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Apple WWDC20

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115 pointsaspenmayer54 comments

When I gave a demo of Kaleida ScriptX DreamScape at WWDC in 1995, the rule was that if your demo crashed, you had to do push-ups. Is that still the case?

My improvisational demo briefly came off the rails and froze up for a few seconds while I was switching between Netscape, Director, WebStar, BBEdit, and ScriptX, it had an attrotious frame rate, and butt-ugly programmer graphics, my screen fell in at the 6:00 mark, then a butterfly hijacked control of the presentation, and an insane rube-golbergesque robot went out of control, started bouncing around the screen, and broke apart into pieces, but it never actually crashed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM

That demo was pretty cool! I remember the wonder of that era well, and your demo captured well how hard it was to get to those magical ‘wow’ moments, and how worth it that it was, as least the times worth remembering well.

Thank you -- It was an exciting time, working with some amazing people!

Here's something I wrote earlier on HN, in the discussion about Randy Nelson, one of the Flying Karamotzov Brothers, who worked at Kaleida teaching developers ScriptX! He recently retired from his job "teaching leadership-as-jazz to Apple staff worldwide."

Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers (cake.co)

https://www.cake.co/conversations/w3j7jDp/that-time-steve-jo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776444

>Randy Nelson is awesome and brilliant! He deeply understands programming, teaching, performance and entertainment, and is really great to work with and learn from. I was very lucky that we worked together on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs, where he was in charge of training developers to program ScriptX. Yes, of course, he would actually juggle in class!

Here is one of his few public apperances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8

>Pixar's Randy Nelson on the Collaborative Age

>The former Dean of Pixar University, Randy Nelson, explains what schools must do to prepare students (and themselves) for new models in the workplace. To learn more about collaboration in education, visit https://www.edutopia.org/integrated-studies

>1. You want to find people with mastery, true depth.

>2. The problem is, that isn’t enough. You need people who had failed and recovered. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

>3. Breadth, meaning curiosity about things beyond what you’re deep in.

>4. Collaboration. Not a synonym for cooperation, but the ability to magnify others.

And here's Randy talking about Programming as the fourth "R":

CUE 2012 Closing Keynote - Randy Nelson - Programming as the fourth "R"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_sYSYJfGg

Here is a white paper I wrote about the underlying dynamic web stuff I developed for ScriptX that's shown in the DreamScape demo:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...

ScriptX and the World Wide Web: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"

Thanks for dropping all this knowledge, experience, and most of all, perspective with your history lesson. You’re a star.

Goodness. Friend of mine worked with him at NeXT.

And I'm pretty sure I was at your WWDC demo. That was a wild summer, everything seemed to be happening at once.

This demo brought back memories of being a teenager in the 90s. Wired magazine with the number of people on the Internet written on the spine, people and companies that saw the Internet as an amazing new medium but didn't know how it would work out but still did it anyway. Crazy ideas that might just work, though many didn't. The lingering fear that the government was going to shut down the Ineternet at any point, but the feeling that there was a community that would fight against that.

Thanks for the flashback :)

Nice demo man. That's inspiring!

That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a computer do

This is why I read HN.

There have already been three threads about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22568337

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22568601

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23081500

So obviously we should bury this one as a dupe, but I can't, because DonHopkins' comment is too good. damn you don

Since you’re here and mentioned it’s a dupe, how’s karma sharing[1] coming along?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346089

I wrote that 15 days ago. That is a blink of an eye in our slothlike progress.

And that, my friend, is why a dupe is never a dupe.

Unless we've all been duped!

... we have to go duper?

(I’ll see myself out...)

I think in future this will gain momentum. We had one of my co-workers attend this event and he was super happy with the experience. But if you think of it you are flying 1000s of people all over the global, hotel, cabs .... way too much money spent. Also less carbon footprint :-)

Also, a few thousand randomly (or not) selected is not in any way good when the target audience is more than a few million

> Here’s the lineup.

> WWDC20 brings together millions of Apple developers around the world. Join us for a fully packed program to gain early access to the future of Apple platforms and engage with Apple engineers.

> June 22-26

> Requirements. Watching session videos and viewing related documentation and sample code is available to anyone. To request a lab appointment or to post questions for Apple engineers about WWDC20 content on the forums, you must be a member of the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program as of June 11, 2020 at 9 a.m. PDT, or a Swift Student Challenge winner. Your membership must be current, valid, and in good standing from this date until the end of WWDC20.

Is this the reason why my developer account renewal request has been put in pending for almost a month now? Too many new registrations?

I don’t work for Apple, so I don’t have any specific knowledge on that issue. I would try reaching them through the official channels, and if that doesn’t work, official Apple Twitter account DM.

Surely I did reach out to them via emails and phone calls, several times in the past few weeks. It was not helpful at all as they just tell me to wait and "we'll update you when there is more info".

Haven't thought of Twitter DM tho, I'm gonna try it. Thanks for the tip.

FWIW, mine was renewed (automatically) literally 3 days ago.

This is the strangest apocalypse ever.

No, what would be WWDC17 : https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/101/

It bugged me because that isn’t what would happen to your iOS devices if the App Store went down, to my knowledge. I don’t know what would happen but likely nothing at all immediately. Apps don’t suddenly disappear if you’re in airplane mode indefinitely. Even app revokes wouldn’t affect you if you’re not online, and there are degrees of app revokes. Some just remove the app from the App Store, but preserve the ability to reinstall for those who already have the app. More strict are those which remove the app from the App Store entirely, with no ability to reinstall. Those are extremely rare cases, but I disagree with the concept on principle except in cases of malware or other abuse, as determined by me. Currently, Apple decides.

Still, all those apps disappearing ground my gears.

/rant

What apps do they not let owners reinstall? I got iDOS on my iPhone during a brief stint on the App Store and was able to redownload it on all my new devices until they dropped 32 bit support.

It was a pretty cool party trick to run Windows 95 on my phone without jailbreaking it, and it seems like that's exactly the kind of app they would remove permanently. Additionally, I could use the DOS prompt to poke around the system files (though it was read-only).

That’s a great question. I believe that apps which have been deleted from the App Store by the developer cannot be reinstalled through the Purchased tab in App Store. I’m looking for specific examples, but so far all I’ve seen which aren’t reinstallable in App Store are either 32-bit as you mentioned or removed by the developer.

Thank God they are finally replacing the developer forum software.

There's a WWDC app for every platform, except for the Mac.

After all the fuss over Project Catalyst/Marzipan last WWDC, it does not inspire confidence if you cannot even bother to port this to Mac.

Just an observation, it doesn't matter to me personally.

I think Safari natively supports the functionality that the apps provide in-browser.

So why build an app? iOS/iPadOS users have Safari too.

Short answer: iOS Safari isn’t macOS Safari. Not sure if a more recent document like this exists to explain differences between the two.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2010...

That document is definitely very out of date, I don’t think any of it is even relevant any more. The unsupported features listed were implemented a long time ago. Safari does handle mouse events (e.g. hover) as best as those concepts translate to a touch platform.

On iPadOS 13 it actually goes as far as pretending to be a Mac. Developers have resorted to using hacky client-side detection such as checking for touch support to determine if they’re on an actual Mac, or an iPad pretending to be a Mac. (https://stackoverflow.com/a/58064750)

Pretty much they don’t want you to treat iPad as a big iPhone, but if they can pull that off with iPad, it implies both iPad and iPhone Safari is a desktop-class browser with almost complete feature parity.

Noticed that as well... It’s disappointing.

> Every platform except the Mac

You make it sound like there are apps for Windows, Linux, and Android, and anything else. There's just an iOS app, and it's there because the WWDC app for iOS has been there for years, especially useful in a physical conference where you're bringing your mobile device with you.

For real computers, a website is just fine. And they probably don't care much about Android anyway.

I should have said every device, not platform.

The website is fine. I'm sure it's fine on iOS, too. But it was supposed to be simple to port iOS apps to MacOS, and they didn't bother with their own developer conference app, if only for the reason to lead by example.

Instead, my question is why are they even featuring a mobile app so prominently at all for a remote conference.

Inertia, most probably. (And it’ll probably be a better, snappier experience than the website on mobile.)

But why even build a native app even if it is easy? It adds no value, and is another thing to test. The web experience is fine for this.

Sure, but the same could be said for iPadOS and iOS which have native clients.

Rambo made an unofficial one:

https://wwdc.io/

There's no official one, but this one is pretty good: https://wwdc.io

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