And I just was reminded of another reason to avoid mobile apps when possible. Maintenance cost is high, especially on iOS. They release OS updates several times a year that will break your **** unless you have someone dedicated to staying ahead of that.

I'd imagine so. I'm not the most typical smartphone user but the vast majority of "apps" I use (if not 100%) are things I downloaded from the app store and not something I use in a browser.

Our app had around $10k in sales, then an iOS release broke it and the guy who owned all that stuff took forever to fix it. After that no more sales. Also our marketing person was a huge turd.

It's possible there are still sales and the owner dude is just keeping the money. But since there have been no reviews I doubt it. The sucky thing is the app worked fine on the new iOS. You just have to jump through all the hoops to re-certify it before Apple will put it back in the store.

+1000

I play around with iOS development in my spare time. The investment required just to keep up with the updates feels like its growing every year. Even if you try and stay focused on a niche, it's a pain to stay current.

Purposefully breaking **** from one update to another sounds like something people would accuse Microsoft of doing not Apple.

Really? MS has been going out of their way for years to make stuff backwards compatible to a fault. I'm sure they inadvertently broke plenty.

Apple is the company well known for torching everything from time to time. Member when they switched CPU architectures?

Yeah, Apple definitely has the rep of screwing over people not keeping up with them.

the latter. again, highly dependent on what you're doing. some things need native hardware integration. but for many things, the only advantage apps offer is that untechnical people have been trained to "just look in the app store" and also to take you less seriously if "you don't even have an app." that *may* be a legit reason to make one, but it isn't necessarily.

and vs a good web dev making a mobile site, developing iphone and android apps can easily be 10x cost and time, so just keep that in mind in the cost / benefit analysis. it's also much easier (and instant) to update a mobile site.

EDIT: you can also enable your mobile site to be savable to the ios homescreen, which means users open it from what looks like a normal app icon, and the browser chrome is gone, so it feels much more like an app. You just have to get them to do it... it's no harder than texting a link to someone or doing an app store install, but it's not something ppl are familiar with.

what do you guys think programming will be like in 50 years? programming languages, in relation to computer architecture, design patterns, etc

Either the singularity will have happened and nobody writes code anymore, or we'll all still be using C++.

These are all reasons people use Cordova and not some fringe crossplatform framework or building native apps.

All obsolete of course.

FWIW increases in processor speed will be THE key factor in my view. Programming languages can evolve towards more powerful resulting in making it easier to manage complexity. Right now processor speeds have pretty much maxed out and Moore's Law is probably not viable at least this point.

vi

tabs

The rest is fluff.

Cordova is great and useful, until its not.

There are pros and cons to native development vs Cordova / Phonegap.

Our app was built in 2007 or 2008.

To fix the internet, we must kill anonymity

https://medium.com/@walterisaacson/t...aee#.o8mgqv5yi

I've thought about this a lot, how one would go about creating a sort of secure internet, but is it really possible? MACs can be spoofed, etc.

Programmmers will be replaced by computers and ai. Or the skills will become so universal they will be like assembly line or fast food workers. Or become obsolete like coal miners.

Anyone have any links to how react determines when to update the DOM? In my use, it's clear that every call to render updates the shadow Dom, but its batching of real Dom updates is strange.

For example I have 3 requests the fire off serially and each calls setState and results in a call to render. Nothing abnormal there. But if I chain a fourth request, the render from the third request only performs a partial Dom update until the fourth request renders.

componentWillReceiveProps is an interesting method to use for that stuff.

Yeah that's what kicks off the series of requests. I'm in the process of refactoring so we only do one call to setState, but this partial render weirdness got me interested in how that batching of real DOM updates happens.

https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture

react does weird rendering stuff and is still slower than a bunch of simpler vdom libraries like snabbdom.

I agree it will be AI or very ubiquitous. I think ubiquity is more likely than a pure AI but then again 50 years is a long time so who knows.

I highly doubt ubiquity of skill. We can't even get meaningful literacy and basic math skills taught to a significant portion of the population and we've been chasing ubiquity of those skills for a century.

Programming is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than either of those skills.

Far more likely is that tooling gets so strong that programming becomes drastically simplified, but even this is difficult to imagine from where we are.

AI is possible of course but seems a long way off. And I think we'll see global economic collapse and or another world war in that time frame that could delay any progress.

Grim possibility, but I expect a world war would vastly accelerate AI development