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Apple introduces macOS Mojave

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Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#541
post #486

The complaints here about how the new macOS does not have anything exciting or interesting is weird. I thought the best thing about the new macOS (and iOS) is that it's supposed to be Apple focusing on stability, rather than new features. Given all the bad things that have happened with macOS in the past year, I thought this was going to be appreciated. https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/30/apple-focus-on-software...

So. The most important feature of this new release "designed for pros" that gets top placement on the announcement page is ... dark mode. The second is stacks. The third is the ports of iOS apps (including the long overdue Home). I find it very hard to be excited about a yet another "major" release that doesn't even qualify as a minor version bump.

I’ve been wishing for dark mode for all 6 years I’ve had my MacBook Pro, so I’m pretty happy with that alone. I also have next to no qualms with OS X in its current state so I’m pretty easy to please. I will say that the hardware quality on the other hand has taken a nosedive lately.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#542
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed -- as a Deaf person who uses visual languages to communicate, it's allowed me to actually begin to express myself using a set of pseudo-language visual elements. Some of them roughly map over to ASL expressions; I am looking forward to when they add ASL-specific emoji, or ASL language support, or even hands in the new animoji.

That's.. actually pretty extraordinary. In my cynicism I had imagined the only possible motivation for positioning new emoji as flagship features of their iOS iterations was a blatant attempt to lure pre-teens into a long (and lucrative) journey into Apple's ecosystem. I think perhaps I should take a few steps back and absorb the idea that: 1. people communicate in many different ways and 2. these things aren't value…

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Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for starters, you don't have to turn your head 90º to resolve some, but not all of them as an image, as you do with your provided examples. They're also much higher-resolution so it's easier to pull meaning from an unfamiliar one.

> Well, for starters, you don't have to turn your head 90º to resolve some, but not all of them as an image Well, no one actually does, so I'm glad we got out ahead of that problem. > They're also much higher-resolution so it's easier to pull meaning from an unfamiliar one. except you don't really need that many. There are a few common emotions that people use... and then there are winky T-Rex emoji's that are comple…

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Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#544
post #175

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There's precedent: Chrome and Firefox both implement WebGL on Windows with ANGLE, which translates OpenGL to Direct3D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGLE_(software)

And it seems they are working on a more generic library : https://github.com/google/nxt-standalone

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Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#545
post #407

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Wat. Metal and OpenGL two completely different APIs, shading languages and probably a whole host of other things. I've ported my fair share of things from fixed-function to programmable shader pipelines and you'd be effing naive if you think you can do that in a couple weeks on anything more than a toy demo.

Well Modo isn’t a toy.

The question is, how many devs did they have working those two weeks (and what resources did Apple provide to help them)?

I develop an OpenGL-based video engine for a live media playback application, which is very nearly as simple an application of OpenGL as you can expect to find in the real world, and there's no way I could expect to port it to Metal in a week or two singlehandedly. Like others have mentioned, it's a completely different paradigm, not just a matter of changing around some function calls.

That said, I welcome this change with open arms (and secure in the knowledge that legacy code will continue to work for the foreseeable future). OpenGL is a fragmented, brittle, spaghetti-inducing pile of global state. Rewriting in Metal isn't anywhere near as small a project as Apple claims, but I'm perversely looking forward to it -- I'll be very happy to have OpenGL in my rearview mirror.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#546
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it seems they are working on a more generic library : https://github.com/google/nxt-standalone

Ah, and NXT has a Metal backend! Very cool. It's important to note that NXT isn't necessarily a replacement for ANGLE. It's an experimental replacement for WebGL as a whole, with a different API. There still needs to be a way to run WebGL programs on Mac if this deprecation leads to removal a few versions down the line.

And not strictly a replacement either, WebGL would not go away. The successor to WebGL is still so far away that there will probably be some versions after WebGL 2.0.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#547

WWDC 2018, from underwhelming to boring. I will lose my mind if i hear *oji one more time. Will they ever stop with this nonsense? Favicons in Safari? It took them 6 years for the browser to remember the zoom setting per site, now we have the luxury of having favicons.

It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on *oji.

business partner and I both have Surface related products. His #1 complaint against Windows10, is the Emoji support compared to macOS.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#548

Is anyone else excited about "dark mode"? Seems like a nod to developers, a lot of whom are night owls. For that, Apple, I applaud you.

I like it, only issue I've found so far is Safari's private browsing (or Incognito) that is indistinguishable from normal browsing.

Under "normal" circumstances I wouldn't care, but I use it a lot for development with the same site, so I don't know which is what.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#549
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Whole new way" is a bit hyperbolic, but an emoji definitely brings layers of meaning that are normally only feasible in in-person conversation into the written realm. It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy. It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don'…

> It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy. "meh"

I read that as "who knows?"

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#550
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance. OpenGL has been an awful API for many years now. The drivers are way too complicated, and applications don’t have enough control to deliver smooth performance. All OpenGL does now is let you kind of mediocrily put things on the screen.

What do you think about them forcing you to use Swift or Objective-C for this? Forcing you to use languages that use ref counting and object oriented pointer tables that are traversed at runtime? How much of the gains does objc_msgSend eat up? I though you are against such things? How ugly would the JAI code to need to be to interface with this? I wish they had a simple Metal C API, but their new API comes with a bun…

Any overhead coming from objc_msgSend is minuscule compared to the gains from things like better serialization of GPU-bound tasks and not having to synchronize repeatedly with the CPU.

If you're worried about refcounting, use ARC (which you have to with Swift anyway). First, the compiler is very smart about optimizing away retain/release/autorelease calls whenever it can. Second, when those calls do have to be made, they're implemented using vtables, and never hit objc_msgSend() in the first place.

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