If an interpreter is written that complies with the OS4 requirements, all apps running in that interpreter will also comply with the requirements. Likewise I could write a machine emulator that runs on OS4 that emulates for example a SNES, and runs SNES games, and all those would also comply because the VM code itself is compiled with the "smart" build tools. This _must_ be true as all an interpreter or VM is is a program that says "if x do X else if y do Y" where "x" and "y" are the source language instructions and "X" and "Y" are the native code to implement them. If this did not work any code that had "if" statements that depended on run-time information (for example "if user presses key "x" do X" would also not work in this new "magic" framework.
There is no reason the profiling used for objective-c cannot work with other languages... The OS only sees the machine code (as we are dealing with compiled languages).
It is easy to see this is true. If I write a python interpreter in Objective-C, the interpreter itself complies with the OS4 requirements, so automatically any python scripts running in the interpreter must also comply. QED.
Objective-C is not the best language either, it is not a "standard" in the way C and C++ are standards. Although parts of an app can be written in C/C++, the environment is designed around Apples pre-C++ object-oriented-ish language "Objective-C". The app itself must be written in objective-c but can link to code in C/C++. IMHO Apple should really move to C++ like the rest of the world.
If your app does not "claim" to support a screen size in the manifest, then it will be auto scaled to the original G1 resolution by the OS. There is no problem unless your app claims to support multiple screen sizes and in-fact does not. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and the Android API is the better, and Java is easier to code in than objective-c (due to managed memory).
Also I like the fact the DROID/Milestone/Nexus One etc have a much higher screen resolution than the iPhone.
On second thoughts you are right, it is usually an arithmetic shift. It must have been an unsigned divide I have had to code with a logical shift in inline assembler.
Really the right thing to do would be to use ASR on a signed number and LSR on an unsigned number.
As someone who frequently gets asked to work with code written elsewhere, adding features, fixing bugs etc, I find comments in code mostly useless. Reading and understanding the code is the only way to really understand what is going on. I find the comments don't really save time, as if there is a bug in the code, the original programmer did not understand the code anyway.
On the systems I have coded for right shift in C has always been a logical shift, not an arithmetic shift. There is no way to do an arithmetic shift from C, so you have to use inline assembler.
The UK has the Data Protection Act to prevent this kind of thing. Companies storing personal data must officially register, and must not share the data without the person concerned giving permission. You have the right to see a copy of any data held about you on payment of a small fee (to cover administrative costs). The law even prevents govenment departments from sharing data.
However, a recent amendment was passed that allows a minister (the Home Secretary I believe) to grant exemptions to this, and to compel disclosure from third parties - this was under the pretense of counter terrorism, but no safeguards were built into the procedures, so the exemptions could be used for political purposes.
These days developers do not need admin rights to physical machines. All they need is a user account with permission to launch virtual machine instances. They can have admin rights on the virtual machines.
If the developer does not understand basic computer security, then their code is probably full of the same problems. To write secure code, you have to understand security.
I think a simple LISP interpreter would be a great way to get started in programming. You can move on from basic maths (1 + 2) pretty easily to LISP. LUSH looks good http://lush.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html as it provides a complete environment including graphics and combines LISP with inline C, in a similar way to the way BBC Basic has inline assembler.
Why not display if the copy is pirated on the high score table where everyone can see, and offer a link to "pay now" right there (by paypal?). You could make it apply only over a certain score, so try-before-buying people are not affected, but if you invest serious time in getting a descent high score, are you really going to want to known as someone who didn't pay? To apply more pressure, you could have "pay within X days or have your score removed".
Open source games are the way forward. My favourite game is Warzone2100, which is now free and open source. No DRM, you are free to give your friends a copy, so you can play them over the network.
If you want to produce a variant, you can take the source and alter it to produce derivative games.
I was referring to XPCOM, which allows many languages (including C++) to have the same kind of dynamic binding as objective-c. It is used by firefox to implement plugins for example. Of course in C++ it looks messy as the management of XPCOM objects is exposed. In Javascript this management is hidden. There is nothing wrong with implementing the computationally heavy parts of an application in C++, and then using Javascript as the toplevel.
Besides, Javascript is a proper object oriented language. Javascript is both object oriented (using the object prototype model) and supports closures (something neither C, C++, and objective C cannot manage).
See: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html
Makes sense... but I am not sold on the benefits of a dynamic language... how is this better than dynamically loaded shared libraries?
If you really need a dynamic framework there is always XPCOM, which gives you the added benefit of being able to use it from many different languages, and of course the dynamic binding is built into Javascript which makes it ideal for linking together components written in C++.
Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C? To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.
Ah, so its just a driver issue, in one particular release... I don't think Windows users can feel too smug about this, I have had many driver issues with Windows. My sound card does not work with Windows7.
Should I make a joke about how Windows includes amazing technology for making record companies rich, but cant even get the basics like playing sound right?
Okay, why do I not have a problem with this? I watch BBC iPlayer fullscreen flash on my 46" 1080p TV from Linux, and apart from the low resolution of the flash stream (even in high quality mode), it is perfect.
I have been developing for Android non-stop for most of this year. I found the SDK very easy to use (having done J2ME and Blackberry before). The API is stable, and not buggy. I found all the documentation and examples I needed on one website http://developer.android.com/index.html and found the UI classes very flexible. I was able to clone the look and feel of an iPhone app quite easily just by using the xml styling, a couple of animations and one custom layout component. The API is the best I have used, and in my opinion much better than objective-c (we develop for iPhone too), which is a bit of a cludge on top of C. Expect Android to start turning up on a lot of embedded devices, not just phones (HP photo-copiers for example, cameras). In the B2B market (selling bespoke apps to companies, handset manufacturers and network operators) there is a lot of buzz around Android. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and see more potential for Android at the moment (as we mainly are B2B, and are not too interested in writing apps that may or may not make money in the Shop/Market). We are also looking for more experienced Android developers at the moment.
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If an interpreter is written that complies with the OS4 requirements, all apps running in that interpreter will also comply with the requirements. Likewise I could write a machine emulator that runs on OS4 that emulates for example a SNES, and runs SNES games, and all those would also comply because the VM code itself is compiled with the "smart" build tools. This _must_ be true as all an interpreter or VM is is a program that says "if x do X else if y do Y" where "x" and "y" are the source language instructions and "X" and "Y" are the native code to implement them. If this did not work any code that had "if" statements that depended on run-time information (for example "if user presses key "x" do X" would also not work in this new "magic" framework.
There is no reason the profiling used for objective-c cannot work with other languages... The OS only sees the machine code (as we are dealing with compiled languages). It is easy to see this is true. If I write a python interpreter in Objective-C, the interpreter itself complies with the OS4 requirements, so automatically any python scripts running in the interpreter must also comply. QED. Objective-C is not the best language either, it is not a "standard" in the way C and C++ are standards. Although parts of an app can be written in C/C++, the environment is designed around Apples pre-C++ object-oriented-ish language "Objective-C". The app itself must be written in objective-c but can link to code in C/C++. IMHO Apple should really move to C++ like the rest of the world.
If your app does not "claim" to support a screen size in the manifest, then it will be auto scaled to the original G1 resolution by the OS. There is no problem unless your app claims to support multiple screen sizes and in-fact does not. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and the Android API is the better, and Java is easier to code in than objective-c (due to managed memory). Also I like the fact the DROID/Milestone/Nexus One etc have a much higher screen resolution than the iPhone.
Its actually pretty good value if you compare it to the other Android phones in terms of hardware (for example the Hero is 400 GBP).
The 3G version (with multi-touch) is called the "Milestone" and is available from expansys in the UK.
On second thoughts you are right, it is usually an arithmetic shift. It must have been an unsigned divide I have had to code with a logical shift in inline assembler. Really the right thing to do would be to use ASR on a signed number and LSR on an unsigned number.
As someone who frequently gets asked to work with code written elsewhere, adding features, fixing bugs etc, I find comments in code mostly useless. Reading and understanding the code is the only way to really understand what is going on. I find the comments don't really save time, as if there is a bug in the code, the original programmer did not understand the code anyway.
On the systems I have coded for right shift in C has always been a logical shift, not an arithmetic shift. There is no way to do an arithmetic shift from C, so you have to use inline assembler.
The UK has the Data Protection Act to prevent this kind of thing. Companies storing personal data must officially register, and must not share the data without the person concerned giving permission. You have the right to see a copy of any data held about you on payment of a small fee (to cover administrative costs). The law even prevents govenment departments from sharing data.
However, a recent amendment was passed that allows a minister (the Home Secretary I believe) to grant exemptions to this, and to compel disclosure from third parties - this was under the pretense of counter terrorism, but no safeguards were built into the procedures, so the exemptions could be used for political purposes.
These days developers do not need admin rights to physical machines. All they need is a user account with permission to launch virtual machine instances. They can have admin rights on the virtual machines.
If the developer does not understand basic computer security, then their code is probably full of the same problems. To write secure code, you have to understand security.
I think a simple LISP interpreter would be a great way to get started in programming. You can move on from basic maths (1 + 2) pretty easily to LISP. LUSH looks good http://lush.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html as it provides a complete environment including graphics and combines LISP with inline C, in a similar way to the way BBC Basic has inline assembler.
Why not display if the copy is pirated on the high score table where everyone can see, and offer a link to "pay now" right there (by paypal?). You could make it apply only over a certain score, so try-before-buying people are not affected, but if you invest serious time in getting a descent high score, are you really going to want to known as someone who didn't pay? To apply more pressure, you could have "pay within X days or have your score removed".
http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/news/20-04-06_1?template=template/printable.xml And the BMW diesels are more fuel efficient, they just have a smaller fuel tank...
Faster than a V8 Jaguar XK, (0-60 under 5 seconds), 500+ bhp, 188 mile range (not bad for a sports car), recharge in _10_minutes_ http://www.lightningcarcompany.co.uk/home.php
Open source games are the way forward. My favourite game is Warzone2100, which is now free and open source. No DRM, you are free to give your friends a copy, so you can play them over the network. If you want to produce a variant, you can take the source and alter it to produce derivative games.
I was referring to XPCOM, which allows many languages (including C++) to have the same kind of dynamic binding as objective-c. It is used by firefox to implement plugins for example. Of course in C++ it looks messy as the management of XPCOM objects is exposed. In Javascript this management is hidden. There is nothing wrong with implementing the computationally heavy parts of an application in C++, and then using Javascript as the toplevel. Besides, Javascript is a proper object oriented language. Javascript is both object oriented (using the object prototype model) and supports closures (something neither C, C++, and objective C cannot manage). See: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html
Makes sense... but I am not sold on the benefits of a dynamic language... how is this better than dynamically loaded shared libraries? If you really need a dynamic framework there is always XPCOM, which gives you the added benefit of being able to use it from many different languages, and of course the dynamic binding is built into Javascript which makes it ideal for linking together components written in C++.
Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C? To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.
Ah, so its just a driver issue, in one particular release... I don't think Windows users can feel too smug about this, I have had many driver issues with Windows. My sound card does not work with Windows7. Should I make a joke about how Windows includes amazing technology for making record companies rich, but cant even get the basics like playing sound right?
Okay, why do I not have a problem with this? I watch BBC iPlayer fullscreen flash on my 46" 1080p TV from Linux, and apart from the low resolution of the flash stream (even in high quality mode), it is perfect.
You're right, it compiles to Dalvik byte code... My bad.
Dalvik is fully compiled on the Android, so no byte code, no need for a JIT compiler. Most definitely not like Java from 10 years ago...
Try using OpenGL for the graphics, as the phones have hardware for this it is much faster than trying to scale and rotate by hand.
I have been developing for Android non-stop for most of this year. I found the SDK very easy to use (having done J2ME and Blackberry before). The API is stable, and not buggy. I found all the documentation and examples I needed on one website http://developer.android.com/index.html and found the UI classes very flexible. I was able to clone the look and feel of an iPhone app quite easily just by using the xml styling, a couple of animations and one custom layout component. The API is the best I have used, and in my opinion much better than objective-c (we develop for iPhone too), which is a bit of a cludge on top of C. Expect Android to start turning up on a lot of embedded devices, not just phones (HP photo-copiers for example, cameras). In the B2B market (selling bespoke apps to companies, handset manufacturers and network operators) there is a lot of buzz around Android. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and see more potential for Android at the moment (as we mainly are B2B, and are not too interested in writing apps that may or may not make money in the Shop/Market). We are also looking for more experienced Android developers at the moment.