Linked List: March 2, 2020

Monday, 2 March 2020

This month — and this very week — are wide open on the DF sponsorship schedule. One sponsor per week, with a sponsor-written entry in the RSS feed to start the week, a thank-you post right on the homepage from me at the end, and the one and only graphic ad on every page of the site all week long. No tracking or other privacy-invasive bullshit. Just plain honest ads. My best argument that they work: the number of repeat companies in the sponsor archive list.

So if you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s discerning audience, I’d love to have you as a sponsor.

The Verge’s Mac Pro Review ★

Nilay Patel:

So to get this right, we needed to find a configuration that is broadly representative of what pro users might actually buy, allows us to investigate Apple’s performance claims, and hopefully reveals something interesting about what pro users might experience if they upgrade to this machine. And we needed to do all of this knowing that we wouldn’t just send this machine back when the review was done, like we do with every standard review unit. This one was going to be ours to keep.

Happily, we have a bit of an advantage: The Verge is part of Vox Media, a company full of media professionals who use a huge variety of software to work on everything from Netflix shows to print magazine design. And of course, The Verge’s own art and video teams make illustrations and motion graphics for our site and YouTube all day long. So we called in a few friends, let everyone use the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR to work on their various projects, and had them report back.

Excellent review, including the video.

The bottom-line takeaway is a bit ironic. The big problem with the previous Mac Pro is that it didn’t have a thermal design that could handle GPU-intensive computing. The new Mac Pro does, but a lot of pro apps — particularly Adobe’s — aren’t optimized for offloading computation to the GPU.

Update: One other takeaway — the head-to-head comparison with a Threadripper-based PC shows that AMD is kicking Intel’s ass in high-end workstation performance.

Apollo 1.7.3 ★

Speaking of the joy of well-made native iOS apps, Christian Selig’s Apollo — a client for Reddit — has a nice update out today. For all my pessimism regarding the state of software development today, Apollo is a shining example of the right way to do something. Reddit is a completely free website with its own completely free first-party iOS app. But Selig has made Apollo a successful product that users are willing to pay for — it’s free to use with in-app purchases and subscriptions for additional features — simply because the experience on iOS is so great.

I enjoy that part of the fun for paying users is simply getting custom app icons. People will pay for fun. There’s a level of joy and enthusiasm in the Apollo user base, and a true community between them and Selig, that epitomizes the best of the indie development ethos.

Facebook Gets Native App Religion ★

Raymond Endres, VP of engineering for Messenger, writing at Facebook’s engineering blog on a major rewrite of Messenger for iOS:

Mobile operating systems continue to evolve rapidly and dramatically. New features and innovations are constantly being added due to user demands and competitive pressures. When building a new feature, it’s often tempting to build abstractions on top of the OS to plug a functionality gap, add engineering flexibility, or create cross-platform user experiences. But the existing OS often does much of what’s needed. Actions like rendering, transcoding, threading, and logging can all be handled by the OS. Even when there is a custom solution that might be faster for local metrics, we use the OS to optimize for global metrics.

While UI frameworks can be powerful and increase developer productivity, they require constant upkeep and maintenance to keep up with the ever-changing mobile OS landscape. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we used the UI framework available on the device’s native OS to support a wider variety of application feature needs. This reduced not only size, by avoiding the need to cache/load large custom-built frameworks, but also complexity. The native frameworks don’t have to be translated into sub-frameworks. We also used quite a few of the OS libraries, including the JSON processing library, rather than building and storing our own libraries in the codebase.

Overall, our approach was simple. If the OS did something well, we used it. We leveraged the full capability of the OS without needing to wait for any framework to expose that functionality. If the OS didn’t do something, we would find or write the smallest possible library code to address the specific need — and nothing more. We also embraced platform-dependent UI and associated tooling.

File this under “No shit, Sherlock” — native apps are smaller, faster, and more reliable. Via Ben Sandofsky, who notes that this writeup seemingly goes out of its way not to mention React Native, Facebook’s cross-platform framework that pretty much goes against everything in this post.

Some Apple Watch Claim Chowder ★

Nick Heer on Mark Wilson’s prediction five years ago that “the Apple Watch is going to flop”.

MacSurfer Closes Shop ★

MacSurfer:

Dear MHN Readers:

Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease operations effective immediately. Please allow a few weeks to process forthcoming refunds. If need be, subscription inquiries can be addressed to the Publisher at the bottom of the Homepage.

Thanks kindly for your support, and thanks for the memories…

MacSurfer’s Headline News Team

I’m not quite sure when MacSurfer started, but it was long enough ago that I don’t remember the web before MacSurfer. Internet Archive has a snapshot from December 1998, but I’m quite sure that wasn’t MacSurfer’s debut. Update: Going by their copyright statement in the footer, they’ve been publishing since 1995 — a 25-year run.