I ordered an Addison Lee to the airport a few months back. The driver spent the entire time chatting about Uber and how dangerous it is. It's like they get off on it. He was also being quite racist about their drivers. This was at 3am in the morning.
This is just one data point, but I wasn't impressed.
No excuse for asshat drivers, but I've had an almost identical experience with Black Cab drivers too, and plenty of issues with Uber drivers around the world.
They're probably using several bloated SDK's within their app for core Google services, view elements etc etc. If they're using dynamic linking, they have to include these in the binary even if they only use a small percentage of the libraries.
Maybe it's just my experiences (iOS development interviews), but whiteboard interviews are actually quite rare. Most of the time it's either questions about iOS, pair programming iOS or discussing your implementation of some coding test.
I wonder if this is just a result of it being a more niche skill set than a general software developer.
Kotlin is a breeze compared to Java, and it's conceptually similar to Swift (syntax, null safety, type inference etc). I love Kotlin but it's not with it's own quirks.
I would love to see a true cross-platform solution, but honestly it's a dead end in my experience. I would say C++ comes close, but I wouldn't be surprised if people feel unwelcome due to it's syntax and quirks.
I do feel more and more that cross-Platform is a illusion like you say.
As it has always been, my son. I've been hearing the wonders of cross-platform for going on three decades. Be it Unix->MS-DOS, Java on anything, or iOS->Android, there is always a compromise. Prior, it was usually that the app that didn't look native on any of the platforms. These days it seems the compromise is at dev time. But there's no free lunch. Maybe some day, but probably not within my career.
And that's fine, I now know that when the topic of cross-platform comes up to ask "what are we giving up? What will our new pain points be?" What I don't do anymore is think that this time will be different.
The only performance problems I've seen were created by people who don't understand when React triggers a redraw, thus rerendering a 1MB image on every keyboard keystroke.
As long of you are a bit mindeful of the big pitfalls (any bigger framework has some of those), the performance of React-Native is excellent.
Unfortunately Android devices have much
greater variance in performance and tend to trail significantly behind iOS.
We were able to get our app running fairly quickly,
but the performance — specifically on touch events was not at an acceptable level even on higher end devices.
In addition at that early stage there was still a lot missing in the React Native Android feature-set that would
have made getting our prototype to production level more time consuming than our iOS effort.
This was posted on the 7th June admittedly. Does this still hold true?
I personally haven't experienced any performance problems, even on lower end devices (only the ones where the whole OS is sluggish).
I don't know what Discord has seen there, so I don't know if that's been resolved. They also state that transitioning to React-Native on Android would have been more time than on iOS , which doesn't mean that any alternative like Xamarin would have been better. It also reads like the team for the respective platforms is around 1 person big and they already have a running version for Android, so the cost of a rewrite and the time to retrain would not have been worth it, which is reasonable. On a greenfield project, different conditions apply.
From my initial research it appears the React Native on Android suffers performance problems. I.e. the Discord app on that showcase is still native Android, whereas their iOS app is React Native.
What do you do as your day job? Do you find that you don't focus on one thing as part of that?
I'd say I'm the opposite. Funnily enough, I'm envious of people who are a jack of all trades because they can choose the right tool for the job. I just do iOS development in my day job and side projects and although I love app development, I find the lack of knowledge on other tools limiting.
Same here. I wonder whether this experience with the free cracked version helped make Photoshop any more popular. If it was only used in the legal sense, costing hundreds, would it be so popular?
At one point, I developed a hypothesis that for a big software vendor, turning a blind eye to piracy was like a form of "dumping" on the market. Consider a vendor like Microsoft. They could make their money selling legit copies to businesses, and through package deals on new computers.
Meanwhile, anybody who tried to sell a simpler or even better product at a lower price was forced out of the market by the "free" copies of Microsoft that were widely available.
The same "free" software gave Microsoft an advantage in the platform wars (e.g., Windows vs Mac) as well. Though most of the mainstream software was available for both platforms, people would buy a computer that could run the software that they could get for "free," often by copying the disks at work.
I remember a conversation with a friend. He was buying a new PC. I suggested getting a Mac (around 1996). He said: "The Mac doesn't run AutoCAD." I suggested that he couldn't afford AutoCAD anyway, and he just gave me a wink and laughed.
I don't know how this applies to movies and music, i.e., what a "cheaper alternative" looks like. When I was a kid, we would never see a first-run movie. Instead, we'd have to wait until it showed up at the discount theater, where we could see it for a buck. Today, there may be no reasonable business model for providing a lower priced channel for content, because content competes with pirate content.
> At one point, I developed a hypothesis that for a big software vendor, turning a blind eye to piracy was like a form of "dumping" on the market. Consider a vendor like Microsoft. They could make their money selling legit copies to businesses, and through package deals on new computers.
I have anecdata to support this, actually, though I won't name names. The company in question prided itself on the fact that bootleg copies were being sold for something like $5USD in (I think) Romania, whereas their competitors software was being sold for a few dollars less. For comparison, a single commercial license could set you back over $1000-$4000.
The way I see it, it's the same as offering free or next-to-nothing licenses to students. Not only can students not afford the software, you're competing for the mindshare and the number of people who put "I know how to use this software" on their resume.
Heh, i have a lovely anecdote about those student discounts.
The only guy i knew that had heard anything about Apple before the iPod craze was a hobby musician i grew up alongside. Once he reached college the first thing he did was buy himself a Macbook using the student discount.
I could have sworn that MS had to be dragged into strengthening their anti-copying measures from XP onwards by the BSA.
Never mind that MS tries to argue that their products have a lower total cost of "ownership" for businesses, as potential employees are familiar with MS products by having used them already. Thus they require less training if hired.
I think there is even a statement from Bill Gates somewhere about how he would rather see people use unlicensed MS products than FOSS alternatives.
Autodesk (maker of AutoCAD) gives out several thousand dollar pieces of software to anyone with an .edu these days. That's totally the strategy behind it.
I swear there is a line from Bill Gates about how he would rather see people used unlicensed copies of Microsoft products than look into FOSS alternatives.
Never mind the number of companies that maintain steep student discounts. It sure has hell is not because of the goodness of their hearts.
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This is just one data point, but I wasn't impressed.