Most modern games don’t ask the player to interpret the wry smile on another character’s face. The narratives are built on enjoyment and, as games are chiefly meant for recreation rather than as a test of emotional intelligence, there’s nothing wrong with that. Old-time RPGs did not adhere to that idea: back then, “fun” was what you made it and you were not guaranteed to have any.

Does it matter if people don’t finish games any more?

In One to Watch’s film querying at risk I mentioned that the Freebase API that One to Watch relies on was going offline on June 30th.

I’ve submitted an update to Apple which migrates the application to use TMdB’s API. I’ve been using this for the past couple of months without issue, and it was getting close to June 30th, so I decided it needed to be submitted.

Please accept this update :)

I am draconian when it comes to code formatting. Combined with an “I’ll know it when I see it” attitude, this can become irritating. In exasperation, a colleague suggested using clang-format to automatically format our Objective C codebase. Their proposal:

I’ll get the tool’s formatting specification as close to what you like as possible. In return, you agree that you’ll accept what the tool produces.

So, quite some time ago, we introduced a clang-formatting file to our repository.

Back in the late 1990s, AOL tried to create an alternative internet. It was roundly derided, and everyone instead used its sign-up CDs as drink coasters.

As far as I can see, Facebook is now trying very hard to create an alternative internet for its users, one which threatens to be more successful.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser[…]

I was prototyping using TMDb for film search in One to Watch to solve the problem of Freebase’s API going away. While doing this I noticed that the memory usage of the app was going up significantly every time I opened a film’s details view.

Using the Allocations tool in Instruments, I could see that the memory was increasing in a staircase like manner. Looking at the memory listing shown in Instruments, it was clear that this stepping was caused by decoded PNG images, used to display the cover art. Each time the details view was shown, another 3MB PNG image appeared in Instruments.