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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperTechnical (Moderator: ThemsAllTook)The grumpy old programmer room
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Triplefox
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« Reply #1860 on: March 11, 2011, 02:18:16 AM »

I seriously think this may be the worst UI I have ever seen in a commercial product.

It looks like they started with iTunes and then dumped more and more stuff on it, applying some kind of narrow bureaucratic methodology where only tabs can be used.

Personally, I think the inevitable endpoint for most interfaces is to go the route seen in programs ranging from Blender to Emacs to modern web browsers, where every view is single-task-focused and you can have any number of them anywhere, and there's a form of command line input for the most uncommon tasks. Because after a certain point, you can't just click around to find functionality anymore; you might as well have a search box.

mcc, after your post I move we rename this "the sad, soul-crushed programmers room"

We should do spinoffs Coffee

A "grumpy" room(annoying problem), a "sad" room(broken and unfixable things like XCode 4), and a "scared" room(potentially project-ending uncertainties)
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lapsus
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« Reply #1861 on: March 11, 2011, 02:21:54 AM »

woa... think i'll stick with xcode3 for a bit longer then.. thanks for the preview mcc :o
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« Reply #1862 on: March 11, 2011, 05:55:15 AM »

Anyway so despite being concerned and upset about Apple's weird and unnecessary licensing changes last night, I did go ahead and finally get XCode 4 installed.

And I'm… amazed. Behold; can you follow what is happening in this screenshot?

Oh gosh, that's awful.

One of the things I loved the most about Xcode was that it just got the hell out of my way and let me code, oh, and that it didn't have damn tabs..

Those screenshots remind me of Visual Studio, where the philosophy seems to be to throw as much shit as possible on the screen and hope the user still has some room to see their code window.

I left IDEs for good about a year ago and I don't regret it after seeing those shots.  Xcode was the last bastion for me, no more.
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ThemsAllTook
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« Reply #1863 on: March 11, 2011, 06:25:19 AM »

And the worst thing is, I can't go back, because you have to use XCode 4 if you installed iPhone OS 4.3.

You do? There's a download link on connect.apple.com for Xcode 3.2.6 and iOS SDK 4.3. I haven't gotten around to installing it myself, but it sure sounds like it would work.

In any case, that's a really appalling UI. Definitely won't be using Xcode 4 anytime soon. Makes it even more hilarious that they're charging money for it.
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mcc
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« Reply #1864 on: March 11, 2011, 09:01:31 AM »

And the worst thing is, I can't go back, because you have to use XCode 4 if you installed iPhone OS 4.3.

You do? There's a download link on connect.apple.com for Xcode 3.2.6 and iOS SDK 4.3. I haven't gotten around to installing it myself, but it sure sounds like it would work.

YOU NOW HAVE MY FULL ATTENTION. :O will check that out, thanks so much.
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Ludophonic
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« Reply #1865 on: March 11, 2011, 06:24:33 PM »

I disagree. Xcode 4 is a vast improvement over Xcode 3. It is still rough around the edges and rather buggy but the Xcode 3 interface was just atrocious.

I had downloaded one of the earlier developer previews of Xcode 4 just to check it out and ended up moving my projects over to it despite how buggy it was. I'll be glad to never see that horrible bizarre Xcode 3 pop-up file list thing ever again. Or a half-dozen windows all with debugger controls in them. Or trying to pick my poison between three different UI designs all of which sucked in their own unique way.

Xcode 4 is still pretty rough. But at least they've picked a single direction for it instead of "The Car Built for Homer" that it was.
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TobiasW
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« Reply #1866 on: March 12, 2011, 01:05:16 AM »

Are there now tabs for open files in XCode? You know, like in Eclipse, or in Visual Studio, or any other IDE that's worth it's memory?
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« Reply #1867 on: March 12, 2011, 07:15:39 AM »

Are there now tabs for open files in XCode? You know, like in Eclipse, or in Visual Studio, or any other IDE that's worth it's memory?

I absolutely hate this feature.  I don't understand why anybody would want it.

I wouldn't mind so much if those IDEs would open a new tab only when I asked for one.  The default behavior of opening a tab every time I so much as look at a different file drives me crazy and I want to strangle the UI designer(s) that thought of such an idiotic feature.
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« Reply #1868 on: March 12, 2011, 10:18:03 AM »

I wouldn't mind so much if those IDEs would open a new tab only when I asked for one.  The default behavior of opening a tab every time I so much as look at a different file drives me crazy and I want to strangle the UI designer(s) that thought of such an idiotic feature.

Depends what you mean. It ought to be done as a configurable property (as with FireFox and web pages).
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BorisTheBrave
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« Reply #1869 on: March 12, 2011, 11:59:14 AM »

I wouldn't mind so much if those IDEs would open a new tab only when I asked for one.  The default behavior of opening a tab every time I so much as look at a different file drives me crazy and I want to strangle the UI designer(s) that thought of such an idiotic feature.
This is basically a macs vs pcs thing. Pre-windows 7, Windows made it pretty painful to have multiple documents being multiple windows, both from a UI perspective and for process counts. Hence the tab paradigm.

Personally, I like the way emacs does it - you can have many "buffers" open at once which are essentially tabs, except that the buffer list is shared between all open windows, and you may be looking at the same buffer in multiple ways.
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Ludophonic
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« Reply #1870 on: March 12, 2011, 12:13:43 PM »

I absolutely hate this feature.  I don't understand why anybody would want it.

I wouldn't mind so much if those IDEs would open a new tab only when I asked for one.  The default behavior of opening a tab every time I so much as look at a different file drives me crazy and I want to strangle the UI designer(s) that thought of such an idiotic feature.

Xcode 4 works the way you describe. You can configure it so that it double-clicking a file opens it in it's own tab.

The 'Double Click Navigation' option can be changed from 'Uses Separate Window' to 'Uses Separate Tab'.
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mcc
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« Reply #1871 on: March 13, 2011, 02:09:38 AM »

So Eclipse, at least on my mac--

- Takes a good couple of minutes to start up.
- On top of this, the Android emulator takes several minutes to start up.
- While the Android emulator is running it constantly takes up like 20% of the CPU; also eclipse takes up huge quantities of RAM.
- However both easily get into states that it helps to restart them.
- Also, you can't just close and reopen the emulator as you like-- Eclipse gets very confused. In fact, if I close Eclipse and then reopen it, the emulator will not work right until I either restart the computer, or from a terminal call ./adb kill-server followed by ./adb start-server. It's possible ./adb kill-server followed by an eclipse restart would work also.

This makes starting and stopping Android development a very conscious, weighty thing. Because of the resource demands of eclipse + the emulator, I can't do all that much while I'm doing the Android development; but I also have to be darn sure about stopping. Just now I went "OK! That's good enough, done for the night" and closed down the programs. Then immediately went "wait a minute-- in that last test I should have done xxx yyy zzz." After restarting eclipse, several false emulator starts later and some experimentation with adb, TWENTY OR THIRTY MINUTES LATER* I finally was back to the point I was before closing eclipse and running my program in the emulator again! xxx yyy zzz turned out to do nothing so it was wasted time.

* Okay, I may have spent some of that time reading about My Little Pony on wikipedia.
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Triplefox
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« Reply #1872 on: March 13, 2011, 02:40:09 AM »

Got inspired from my post in happy programmer on SWC-building, to work on an old problem again: the shitty workflow of building a SWF from haXe. The compiler takes a single swf-lib and you have to use external tools to build that swf. Past progress has led to two Python scripts: One builds a library swf and convenient stub code automatically from a data directory, and the other makes a preloader library from a successful non-preloading build. But now I really need to make it so I can use AS3 SWCs, such as various portal APIs I want to use. This has been "discussed" on the haXe list, but not "documented."

Issue: There are all sorts of ways I can merge the SWC code into the library swf, since there's an order things get loaded, and a symbol that needs to be attached to assets within each swf for it to be an accessible AS class. Getting this symbol/order voodoo wrong causes the swf to load with a blank screen. The available documentation on this topic is minuscule and not particularly targeted to my problem. Researching a custom solution would mean digging deep into the spec. So I'm doing guess-and-check with the available tools because I really don't want to go that deep and I'm pretty sure the problem's been solved for me already, I just need to find the right setup.

First strategy: Add another tool: swfcombine from the swftools suite. Build a SWC from Flex containing the APIs I want to use. Extract it to "library.swf". Then merge it into the asset swf. Does not work - I need to add more data/tags/symbols somewhere to make the merge work, I think. I can make a blank-screen-maker swf from it, and a immediate-exception-because-asset-symbols-are-not-found swf, but those are as good as it gets. And swfmill is completely failing at including "library.swf" directly.

Current strategy: Switch tools, something I wanted to do anyway. swfmill, the original open-source swf-mangler, has been mostly supplanted by samhaxe-open, which is more recently maintained and has a better understanding of symbol voodoo; I started using samhaxe for the preloader, because swfmill can't do it. It stands to reason that I will probably be able to directly add library.swf if I just switch over entirely, plus I'll knock out a dependency.

If that doesn't work: beg for help from the haxe list.

I hate you SWF Angry I'll work on it more when I wake up tomorrow.
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increpare
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« Reply #1873 on: March 13, 2011, 01:33:07 PM »

several weeks later...the bugs still come  Facepalm
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Draknek
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« Reply #1874 on: March 13, 2011, 03:06:56 PM »

Digging up an old project on a new laptop, I'm finding that SDL_OpenAudio is freezing and taking 100% CPU. Not happy!
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mcc
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« Reply #1875 on: March 13, 2011, 04:15:38 PM »

The rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper.
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mcc
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« Reply #1876 on: March 13, 2011, 04:52:45 PM »

Behold, the depths of depravity my mad quest has lead me to.

So I'm sitting here, trying to figure out how to get an absolute path to a file resource I have packed into my android app. What I eventually work out is there's no such thing. When you include a file in an Android application as an "asset", it actually gets bundled into the APK, which is like (possibly literally is) a big zip file. When you use the AssetManager to get a handle to a file you're not dealing with a real filehandle, you're dealing with some sort of virtual filehandle that uncompresses and reads data out from inside the APK. This is totally sensible and works just fine because the flexibility of the Java API hides the fact the files aren't "real". Java apps also have access to some kind of /assets virtual tree to make things as easy as possible.

...BUT I'M NOT USING JAVA, I'm in the C++ API, and moreover my existing code uses several libraries whose interfaces are inconveniently designed wrt files and want you to pass in a filename path, not an fd, not a FILE *, a path. The C++ API now has some nice functions that duplicate the Java AssetManager and in one place let you get a nicely behaved integer file descriptor for an asset (unless the asset is compressed; see nightmarish link above). But my existing code and libraries are not so nicely behaved. So I can mildly rewrite 3-4 libraries to support getting a filehandle and not just a path, or rewrite the libraries to use callbacks of some kind so that they can read files that aren't even really files (and in this scenario... maybe I have to extend the STL? cuz... I'm using ifstream in places...) or...

...or I can have the first thing the Android application does when it starts up be copy all the assets out of /assets and into the "user files" directory, which IS in the real filesystem and which I can get the path to trivially. And I feel like I ought to be talking myself out of this, because it just sounds stupid, but then again it will actually work and in practice this basically means I'm doubling the ~10MB disk imprint of an application that lives on a device with storage designed to hold podcasts and movies. So it looks like this is what I'm doing, at least for now.
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Triplefox
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« Reply #1877 on: March 13, 2011, 05:46:24 PM »

...or I can have the first thing the Android application does when it starts up be copy all the assets out of /assets and into the "user files" directory, which IS in the real filesystem and which I can get the path to trivially. And I feel like I ought to be talking myself out of this, because it just sounds stupid, but then again it will actually work and in practice this basically means I'm doubling the ~10MB disk imprint of an application that lives on a device with storage designed to hold podcasts and movies. So it looks like this is what I'm doing, at least for now.

This sucks but it would not be the worst thing. You, or someone else, will get the ideas/help/motivation to figure out a solution later, and then you can "optimize" it. That's basically how I've approached all my haXe SWF stuff. In the meantime, it works, you can build stuff.
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« Reply #1878 on: March 14, 2011, 04:45:43 AM »

Tied up in asynchronous bullshit hell.  Sometimes I just want to do something, and then do something else, but that seems to be too much to expect of flex (yeah yeah I'm an idiot for not designing around the capabilities of the architecture).  Lots of events firing left and right, and little order to them.  Time to get out the grappling hook  Panda
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« Reply #1879 on: March 14, 2011, 05:04:41 AM »

All events will fire in the exact order that you add the listeners. The only difference being the sound API which runs in a different thread (which is why you bizarrely always have sound working beautifully even when AS3 code is grinding to a halt).

If you want to synchronise with the sound thread, use getTimer to get the exact time that you initiate a sound. Anything else you do with the sound should be based on that measurement, not what the sound object or channel tells you, because that data is going to be completely out of synch by the time it propagates that data back to the code.
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