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scottlu2

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Very nice to see new PalmOS apps being written, and good job on your strategy game.

I co-authored Warfare Incorporated, an RTS originally on Palm devices, if anyone remembers that. We had to pull out all the stops to get the perf and get it small enough to fit.

JSON Patch 2 years ago

The article suggests json patch is idempotent, but it isn’t idempotent for array mutations. JSON merge patch on the other hand is fully idempotent (in the array case the array is replaced).

Apple Passkey 4 years ago

Comment from the presentation: “Worked with fido alliance to work across platforms”.

That's a fair point, I'll restate: the level of abstraction that developers were exposed to was 95% the same. Exposed message loops, window classes, window messages, unpacking window params, post and send message semantics, painting, single cooperative input queue (window app hanging would hang all apps), and other equivalences.

Once Microsoft agreed to the graphics api change, it was open season to redesign the window manager api because backward compat was moot at that point. The OS/2 window manager api was designed by the same team who designed the win16 window manager apis. There were improvements and a bunch of api change but at the 10K foot level the model was the same - input loop, window messages, and window procs.

This is an important point. Being easier to create means faster to market, faster to create new features, easier cross platform, more value for users in less time. Not all apps can be web based but for those that can be, faster dev time has become a competitive requirement.

I think it’s an economic reality for for-profit companies that make apps. If company A doesn’t go the html app route, and company B does for the same effective product, company B will have an advantage. It’s almost to the point where if your company app can be developed this way, you must do it this way to stay competitive.

Nice demo. Reminds me of a well done Galaxians clone for Atari 400/800 that used programmable character set animation for the aliens. It was impressive.

I had a similar experience: keeping my hands warm while keyboarding made all the difference.

Before this I was at 20% use for 3 years, tried multiple things, went to multiple doctors, etc.

I also: wear a pil-o-splint while sleeping so that area of my wrist can relax at night, make sure my hands are warm and that I've stretched before starting for the day, and changed my typing posture so that my hands are mostly flat and wrists don't touch the desk/keyboard while typing.

Finally, I stopped using emacs and the like because of the control key induced hand/finger stretching. Vim is more RSI friendly in my experience because there is less stretching required to use it.

I worked on both OS/2 and NT and can say they were never the same code base. The NT kernel was 100% new code. At one point there was an effort to port the OS/2 GUI apis on top of the NT kernel. That effort was abandoned when it was decided to focus on a new 32 bit Windows API on NT. Scores of devs switched what they were working on overnight - fun times!

I saved money from lawn mowing and paper delivering to buy a trs-80 model 1 level 1. I remember it being around $525 which was a really tough goal to reach. It was awesome though to finally reach it and bring the trs-80 home.