Jason Evans:
The fundamental approaches taken by every implementation I have found in the literature are to either 1) box all floating point numbers, or 2) to use a combination of boxed floating point numbers and untagged floating point numbers. As one might imagine, (1) can cause serious performance degradation for numerically intensive programs, due to the need to create new boxed objects to store the result of each floating point computation. As for (2), there are numerous papers that discuss various compilation strategies for finding opportunities to use untagged unboxed floating point numbers, but these techniques appear to to be limited to particular problem domains, since they mainly try to convert vectors of floating point numbers to be untagged and unboxed. Nowhere have I found any mention whatsoever of using tagged unboxed floating point numbers.
Floating Point Programming
Craig Hockenberry:
Both of these key interface elements, navigation and tools, are in fixed locations on the iPhone screen. If you’re trying to develop a “sweet” web application for this device, you’ll quickly find that you can’t follow these standard conventions. That’s because there is no fixed positioning in Safari for the iPhone.
David Young:
Yeah, the idea of storing your software company’s defect database on someone else’s servers is kinda scary to me too, at least in a commercial environment. I guess at some point the decision to outsource defect-tracking comes down to a cost-benefit analysis in which you weigh the cost saved by not paying in-house IT to maintain your defect system against the potential damages caused should your critical data leak out due to either deliberate action or indirect negligence on the part of the vendor.
John Gruber:
My first must-fix annoyance is that Mail’s Reply feature is hard-wired to encourage top-posting, an uncouth and illiterate practice.
Here’s an AppleScript I ginned up to fix this by removing the blank line at the top of each response and moving the insertion point to the bottom of the message. (It uses GUI Scripting, and so requires Access for Assistive Devices to be turned on.)
It looks like it will require some adjustment for signatures, though.
The comprehensive iPhone review from Ars Technica is now available, with lots of real photos and screenshots. I wish more reviews didn’t use the press photos.
