Arcticulate

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian I miss those early days. Was France one of the launch countries in Europe, for the original 2007 iPhone? Apple never sold it here (enthusiasts imported it …) and I could not afford the €59/month carrier plans regardless. But, long story short, I bought the iPod Touch second-gen instead, in 2009. >>

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian Later, I got an iPhone 3G on a ”hand me down” basis, in 2010 when the iPhone 4 launched. Didn’t last more than a few months … it became like a brick of garbage with iOS 4.0-4.2.

So anyway, the iPod Touch was a dream for Objective-C development with Xcode 3.x and Xcode 4.x. Despite its low RAM, the GPU was MUCH quicker than the 3G, but slower than the 3G[S] (”Three G ess”). Many games ran OK for a couple of years, regular apps ran perfectly on iOS 4.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian @andrew_williams I love modern Renault cars, ever since renting a Renault Clio RS model year 2014 I think. Also had the fun of renting a Renault Captur a few years ago, too, like 2017, 2018 or 2019 model maybe. What a ridiculous factory error 🤦‍♂️

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@drahardja @viticci No big deal: just modify iPadOS (jailbreak will only take you halfway there). Also, it MUST be pleasing to the eyes, apparently (it does mention aesthetics). While Bard was instructed to not restrict its thinking to ”the world of impossibilities”, it also forgot that iPadOS is not open source compared to Android’s AOSP, but it’s an interesting list of ideas.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@drahardja Sorry, just noticed you used to work for Apple. My reply could have been reduced by 50 percent, easily. What am I even trying to explain? You know more than me about the subject 😊

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian I have seen your bio say that you used to be at Google in the past, so maybe you know 100x more than me about this, but: Google Assistant has been doing on-device AI answers for a few, couple of years now? With this post today, you’re talking about third-party on-device AI, right? 🙂

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@devs @jorijn Thank you, a very interesting read! I used to work as a DevOps Linux sysadmin for several years at a big company. I know what it’s like, and yet I don’t at all because the setup is very different. Our systems were part of a huge, high-performance VMWare cluster and my daily DevOps work was almost exclusively on the scripting side of things. To a small extent I worked with Ansible, plus monitored Nagios, Grafana and more.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@devs @jorijn One issue, though: this picture’s text is rendered with an extremely low contrast because of the gray-on-white text. I visited the link on an iPad Pro with iPadOS 17.1.2, aka the latest production-stable OS build.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Well … I got IKEA Trådfri a couple of years ago (yeah, no Philips Hue ecosystem for me, although I think those iOT devices are compatible). The first couple of days after setting it up, turning on the lights was weird, because they would pulsate and eventually turn off, because of initial sync stuff and firmware updates. >>

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson They do calm down eventually, though. Also, if you go far, far away for the holidays, say being gone a week or two, you’ll find after getting back home, it will pulsate again, getting an update, syncing … 🤷‍♂️😉. PS. If you ever wondered what the heck ”trådfri” means, it’s ”wireless” or more specifically it is composed of two words: ”tråd” (wire) and ”fri” (free as in freedom) … so: ”free from wires”.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Ah, this WEEK. Week! Oh, the timing is … a perfect 100 💯🫣

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Right, I will relay this two-parts plan B explainer, then, which I separately posted, on SMÅLAND: https://toot.community/@Arcticulate/111490325262081656

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson I was not planning on posting twice about IKEA but I had IKEA stuff appear in my feed and had questions about the whole Blåhaj meme. I had never seen them in my nearby store, only in memes 😆

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@the_other_jon @jamesthomson iTunes for Windows was built with an Apple-private Cocoa solution. Not public, unfortunately. The C++ interoperability project is slowly making progress towards bridging Objective-C/Objective-C++, Swift and ”pure C++” into one kind of practical Xcode project. Apple barely passed a 1.0 (v1) version in time for WWDC ’23 >>

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@the_other_jon @jamesthomson >> Give it another 5 years and there is probably a production-ready Windows GUI framework for third-party Apple devs. The Browser Company is not only famous for the Arc browser, but also for an ambitious project to glue Win32 GUI code with Swift. That’s something which will inspire other devs to contribute and build their own bridging solutions. End goal: one app compiled for iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc + Windows … and presumably Linux.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@the_other_jon @jamesthomson So … my point is, if James really wants to, PCalc for Windows could be practically possible in the future maybe? 🤷‍♂️😇

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Finally, I’m a happy owner of the best digital calculator on the planet 🥳. Yeah I know, it could have happened way back after I had bought the iPod Touch (2nd gen) in … 2009 or so, but I don’t know, I don’t use scientific calculators in my work and last time I had math class was before the App Store existed! 😊 Better late than never, I hope 🤞. I already own Dice by PCalc, btw 😉

Cropped screenshot from inside the App Store app for iPadOS. The picture shows the PCalc calculator app icon, app name and app category, with a button below it saying ”Öppna” (Meaning: Open).

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Imagining your list of top-viewed videos, à la Eurovision. Alright, here are the results: 7 points goes to … Homemade compilation called ”Best of WWDC 1997-2008” (various Steve keynotes)! At 8 p: Planet Earth II on Blu-Ray. 9 p: Star Trek: TOS with all three seasons from TV, recorded to VHS and transferred from tape to Quicktime M4V. 10 p: Monty Python shows and movies >>

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson Speaking of TV shows, did you know this: Expedition Robinson (later ”Robinson” only) aka Survivor in the US edition, was a concept created by a British guy, Charlie Pardons, but he got turned down at first. Swedish Television (SVT) however, was interested and bought/licensed it. Of course, it became a huge intl. success, but only because SVT believed in it! 😁🏝️ >>

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@jamesthomson ”The format was developed in 1994 by Charlie Parsons for a United Kingdom TV production company called Planet 24, but the Swedish debut in 1997 was the first production to actually make it to television.[3] The show was a success, and plans for international versions were made. An American version called Survivor started in 2000”. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_(TV_series)

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian This was all I was reminded of, before playing the video in IceCubes:

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian (SkiFree for Windows 3.1) 😅

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian I’m really impressed with your game and the programming language you have showcased previously looks so clean and tidy 👍. Must be a joy to use.

Arcticulate, 6 months ago

@dimillian It’s such a classic, so I assume there were clones made 😎. Really simplistic but challenging AF. Doom and Diablo have a couple of difficulty levels to choose from but none of them offer the even harder than nightmare or hardcore that is ”skifree” 😉

Arcticulate, 7 months ago

@jorijn From what I hear, if you give a cat ”a Ferrari” (made-up example of something insanely expensive) they will go inside the car, find an empty cardbox, pull it out of there and play with the cardbox all day 😺