Pinboard (guardiantech)

Why care about 30,000 notes? >> inessential.com

guardiantech — 2013-10-07T21:32:10+00:00

Brent Simmons:

I’ve learned that I’m unlikely to over-estimate the amount of data people like to keep.
Years ago (2005) I added a tabbed browser to NetNewsWire for Macintosh. I guessed that my most extreme user might have as many as 100 tabs, and I needed to make sure it scaled to that.
I released the feature and people liked it. After a while I started getting complaints about performance from people who had thousands of tabs. Some users had tens of thousands of tabs. I was way off in my estimate of what the most extreme user might do — and I’ve remembered that ever since. (The app remembered your tabs between runs, which was a fairly rare thing in 2005.)
So now I don’t try to guess what a reasonable extreme might be — I guess what an extreme extreme might be, knowing that there’s a good chance I’m still under-estimating.

Some thoughts on mobile >> Chris Dixon

guardiantech — 2013-06-03T16:19:09+00:00

He's a US-based venture capitalist:

Fans of Apple and Google have been arguing lately about which company is winning mobile. Apple has more profits, but Android has more users. But what really matters is when and if developers switch over to developing for Android first, or even Android only. For now, iOS users tend to monetize much better than Android users, more than making up for the smaller user base. The switch to Android first hasn’t happened yet, but at least based on conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs, it seems likely to happen in the next year or two.
- Mobile has had a big effect on b2b software. People want to use their personal iOS/Android devices at work, and many people now have computers with them all the time who didn’t before. This has created opportunities for 1) traditional b2b software that is mobile friendly, 2) companies that support mobile devices for businesses (e.g. mobile security, compliance etc), 3) brand new categories of software for users who previously used pencil and paper for various business tasks.

As is pointed out in the comments, if you're an app developer in India, you're already going to be Android-only. Part of the problem about (the extremely tedious) "winning" arguments is that they don't take account of regional variation.

Scaling to different screens - Building Windows 8 >> MSDN Blogs

guardiantech — 2012-12-30T18:10:53+00:00

Looking at the data about devices in the marketplace today, we see that only 1.2% of active Windows 7 users have screens with a resolution of less than 1024x768. When designing a new platform that supports the devices of today and tomorrow (with undoubtedly higher resolutions) we optimized for the majority of today’s screens (i.e. 98.8%) without sacrificing the experience and complicating the developer story for legacy screens. In addition, the runrate of new PCs with screen sizes of 1024x600 and 1280x720 has dramatically fallen and, to the best of our knowledge, almost no new mainstream PCs are being manufactured with this resolution.

All very true. The surprise is that 1366x768 is the most common screen size for Windows 7, with 42% in use.

StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames >> Code Of Honor

guardiantech — 2012-09-28T20:38:35+00:00

From the games frontiers of the 1990s:

As Ion Storm started to disintegrate due to financial and political problems, members of its development teams left to pursue other opportunities. From this crew Blizzard managed to hire Mark Skelton and Patrick Thomas for the burgeoning cinematics team, where they worked to produce some of Blizzard’s epic cut-scenes. I spent a lot of time with the cinematics team members (who sat not far from me) and hung out with Mark and Patrick, including during numerous surfing outings to Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach.
At some point I talked with Mark and Patrick about how Dominion Storm knocked us on our heels, and they let us in on Ion Storm’s dirty little secret: the entire demo was a pre-rendered movie, and the people who showed the “demo” were just pretending to play the game.

And it gets better.

No-cost desktop software development is dead on Windows 8 >> Ars Technica

guardiantech — 2012-05-24T22:35:34+00:00

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.
If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Flipping heck. Former Microsofties are appalled.

The toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android devs >> The Next Web

guardiantech — 2012-04-01T21:43:25+00:00

This was highlighted by the recent release of Temple Run on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit 1 million downloads in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Read the comments too, though: plenty of Android developers saying they don't have any problem. Seems like it's more of a problem for games developers.

Run, Python, Run! >> Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

guardiantech — 2011-09-20T05:32:47+00:00

"I still can’t figure out exactly which operations are expensive in Python. My C/C++ can’t help me much because it seems that things aren’t implemented like I’d've expected—like lists that aren’t lists, but array lists, leading to for operations you would otherwise expect to be .
"But a friend of mine—Olivier—showed me a simple, basic, yet rather effective tool to profile Python programs (I’m not sure if I should say script or not).

"The tool, RunSnakeRun, inserts hooks in the Python interpreter to build a report of where time is spent, a bit à la Valgrind/Kcachegrind but much simpler, and to display the results using both tables and a rectangular tree-structured inclusion graph (a “SquareMap”)."

Neat.

Social Developers Hopeful About Google+ Platform Potential >> Inside Social Games

guardiantech — 2011-08-08T06:27:59+00:00

"...we’ve been surprised by the optimism among companies we’re talking to, and they’re not just having wishful thoughts. The specific reasons: Google+ is a respectable product, it’s grown quickly, there are clear social communication channels like Streams where developers could promote discovery and engagement, and the transaction fee is likely to be quite low."