.

Edit: Typos

When Microsoft failed to purchase Yahoo to $47.5bn billion in 2008, they reached a 10-year deal in 2009 for Yahoo to use Bing's infrastructure and "backend" for search [1]. Yahoo provides their own UI/UX and Microsoft provides the actual data.

So, technically, Firefox will be showing very similar (if not identical) results to Bing.

[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm

They can fix this problem. Decouple the hardware and software releases. There is nothing wrong with a new device that runs the older OS for a couple of months. Look at it this way:

- New device with a new OS that requires a few rapid updates in the weeks following release because the OS was rushed and is very buggy. > If one of these updates go wrong, which has happened, the user is stuck with a broken device or they could downgrade to an already buggy and less stable OS as before.

- New device with the "old" but stable OS that continues to function well until the new, stable OS comes out. > Even if the new OS's initial release is troublesome, a downgrade will take the user to the older but stable OS, so the device is still functional.

Which provides the better user experience? I vote for the second option, but Apple have opted for the first option without any clear long-term benefits.

According to the "Your App, Your Website, and Safari" WWDC session from this year [1] (Slide titled "Signing up with confirmation" towards the end of the document), you simply use the `current-password` or `new-password` autocomplete attribute again for confirmation of either field.

[1] (Session PDF Link): http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/506xxeo80e5ky...

I found BlockKit [1] to be very useful for any Ruby-like collection methods. BlockKit, as the name says, uses blocks extensively to provide all the most common collection methods one would find in Ruby. Some examples of these methods, taken from the NSArray(BlocksKit) [2] documentation are "each", "apply", "map" & "reduce". There are much more.

[1]: https://github.com/pandamonia/BlocksKit [2]: http://pandamonia.github.io/BlocksKit/Documentation/Categori...

There are a few very well-written wrappers that make utilizing the Obj-C runtime much easier. MAObjCRuntime [1] is a good example of such a wrapper. Look at MACollectionUtilities [2] as an example of how to use MAObjCRuntime.

[1]: https://github.com/mikeash/MAObjCRuntime [2]: https://github.com/mikeash/MACollectionUtilities