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The iPhone killed my inner nerd

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Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#11

Post by Broken_Hippo »

stinos wrote: post #8
arethuza wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect he means that without of the success of the iPhone and then the iPad the emphasis in Windows 8 of having a "touch" interface might not have been there.

Yes and no, I guess. Yes: iPhone/iPad showed what to do properly with a touch screen on a phone or some other portable device. No: if they wouldn't have done it, I am fairly - if not 100% - sure somebody else would have done it. I had an industrial touch screen PC more than 10 years before iPhone existed. Even then, using it with a non-touch aware OS, I reckoned there was future in it: that thing, but smaller and fla…

This - so much this.

Touch-screen tech was coming along nicely before the iphone. I worked in a call center around 99 or 2000. We were using something that seemed to be a very powerful, blackberry reminiscent, touch-screen powered computer. Most of the time these were used to grade the rep's phone calls, adding notes as necessary. Smart phones seem like a natural outgrowth of this sort of technology merging with something folks were already beginning to carry with them - mobile phones.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#12

Post by [deleted] »

zyb09 wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games. Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumb…

[deleted]

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#13

Post by jhbadger »

zyb09 wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games. Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumb…

But even in the MS-DOS era things were disconnected because with the exception of things like DONKEY.BAS, nearly every game was a sourceless executable. On mini-computers and early microcomputers, games like "Star Trek" and "Lemonade Stand" were written in BASIC, meaning that you could dive in and modify the games you had just been playing.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#15

Post by amelius »

Aardwolf wrote: post #6
norswap wrote: post #5

I get it. I only started programming precisely when the first iphone came out, and I started tinkering a few years before. Even so I long for this sense of wonder that existed when everything was hard, or at least required some thought and ingenuity. I know the raspberry pie and stuff are a way to do that, but it feels so artificial and fake. (No, this comment really has no other point but to evoke diffuse nostalgic…

Raspberry pi and similar are not fake if you actually want something of this form factor (not full PC size, and not a smartphone you would build into the wall...) to run some particular job in your house or elsewhere.

Yeah, but it might feel fake if you just download a bunch of libraries, install them and call it a day.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#16

Post by tpxl »

>Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.

>Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.

I feel the article is disingenuous by comparing a phone to a PC.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#17

Post by intoverflow2 »

jhbadger wrote: post #13
zyb09 wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games. Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumb…

But even in the MS-DOS era things were disconnected because with the exception of things like DONKEY.BAS, nearly every game was a sourceless executable. On mini-computers and early microcomputers, games like "Star Trek" and "Lemonade Stand" were written in BASIC, meaning that you could dive in and modify the games you had just been playing.

> sourceless executable

This doesn't matter, the point is the option to do more was always present. Kids are curious and if the option exists at least a few will find it and try to understand it.

Sure you didn't have the sourcecode to Doom but QBasic was always there and to copy games off your friends and even run them you had to at least understand a few basic commands and intricacies of the OS. Not just tap store > tap install.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#18

Post by SmallDeadGuy »

zyb09 wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games. Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumb…

The curiosity is still there in kids though, and that's what matters when it comes to learning game development. Around the age of 11 or 12 I got curious, and discovered Game Maker which at the time was a very simple little tool with a simple graphics editor and some action/event blocks you could drag in order to make things move. Making some basic puzzle games with this was easy, but anything more complicated required diving into the built-in scripting language GML (Game Make Language) that I've long since forgotten.

After that I also played with flash games, disassembling them using some strange tool into a kind-of assembly-like code where I tweaked values and instructions to see what happened.

Some time around 15-16 years old, Minecraft became popular in my school. This was what tipped me over to more traditional programming, because there was already a modding community which provided tools for easy deobfuscation of its classes. Instead of revising for GCSEs, I made a small number of mods including elemental creepers which became popular enough to earn a small amount of ad revenue. Something like £20-30 a month for nearly 2 years wasn't great money, but as a kid it maintained my phone contract and a library of games on steam to play.

EDIT: Can't forget Ludum Dare, switching from Java to C# after my first LD experience improved my programming a lot even though the languages have a lot of similarities.

Sure, kids these days may not just happen to stumble upon the code of a game by opening its BASIC file in a text editor, but with curiosity and the internet it is very easy to begin learning from a young age. For me, this all started ~11 years ago, but I'm sure everything I did with my curiosity is still possible for kids today.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#19

Post by collyw »

zyb09 wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games. Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumb…

In saying that I notice that a lot of the developers I work with who are gamers always seem to know a lot more than me about networking. I assume that its related to setting up LAN parties and the likes.

Re: The iPhone killed my inner nerd

#20

Post by TillE »

sametmax wrote: post #4

Yeah cause having an IA always on, connected to you entire house, to turn off the light is definitely easier than a switch.

Honestly, this recent nerd obsession with using hideously complex technology to control your home lighting is extremely funny.

It's the idea of going to all this effort just to be able to do some not-very-useful things. You're running an entire embedded computer to control a single light bulb. Just hilarious.

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