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0 pointsmonster_truck2mo ago0 comments

One of my first paid iOS dev jobs was porting a Go game from iPad to iPhone, don't even think the 4 was out yet. It also used computation time based difficulties. By the time I was done writing it, I knew a few tricks I could eke a win out with on 19x19.

When the iPhone 5S came out, I tried it on a whim to check the UI scaling etc... the beginner difficulty on a 9x9 board deleted me. It was grabbing something like 64x more samples per go, the lowest difficulty on the 5S (instant responses) never lost a single game vs the highest difficulty 3GS (15 second turns)

iPhones had a lot of moments like that. Silly bullshit like "what if every pixel was a cell in a collection view" would go from "oh it can barely do 128" to "more responsive than that was, with 2 million" in a few gens.

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plorkyeran2mo ago

One of the minor weird things about iOS development early on was just how fast the transition was from the simulator being dramatically faster than actual devices to the simulator being slower than devices. When I started out you’d get things working nicely in the simulator and then discover it’s an order of magnitude too slow on a phone. Just a few years later and my phone was faster than my laptop until thermal throttling kicked in.

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0 pointsmonster_truck2mo ago0 comments

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plorkyeran2mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse