Posts

Showing posts from October, 2019

Swift vs Kotlin

Image
Dropbox wrote a candid and insightful post titled  The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android . It's a common dream to have "one codebase to rule them all" but reality intruded, not only for DropBox, but on projects I have worked on as well. Dropbox needed to support both Android and iOS devices, so instead of writing for each platform in Java and Objective C respectively, they labored to produce a layer of C++ code that worked for both.  But success was hard to come by, and in their own words: By writing code in a non-standard fashion, we took on overhead that we would have not had to worry about had we stayed with the widely used platform defaults. This overhead ended up being more expensive than just writing the code twice. I would add, from my own experience, that a "generic code layer" targets the lowest common denominator, and fails to take full advantage of native device features.  Add that Apple and Google are continuously

On The Road To macOS Catalina, Take The Scenic Route

Image
I've upgraded to macOS Catalina and there's a lot to like.  There's also a lot to be concerned about, and I recommend only upgrading if you have a second machine running the older macOS Mojave.