New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

their culture values hard computer science; whereas, Apple's values softer stuff like user experience

this is crazy, Apple's coding standards are also very high and _not getting messages_ is the shittiest user experience imaginable

and that Google UI stuff isn't bloody awful.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution

Got our hands on a 27" iMac today. Lovely thing, but the screen is still hella shiny, the calibration is way off and the whole thing too bright for proper repro work :-(

anyone got any recommendations for security cage/lock things for mac minis? I've bought a couple that claim to fit on to the back of monitors, but they only work if the monitor isn't already using the VESA screws. (like huh?)

in other news, i just bought this -- http://readdle.com/products/scannerpro/ -- so we'll see how that goes

Sometimes I don't get the messages.

I think it has more to do with some wishy-washiness on how iMessage, when it's not phone-to-phone, should work and it was linked to management shake-ups. If anything, I'd bet that it was a cross-disciplinary thing where there isn't an "iMessage team," just different groups trying to connect to the same services and doing it wrong.

Their web stuff was generally shitty due to constant mismanagement, though.

also I should clarify on user code versus service code: Apple does a middling job of services, unless you could all the iTunes store stuff, which is actually pretty solid in that it moves a lot of product and doesn't really error out

I could believe that, though it's only in phone to phone scenarios I've ever lost messages. This is what's frustrating, as I understand that all software is chock full of bugs; I've been developing it for 33 years, but some things really have to be right and reliable delivery of messages like this is really critical for a user to have trust in it. The rest is icing on the cake.

x-post yes iTunes is pretty solid.

they obviously didn't think through and rushed a lot of iMessage shit. did you see those reports of some messages going to a phone's former owner? they implemented it via device id rather than signed-in user. lots of weird assumptions.

err, rather a phone's former owner's messages going to that phone, rather than their new phone

I suppose what bothers me is that the last lost message was a few weeks ago. I'd have been fine if it were initial teething problems, but it's been on the go for what, a year?

ya why would they do that

Good user experience?

I have two MacBooks, and I've bought 3 different iPhones. However, my work computer is a PC. I would like to use iMessage, but I use Google Talk since there is no iMessage for PC. There is also no GoogleTalk for iPhone (no real version, with history, syncing with the gmail client, etc.). It would be cool if one of the two companies would get over themselves and get their messaging to work on all three platforms. I guess Google's answer is "buy an Android phone," and Apple's is "don't use a PC at work." Not sure whose is lamer. No ORCAD, Visio, or Allegro on a Mac, so I'm stuck.

And a Google Apps Sync for Outlook on MAc would be nice too, since the Mac mail.app is irreparably broken for me (seriously, I've tried everything).

The iTunes Store (and the apple store) is actually a bit of a mess too. It is generally solid on the straightforward buy->download scenario but everything else is archaic and junky. Even the new stuff, like Match.

(Related: Apps are still fundamentally treated like music singles on the back end, which is a bit hilarious. And one of the reasons there are still no trials or paid upgrades.)

Xp

very true

Yes, actually you are right. Match kind of only works if you want to work in its scenarios... So for example, I can't populate my iPhone manually (because it's got less storage than match) and then add things using match - I have to delete everything.

Also - manually managing things doesn't work very well all of a sudden (sorry stet, was obv going on about this the other day!)

There are totally paid upgrades, though, they're "in-app purchases". Not sure if that's made it to the mac, though.

Yeah, that works for new features you can bolt on, but it doesn't work for a full v2 upgrade. It's kinda a hack to get around the store limitations anyway.

I am glad ILX doesn't have ANY BUGS.

If we had $600bn in the bank I bet moving threads between boards would be super-smooth. Probably have an animation on a textured background.

Yes it works not bad, considering I DID IT FOR LOVE.

three-finger swipe to switch board

sorry for all those times I said I might be able to help and then didn't, guys :(

Did you? Oh hey don't worry about that! I don't remember anyway!

turns out that all that web application programming, deployment, and troubleshooting at work really made me disinterested in doing it outside of work

I can understand that. I'm actually the opposite. I don't do it at work any more but still love it, so really enjoyed making ILX.

haha ditto to everything mh said, including the apology (though I'm much more of a middle tier guy)

I was quite close to using message queues in ILX by the way... Decided it seemed like overkill. Glad I did!

message queuing is super rad but also very tricky in some ways

I know Apple has a lot of work to get it right, but at the same time, it's hilarious to me how many newer web upstarts are scrambling all over the place with MQ-styled things now and learning it when it's old as hell and pretty much the grandchild of what's run every ATM network since... forever

not that everyone needs big blue and MQSeries, but... yeah, queuing

Indeed... All I thought I might've used some kind of free MQ thing for was to serialise new posts to completely avoid database contention. At the time, I had no access to usage information, so had no idea how frequent things might be. In practice, just doing as simple a database update as possible (though I do two tables now, only one back then) was the answer. Updates are really not frequent, so glad I didn't waste time doing queues.

tbh I think a lot of people are doing key/value caches and replicating them back to a DB these days

iirc ilx code does a lot of memory caching of objects?

It does, very aggressively, in that the cache is actively updated (i.e. at the same time as the database), so threads like this are always read from memory. Half of the accesses are 100% in memory (the other half are googlers who naturally pollute the cache and need to be read from the database).

To be honest, if we'd had cloud infrastructure and the memory we have these days, I wouldn't have bothered with caching at all. Just designing the database well enough (to make 90% of the accesses clustered index reads) would have been enough.

I'd probably have been a bit more standardly lazy and just done aggressive object caching via Spring mapping the db, along with the indexing

framework framework framework

Yes I deliberately avoided any ORM stuff. My head was (and still is at) stateless stateless stateless. Except of course the cache, but that's a special type of state - one that can be centralised and that operation doesn't depend on. It's the functional programming thing. It's all just servlets. No session state. Very easy to understand because there are minimal interactions between different operations.

this is reminding me of a silly ilx-related project idea I had

but back on topic, when the heck am I getting a retina iPad mini damn it.

can we implement up-middle-finger swipe for suggest ban

mh, I'm wondering the same thing. I will preorder one. Hoping 6-18 months.

Should have my 27" iMac by this time next week.

Got our hands on a 27" iMac today. Lovely thing, but the screen is still hella shiny, the calibration is way off and the whole thing too bright for proper repro work :-(

Have you calibrated it? Just run through the "calibrate" options in System Prefs>Displays>color. Beyond that, spend some money on a calibrator. Monitors are never that good out of the box, but Apple uses pretty decent IPS screens and you should be able to get good results. But for proper repro work you should be using a proper monitor!

http://www.eizo.com/global/solutions/graphics/index.html

i saw a blog post recently (possibly one of the nerdy iphone dev blogs i read, but i have a horrible feeling it might have been gruber or sth) where the guy was saying the one thing that keeps him awake at night as someone who has invested his career in apple, and should be keeping apple awake at night, is the fact that they clearly have no one who understands sync

that blog post was otm

you don't need to sync everything will be in the cloud

yay cloud

ok sync = internet for the purposes of this argument

btw that was complete sarcasm, 100% of the stuff I work on for my job these days involves data sync services for an audience that has slow ass internet connections or even work disconnected

dropbox 4ever

if these iWatch reports are true feel like apple is really jumping the shark

it's really unclear to me whether or not wearables are just going to be a niche market or not

I will be looking forward to the markers report on wearables in 2013

http://missingbite.com/picts/tn.retrowatch.jpg

feels like apple had a meeting where they were like 'what other common conventional markets can we REINVENT. where can we INSTILL DESIRE INTO THE CONSUMER.' and somebody said watches and maybe it was aronud the time that kickstarter for the ipod nano wearable wristwatch thing was taking off. what a bad idea