Linked List: September 28, 2013

Saturday, 28 September 2013

MacUpdate’s Fall Bundle 

My thanks to MacUpdate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their Fall Bundle — a collection of great Mac apps, all for just $49.99 for a limited time. The bundle includes ScreenFlow 4 (normally $99), a terrific utility for creating and editing screen recordings; TechTool Pro 7 ($99), the Mavericks-ready version of the popular system utility; PDFpen 6 ($59), the essential PDF toolkit; Civilization V: Gold Edition ($49), the best-selling strategy game; plus several more great titles.

All told you’ll save over 90 percent over what you’d pay for these titles separately. You’ll save 50 percent just for ScreenFlow or TechTool Pro alone. It’s a terrific deal.

Mike Ash on ARM64 

Next time you see someone claiming that Apple’s move to 64-bit with the A7 was a marketing gimmick, point them to this, Mike Ash’s outstanding explanation of the advantages (and trade-offs) ARM64 has brought to iOS 7. Just one bit:

Adding it all together, it’s a pretty big win. My casual benchmarking indicates that basic object creation and destruction takes about 380ns on a 5S running in 32-bit mode, while it’s only about 200ns when running in 64-bit mode. If any instance of the class has ever had a weak reference and an associated object set, the 32-bit time rises to about 480ns, while the 64-bit time remains around 200ns for any instances that were not themselves the target.

In short, the improvements to Apple’s runtime make it so that object allocation in 64-bit mode costs only 40-50% of what it does in 32-bit mode. If your app creates and destroys a lot of objects, that’s a big deal.

Technical Notes on Vesper for iOS 7 

Speaking of Vesper and Brent Simmons, he’s got a nice rundown of iOS 7 technical details:

You remember in Lord of the Rings when Gollum finally gets the ring and he’s holding it up and dancing around? That’s me and TextKit.

So happy together.