Comments for Genome Studio

Comment on Hiatus alert by bleep!BOX, a groovebox app for your iPhone » Blog Archive » What’s next?

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:54:44 +0000

[...] at most to do, get the same placement in the app store that the quality apps that might have taken 3 months to do. So please tell your friends, tweet, post stuff online, [...]

Comment on BleepBOX! screenshots by admin

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:38:47 +0000

libNUI, yeah ( http://www.libnui.net/ )

Comment on BleepBOX! screenshots by Christian Moore

Christian Moore — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:49:21 +0000

These are looking very interesting indeed This is built in NUI library aye?

Comment on Day 3 learning objective c by Steve High

Steve High — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:44:23 +0000

The autorelease pool serves as a flushing mechanism, mainly for objects fetched through foundation calls (example: [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity:0]) where you yourself are not allocating these objects. When theyre returned to you, they are set to autorelease (this is the Apple standard and anyone who makes such methods should definitely follow it).
So basically, anything created and set to autorelease within a pool will be released when the pool is released. So basically its just a memory optomization technique.

Exception handling on ObjC is not nearly as useful as in other languages. The stack traces only point you to memory addresses and nothing useful (at least…as far as I can tell). Look up how to enable NSZombie in your code. This will at least give you more insight into those ‘BAD_ACCESS’ errors.

Comment on Thoughts on Objective C by admin

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:44:35 +0000

Dynamic typing is cool (flash is capable of some pretty extensive dynamic typing). It is most helpful for keeping loosely defined connections between your classes (and enabling easier interprocess communication). However, there’s still no reason why [someobj somefunc] couldn’t be written as someobj.somefunc. Flash has dynamic typing and works this way. That said, flash is a scripting language and maybe there was some technical reason why objective C chose not to work do this. The thing that seems to really suck about this scheme is that if you mess up a method call (ie, pass the wrong parameter to a method or call a method that doesn’t exist) then you get a crash with no ability to find out what line the crash occurred on. Also, no error at compile time. This can be a real pain for debugging. Also, with the retain / release scheme, if you release something you shouldn’t have, the crash doesn’t always occur until the memory pool is released (which also is a nightmare to debug).. in C/C++, if you release the same memory twice or access a bad pointer you get a crash right away and it’s pretty easy to debug. The bugs that are hard to catch are buffer overruns since they don’t always cause a crash where you expect. Anyway, I guess I was just kinda hoping that since apple is regarded as being so visionary when it comes to designing devices, that their choice for programming language would offer something over .NET, Java, etc.. My experience is that it has a higher learning curve and is just as crashy, if not more so than other languages I’ve used. Just look at how many iphone apps crash or leak memory. if the iphone was made by microsoft, apple would be all over that. Instead people pretty much ignore it. Strange how that works. But, enough venting - I’m sure in a week or two I’ll be totally comfortable with the language and won’t care about it’s shortcomings.

Comment on Thoughts on Objective C by Dennis

Dennis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:44:31 +0000

Objective-c Language is definitely tough to get used to coming from a JAVA/C#/C++ background. In theory, the reason for the strange syntax (basically passing method names as string parameters) is because of Objective C’s Dynamic Typing which enables Message passing and forwarding. The syntax is therefore based in the languages roots in Small-talk. Hence, the parsing of method calls happens during run-time , leading to further frustration for developers. It should be noted though, that message passing and dynamic typing can be extremely powerful, especially in mobile apps which, I believe, was the reason for incorporating it into the iphone platform.

Comment on Hiatus alert by admin

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:48:18 +0000

Cool, thanks Sebastien, you’ve been very responsive so far I plan on doing a post comparing the two frameworks and the pro’s and cons with both.

Comment on Hiatus alert by Sébastien Métrot

Sébastien Métrot — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:03:02 +0000

Hi,

Just wanted to say that as the author of libNUI I’m glad you give it a try!
We’re very interested about your feedback, particularly as you also are a Juce user. Don’t hesitate to post in our forums or mailling lists if you have questions or problems using some features.

Cheers,

Sébastien

Comment on Module View I by admin

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:16:31 +0000

Yeah, definately. Ideally I’d like to wait until I implement a new design (mostly just look and feel changes).

Comment on Song View IV by admin

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:15:33 +0000

totally agree.. a lot of music UI designs trade ease of use for ‘cuteness’. I think the main advantages of trackers are not that they look like musical spreadsheets of numbers, but that they are easily controllable with the keyboard and that they offer compact representation of notes and parameters. Also, it is fast to edit. The keyboard makes it easy to enter precise values or notes. Trying to click on the right note can sometimes be tedious where it might only require a few clicks of the keyboard. On the other hand, drawing an envelope can be a lot faster using the mouse, which is why I support both methods.

I’d like to provide an alternative to the piano roll which offers a compact note view (like a tracker), but minus the hexadecimal numbers. This will be another input module - people can pick whatever one they prefer.