Random Thoughts

I’ve been really impressed by the games sessions so far at WWDC 2023. One of my complaints about Metal has been with the really small amount of community documentation – it can be difficult to find resources specifically on porting from DirectX. It looks like a problem Apple is really beginning to tackle. Automated conversion from HLSL based shaders is also a really good improvement. I’d love to see them support SPIRV shader conversion as well...

On the first internal test of Uru for Mac, I got some weird feedback from testers. As the player character was walking, the game wasn’t responding smoothly to the mouse. As the player moved the mouse to turn the player, the player would turn in fits and starts. The way Uru handles the mouse is pretty common for games, especially third person games. You hold down the mouse button, and then move the mouse left or...

Mark Gurman posted an update saying the M2 Extreme chip had likely been cancelled. I’m going to assume what Gurman is reporting is accurate, because it generally is. Workstation chips are expensive to design and produce. CPUs like the Xeon are sustainable because Intel splits the development cost over a wide range of customers. It didn’t seem sustainable for Apple to design a workstation chip just for the Mac market. According to Gurman, this is likely...

I’m still learning SwiftUI. Learning something new is hard. I taught myself programming by typing random commands into HyperCard on a Mac SE. After that, I did REALbasic. When I was 14, I started learning Cocoa using whatever Apple tutorials and sites I could find online. It was a struggle. No one had taught me about classes, polymorphism, or memory management. I wrote a lot of bad code long before I wrote a lot of good...

John Gruber today posted some reliably sourced rumors about Apple’s cross platform efforts. Most notably, he’s placing any changes in 2019, and not at WWDC 2018, and casting doubt that what Apple is doing is UIKit on the Mac. (And if you follow me on Twitter, you’re likely aware that I feel that UIKit on Mac would be a bad move.) “XKit” not assured. I read iMore’s article first and got quite excited about the prospect of an...

I’ve been thinking about what a unified Apple API could look like. One of the biggest issues is that iOS devices and Mac devices are very different, and even some iOS devices like the AppleTV aren’t even similar to devices like the iPhone or iPad. One option Apple has is creating a new, massive API that exists on both iOS and Mac. This is a tremendous undertaking. It’s taken Microsoft many years of public iteration on...

I’m really happy to see Apple’s announcement on the Mac Pro today. Last November I wrote: “Even if you think the Mac Pro is going to be updated, Apple’s lack of a mention of it (or the iMac) implies that Apple is still misjudging the expectations of the pro community. When you’re a Pro, you don’t like uncertainty around the tools you need to earn a living. Would you risk your business on a vendor that...