Linked List: December 12, 2017

Tuesday, 12 December 2017

Phil Schiller Interview With Dan Grabham 

Phil Schiller on the development of the iPhone X, in a wide-ranging interview with Dan Grabham for T3:

At the time, at the beginning, it seemed almost impossible. Not just almost. It seemed impossible. And to pull off what feels impossible and make it possible — and not only that, but just something we love using — is just a great achievement.

“Clearly there was a point in the process where we had to commit to the fact that it would be a full top-to-bottom screen on the front with no home button, which means you’re counting on Face ID working as we’d hope, and being as good.

That’s an exciting moment, when you have to sort of… the old saying: ‘Burn the boats. Leave the past behind, and commit.’ Knowing that the team was willing to make that gamble was a key point early enough in the process.

Cabel Sasser’s First Look at the iMac Pro 

Speaking of Twitter threads, here’s a short one from Cabel Sasser, after a few days with the iMac Pro:

Games. Fired up the ol’ Firewatch, to test the iMac Pro (Radeon Pro Vega 64) vs. my current Retina 5K iMac (Radeon R9 M295X). At 2560 × 1440, the iMac topped out at 25 FPS, the iMac Pro at 62 FPS (!).

You have to love the black Lightning cable.

How to Design for iPhone X (Without an iPhone X) 

Sebastiaan de With on how he (and developer partner Ben Sandofsky) designed the iPhone X version of Halide before they had an iPhone X. Halide is truly one of the very nicest apps I’ve ever seen. And I just love de With’s “world map of the iPhone X for your fingers” — and it’s fascinating to see how this “map” affected the layout of controls when Halide is running on the iPhone X.

Twitter Adds Support for Threads 

Sasank Reddy, product manager at Twitter:

Now, hundreds of thousands of threads are Tweeted every day! But this method of Tweeting, while effective and popular, can be tricky for some to create and it’s often tough to read or discover all the Tweets in a thread. That’s why we’re thrilled to share that we’re making it simpler to thread Tweets together, and to find threads, so it’s easier to express yourself on Twitter and stay informed.

We’ve made it easy to create a thread by adding a plus button in the composer, so you can connect your thoughts and publish your threaded Tweets all at the same time. You can continue adding more Tweets to your published thread at any time with the new “Add another Tweet” button. Additionally, it’s now simpler to spot a thread — we’ve added an obvious “Show this thread” label.

This is a good idea. People are creating threads without official support, so true support can only make it better. This sounds like it’ll be easier to create threads, and — importantly — it will be easier to ignore threads you’re not interested in.

I think this is a much better idea than increasing the character limit per tweet to 280, but one month into 280 Twitter, I have to say I don’t mind it much.

Marques Brownlee on the iMac Pro 

Marques Brownlee’s “one week with the iMac Pro” video. Really does seem like everything we were hoping for, including the fact that it runs quietly.

The most interesting thing I learned from this is that the iMac Pro is not upgradeable. There’s no hatch on the back for upgrading the RAM. Whatever you order from the factory is what you get. I’m OK with that — I think that fits with the iMac form factor — but it’s going to rankle those who think “Pro” should be synonymous with “upgradeable”.

Craig Hunter on the iMac Pro 

Craig Hunter:

When you get into an intense development or debug cycle that involves a lot of compiles, saving fractions of seconds here and there adds up and can give you extra hours in a day. This is one area where the 10-core iMac Pro shines when combined with Xcode’s ability to automatically take advantage of multiple cores to compile multiple source files simultaneously.

Most of my apps have around 20,000-30,000 lines of code spread out over 80-120 source files (mostly Obj-C and C with a teeny amount of Swift mixed in). There are so many variables that go into compile performance that it’s hard to come up with a benchmark that is universally relevant, so I’ll simply note that I saw reductions in compile time of between 30-60% while working on apps when I compared the iMac Pro to my 2016 MacBook Pro and 2013 iMac. If you’re developing for iOS you’ll still be subject to the bottleneck of installing and launching an app on the simulator or a device, but when developing for the Mac this makes a pretty noticeable improvement in repetitive code-compile-test cycles.

Hunter also has some impressive benchmarks from his work in aerospace engineering.

Vincent Laforet on the iMac Pro 

Photographer/filmmaker Vincent Laforet, after a week with the upcoming iMac Pro:

Last week I received a pelican case from Apple with a very special Mac inside of it… It was an iMac Pro configured as a 10 Core 3GHZ Intel Xeon W, 2TB SSD, 128 GB RAM, Vega 64 Radeon.

After unpacking the (to be expected) beautiful Space Grey hardware, keyboard, mouse and trackpad, it was time to get down to the brass tacks, I had ONE question that I needed to answer: how fast is this thing, and how much time will it save me in my everyday imaging tasks?

I found a very consistent set of results: a 2X to 3X boost in speed (relative to my current iMac and MacBook Pro 15”) a noticeable leap from most generational jumps that are generally ten times smaller.

Whether you’re editing 8K RED video, H.264 4K Drone footage, 6K 3D VR content or 50 Megapixel RAW stills — you can expect a 200-300% increase in performance in almost every industry leading software with the iMac Pro.

I’ve seldom seen a jump this dramatic before on any new generation of Macs — 20%-30% speed increases are the norm … NOT 200%-300% increases. That’s SIGNIFICANT.

Seems particularly impressive for imaging pros.