The choice to port to RN wasn't technical at all. Tobi (the CEO) prefers RN philosophically. No technical argument opposed to RN--which is super easy to come up with, along several axes--would have stopped the port. It was inevitable.
This is my opinion, as I watched it unfold. I'm no longer at Shopify.
It seems like the choice to use RN is usually made by the business side rather than engineers. I'm biased because I work as a mobile engineer but I've never heard an engineer emphatically love working with RN. In fact, I've usually heard horror stories about how it works, still having to write platform code, finding the talent that knows how to properly write RN, the fact that it's technically single threaded, etc. But hey, at least the higher ups get to hear "there's one codebase and therefore it's cheaper."
If he's willing to have the business fund it long term then fair enough honestly. But it seems like a weak strategy that isn't playing out well judging by the progress made over the 3 years so far.
Former Shopify iOS dev here. I pushed SO HARD to get dark mode to be a thing we would do. It's table stakes, IMO, in 2020 and beyond, to support it. We'd get roasted on Twitter, LinkedIn, just about everywhere. HN Comments, even. :)
Got shut down at the highest level. Like, definitively. As in, please don't ask again.
I don't think you'll ever see it as long as Tobi is CEO.
Ugh, i got a bit of pushback on supporting dark mode in my native app, luckily i was starting from scratch and once you show you can pretty much do it by setting up assets correctly and that you can switch modes from the quick menu to test, noone even thinks about it anymore.
They were all coming from a non native mindset though
Ehh ridiculously easy seems like a stretch. You need to adapt all of your designs for dark mode and if you haven’t thought about it in the past or you don’t have a design system that is easily adaptable in the app you are going to be updating a lot of components and screens.
OK, yeah, you need to think about it first, but it should just be a case that all the colours in your design have alternates. It's mostly a case of differentiating between background and foreground colours.
Then you put all your colours in the Assets, only ever used named colours, maybe hardcode some shortcuts, then you never think about it again.
There are a couple of rare cases here and there, eg custom drawing using Core Graphics, where using cgColor won't pick up the change, you have to grab the underlying colour again and force a redraw
> 1. Joel saying "I didn't understand that question" and then moving on might have been succinct and practical, but it was just not a good reflection of him.
He's presenting in the style of You Suck at Photoshop, a series of Photoshop videos in the same style.
At the beginning he says something like "this is basic to intermediate, but for you this is going to be stupid hard", which is from the first (?) YSAP, "Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects" [1].
Reading your single comment (and watching the linked clip) was very much worth my time! I never before realized that you can address Excel cells via a symbolic name instead of row/column-wise. That is very cool and probably very basic. Now I'm going to watch the rest of Joel's video!
They specifically made comparisons to the A8 chip (in the 6 and 6+) during the event and emphasized the speed increase. Apple knows their true problem is getting old iPhone users to upgrade.
Also, did you see the event? Not the same phone at all.
Wide color, awesome new camera and dropping it in the toilet might be enough.
It would be interesting to know if they were just reimplmenting Android's View OnPaint and doing it in 2D land or getting an OpenGL context and drawing it 2D in there. I wonder what the battery differences would be like.
Naive question: do faster cores perform slower tasks with more efficiency? In other words, if a game uses 80% of the old processor, but only 50% of the new one, is there an impact on the battery life just by being a faster CPU?
Yes. Especially with multiple cores, gets more work done quicker and the core can shutdown. The core can also scale down where it is presumably more efficient.
When I switched to Mac from Windows about 5 years ago (because I decided to be an iOS developer), this is the biggest thing I noticed. There was zero feedback, or a just a quick beep out of the speakers. The anthropomorphic equivalent would be malevolent staring.
That's weird to me as a lifelong Mac user because that's what I experience using Windows. My father needed help with something on his Windows machine, so I sat down and double clicked on an app. I got the hourglass for about 2 seconds and then ... nothing. The computer looked like it wasn't doing anything. No feedback. No icon in the dock-like window at the bottom, just nothing. I double clicked a few more times, and eventually the first instance showed a window. I think other instances may have started up in the meantime, slowing things down even more.
This is normal. I'm feeling it right now with what I want to do.
In my heart and mind, I _know_ I can do it, but then the doubts and fears rush in. I totally understand the feeling you're going through.
I just finished _Art & Fear_ by David Bayles and Ted Orland which is a fantastic book about creating stuff. Nearly all the advice applies to software developers.
Don't give up.
Success isn't binary either.
Release your project (Some success!). Make some sales (More success!). Market your project to get more sales (Success!).
You probably won't get fuck you money on the first day, but with enough marketing, maybe you'll be able to quit your job within the first year.
