Over at the DOS Games Club we have played six small games1 during the cold month of December. I have suggested playing UGH! and joined Florian, Martijn, Mike, Philipp and Tim on the 25th episode.
In February we will be operating on unfortunate patients in the Life & Death.
Ugh!, Bolo Ball, Micro’s Dilemma II, Lode Runner, Alley Cat, MinerVGA ↩︎
Today I have discovered the Dotsies font. Although I doubt I will use this, it made me wonder about using it in Eventail.
I’ll hammer something out to test this.
I have joined micro.blog, to which I will hopefully federate micro posts from this blog.
Let the writing commence.
Increasing amount of tools are written for web, many presenting themselves as replacement for standard desktop applications.
For simple stuff this is fine, few people would like to install an application for every shop or transport provider.
Complex programs running in tabs hit an insurmountable hurdle: “they cannot implement correct keyboard shortcuts”. And it is a problem that nobody has figured out yet, it is a fundamental issue that will never be fixed.
Some examples that come to mind:
Another problem is selection. ⌘A selects everything, this is never what you want to do in an application, but it can be something you want to do on a webpage. This means you need to break one behavior or the other.
MKBHD’s video about blind camera comparison concluded with a baffling result. The most interesting thing is not the winner, but the phones that got to share the last place: iPhone XS, iPhone X and Pixel 3.
Although their cameras are superior on technical level1, people prefer pictures from other cameras because of increased brightness and saturation.
Of course there is nothing that stops iPhone and Pixel to do the same thing at the cost of losing information rendering further post-processing inflexible. That being said, I can imagine that being beaten by a Blackberry in a photography test must hurt.
The solution is simple. I am sure that if pictures after auto-enhance have been thrown in the competition, the results would be different. The winner might stay the same, but I doubt that iPhones and Pixels would remain dead last.
What Apple and Google should do is to add an option to turn on auto-enhance by default. This way no information would be lost and people who prefer pictures without it could disable it. It would make the pictures coming straight off-camera punchier.
But first Apple would need to fix their auto-enhance algorithm which makes everything orange.
Noise, dynamic range and colour reproduction are comical on some of the tested phones. ↩︎
As a side project I am launching my YouTube channel Binary Campfire. I haven’t decided its ultimate purpose; but as others before me, I will start posting some videos about video games. Old ones, as that is what I play these days.
The first video will take us back to 1992, with a side scroller/shooter game Alcatraz.
The event held on the 30th of October solidified the idea roaming the Internet since a few years: ARM Macs are coming, and they are coming soon. A-series chips have caught up to all but the best Intel mobile chips1, so why is there an Intel processor inside the new MacBook Air?
I have a theory: A-series chips are not powerful enough–but in an unapparent way.
In my previous article I have predicted that Apple would:
This did not happen as predicted. What was announced is a new MacBook Air, which is a 13" version of the current MacBook. Other laptops in the MacBook line were untouched.
What I think will happen next year is:
But herein lies the problem. Which chip would go in? If Apple took the A12X processor from the current iPad Pro and added a bit of RAM, this setup would breathe at the neck of the current 15" MacBook Pro with Touchbar4. This would have serious implications for the Pro line as the only differentiator would be the software they can use.
In order to offer compelling Pro hardware, Apple needs to make a beefier A-series chip. One that would give even the Intel desktop chips a run for their money.
An A12X chip is neck-to-neck with a 6-core Intel Core i7-8850H; it only falls behind an i9 ↩︎
In today’s Apple’s philosophy this means that it will continue to be sold, maybe with lower price. ↩︎
I expect this name to be something unexpected, what about an “Apple Mac”? ↩︎
If they added active cooling, I would bet that it could run circles around a 45watt 4-core Intel processor. ↩︎
A new episode of Dos Game Club podcast was released today. This 22nd instalment is about a legendary game: The Secret of Monkey Island.
I have been fortunate to be able to join Martijn, Florian, Mike, Philipp and Esko to discuss this great game during an epic 3 hour session. If you enjoy retro gaming and especially DOS games, give this podcast a try!
Every month we select a different game to play and discuss on the forums and IRC. Martijn and Florian then invite a few guests do discuss the episode and record a podcast session.
As a fun exercise I would like to make some predictions for the 2018 September Apple keynote. There are two rumored machines that should come out.
According to rumors, this machine will be geared towards pro users. As usual, the statement is vague. What pro users? Developers, animators, writers?
Current Mac Minis mainly serve three purposes:
Professionals do not need home media servers, and since Apple does not make a standalone screen it means that the machine will have to be usable headless.
As such it will require Ethernet and power, which makes it possible to do away with all other ports. I expect Apple to offer a low-grade Xeon CPU option in order to allow for ECC ram and at least an option with 32G ram.
Why would Apple do this?
I expect Apple to sanitize their offering. Nobody except Apple pundits knows how are the machines named before they enter the Apple store.
I believe that Apple will:
This will make the lightest Mac have the Air moniker. The current MacBook is underpowered for the generic user and the current MacBook Pro without TouchBar is a compromised machine with no market.
For CPU it will have the cheapest Intel 15W CPU Apple can get, with expensive upgrades to CPUs with the same TDP. It will not have a discrete GPU and no TouchBar.
People buying the Pro computer should be savvy enough to know which dongles to buy and people buying an ultra-light computer do not need peripherals.
However, Apple needs the Average Joe’s MacBook to work for most users today, not in an imaginary future. This means it needs at least one USB port. It does not need thunderbolt. It would be better with an HDMI port and an SD card slot but these are unlikely to be included.
I predict that it will have 2 USB-C ports for power and 1 or 2 USB-A ports (for symmetry).
If Apple wants to make this work they would need to backpedal to the old system. Even the new updated 2018 butterfly keyboard keeps failing. If they make a new body for this machine, it is possible that they would introduce a v4 of the butterfly switch mechanism.
As the release of new iPhones is approaching, it is time to speculate on new features, or the removal of the old ones. There are rumors that one of the new iPhones will lack 3D Touch capability. To me, this is disturbing as I think that the biggest hindrance in 3D Touch adoption is that it is not omnipresent. Contrary to the opinion that it is broken, I believe that discoverability is a minor issue.
On a desktop interface there are no indicators to show that a particular element can be right-clicked. This is so because:
First point can be resolved by software: I leave it to designers to design a replacement for menus or toolbars that enable advanced functionality which can be then used with 3D Touch. The second point can be solved with users being exposed to 3D Touch all the time. With the current lineup this is a non-starter as it is available on high end phones only—not on the SE, and not on the iPad.
Now is the time for Apple to show if they are invested in 3D Touch or whether it is just a nice-to-have feature.