A friend told me this story: He works for a large company as a software developer. He made a PR to change a compiler setting. It was rejected because the build team believed it would cause them to have to add more machines to the build fleet, and they hadn’t met with the finance team to discuss that, yet. I wouldn’t have thought that changing a compiler setting would require capital expenditures, but here we are.
When your friend makes a PR to change compiler settings, it becomes a committee meeting. If the executive director says "GET RID OF THAT LINE ON THE WEBSITE ITS HURTING OUR BUSINESS" it's a 2 hour meeting between leadership, engineering, and legal, and communications and its done.
The speed of the change is proportional to personal authority within the organization of the person requesting the change. When ASUS says "we're working on it" what they mean is "leadership doesn't give a shit".
Case in point: My father was an EE at GM in the 70s. He told me one time that the company knew of a problem in some model from that era where when you made a hard left turn with the air conditioning on, the engine would stall. Fixing it would have increased the cost of each car by 15 cents, so they chose not to fix it. These models were later recalled. I don’t know whether the cost of the recall was more than the cost to have just done it right in the first place.
I work in the video world, and video editors have been asking for something like Final Cut Pro on the iPad for ages. They often used iMovie but wanted something more, so they'd start in iMovie on their iPad because they had it on them, then later when they hit something they couldn't do in iMovie, they'd move the project to their Mac and import it into FCP. It was a bit of a pain. And obviously Apple isn't the only one who thinks that. Davinci released an iPad app a few months ago. (Or announced it, anyway. Not sure if it's available yet.)
For fun, I've used GarageBand on the iPad, and it's great! I use Logic on my Mac for actually writing and recording, but I do think it would be great to have something more powerful than GarageBand on my iPad. Sometimes I hit a wall on the iPad and have to move over to Logic on the computer. It would be nice to not have to switch like that right when I'm in the middle of working.
FWIW, the iPad is velocity sensitive. I haven't tried Logic Pro on it yet, but with Garage Band, it definitely plays louder if you hit it harder (for patches that support it). Some software synths in GB also have a pseudo-aftertouch where you slide your finger up after hitting the key to invoke aftertouch.
That said, I don't like playing on a screen. I'm a long-time piano and keyboard player so I just hook up an external instrument. But I was pleasantly surprised by what I could do just on the iPad with GarageBand.
I wonder if this works by measuring the size of your touch (i.e., how much your finger "splats" when it touches) or using the accelerometers/gyroscope or what.
Regarding aftertouch, it does support it in a way (and it's shown in the video). For many synths, after you press a key on the on-screen keyboard, if you hold it and move your finger up towards the back end of the key, it gets translated into aftertouch. GarageBand on iPad has supported this as long as I've been using it (a few years). I don't know if every synth supports it, but there are definitely some who do.
Thank you so much for posting this sane response. As the spouse of someone who can't walk due to a disability (and also can't move themselves in a wheelchair), reading these discussions where people assume everyone is young, able-bodied, and lives in great weather gets really tiresome. It often feels like they're intentionally not arguing in good faith because some of the points are so obviously incorrect.
I don't think that's an assumption (it's certainly not one for me). Bikes are great, most folks could use bikes. Some folks cannot, and we should ensure our spaces are available to all of us.
And I deal with a similar issue in my own life -- not due to a disability, but due to another form of discrimination. Believe me, I'm well aware that spaces aren't designed for everyone. If I gave the impression that bikes were the only or universal option, then of course I apologize!
I’ve been using Kagi for almost a year now and love it. I’m on the early-adopter plan, but just checked and haven’t been anywhere near my included number of searches in the last 6 months. I probably do some searches with DDG on my work machine, so I’d probably being doing less than twice as many as I actually am if I set up my work machine to use Kagi. (But I like to keep work and home stuff separate.) Overall very impressed with it and also using the Orion browser and loving it.
So much this. Metal is so elegant to use. I've tried reading through Vulkan docs and tutorials, and it's so confusing.
Also, this seems like some major revisionist history:
>This leads us to the other problem, the one Vulkan developed after the fact. The Apple problem. The theory on Vulkan was it would change the balance of power where Microsoft continually released a high-quality cutting-edge graphics API and OpenGL was the sloppy open-source catch up. Instead, the GPU vendors themselves would provide the API, and Vulkan would be the universal standard while DirectX would be reduced to a platform-specific oddity. But then Apple said no. Apple (who had already launched their own thing, Metal) announced not only would they never support Vulkan, they would not support OpenGL, anymore.
What I remember happening was that Apple was all-in on helping Khronos come up with what would eventually become Vulkan, but Khronos kept dragging their feet on getting something released. Apple finally got fed up and said, "We need something shipping and we need it now." So they just went off and did it themselves. Direct X 12 seemed like a similar response from Microsoft. It always seemed to me that Vulkan had nobody but themselves to blame for these other proprietary libraries being adopted.
> What I remember happening was that Apple was all-in on helping Khronos come up with what would eventually become Vulkan, but Khronos kept dragging their feet on getting something released. Apple finally got fed up and said, "We need something shipping and we need it now." So they just went off and did it themselves.
This is not really how it happened. AMD released Mantle back in 2013 based off their experience with game console specific APIs. From what I remember, AMD expressed some interest in Mantle becoming a cross-vendor standard, but were a bit wishy-washy early on. GDC 2014 then saw some AMD talks on Mantle, the announcement of DirectX 12 from Microsoft and the AZDO talk. Apple then announced Metal in June of that year. The "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative" kicked off around that same time with a public call for participation in August. Apple did join the working group at some point (they're one of the many companies listed in a slide from the announcement presentation), but I don't see any evidence that they were ever a major player in the standard.
Now obviously, Vulkan was not an option for Apple in 2014 when they announced Metal since the project hadn't really gotten started yet, but I don't see any evidence that they pushed Khronos to get started on a replacement for OpenGL earlier either. They were also lagging behind on OpenGL support for years before they announced Metal (they stopped at 4.1 which was released in 2010) and notably almost none of the techniques presented in the AZDO talk worked on Mac OS for this reason. I'm sure part of the reason they decided to go their own way with Metal is that you can move faster as a single company, but I think it would be naive to assume that making cross-platform development between iOS and Android harder wasn't a factor.
Additionally given how Long Peaks went, had it not been for AMD giving Mantle to Khronos, they would still be arguing to this day how OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like.
I think your doing your own revionist history here. The rumors are all that Apple is the one that blocked Khronos' initial attempts with the "Long Peaks" proposal that was supposed to become OpenGL 3.
And while Metal was released in 2014, Apple had already stopped updating OpenGL way back in 2010.
Apple is also supposedly engaged in a legal dispute with Khronos, which is why they so vehemently rejected SPIR-V in webgpu.
Mantle (which is what became Vulkan) also came out before Metal did (2013 vs. 2014)
> Direct X 12 seemed like a similar response from Microsoft
That seems like a stretch since nobody ever expected Microsoft to do anything aligned with Khronos. They'd been doing their own thing for a decade+, why would you think DX12 was anything different?
> What I remember happening was that Apple was all-in on helping Khronos come up with what would eventually become Vulkan, but Khronos kept dragging their feet on getting something released. Apple finally got fed up and said, "We need something shipping and we need it now."
How is that evidence that Apple ever tried to engage with Khronos on a Metal-like API, though?
Seeing as Apple had already stopped updating OpenGL versions about 4 years before the release of Metal, it seems more likely that Apple never planned on working with Khronos on anything.
Do a search for Apple & Khronos and you'll find a lot more examples of spats between them over the last decade than anything else. Including an ongoing legal dispute.
You also won't find any hint of involvement from Apple in anything Vulkan-related. Or really anything else Khronos-related. They've even pulled out of OpenCL - the thing that only Apple ever cared about in the first place.
No idea why they are still a member of the group. Possibly they just haven't been kicked out yet, possibly they still want to retain voting input for something (like webgl).
For the same reason Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are, they care about specific parts of Khronos, not all of it, not for all their products.
Sony cares about Khronos on Android phones, not so much on Playstation.
Nintendo supports OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan on the Switch, with NVN as the main API. During the previous generations they started to support GL like APIs, not really 1:1 to the standards.
Microsoft was the main contributor to the initial set of GlTF 2.0 improvements, and BabylonJS is the first browser engine to driver most of the WebGPU efforts, and they care about Khronos APIs in the context of WSL.
Apple once cared about Quickdraw 3D, OpenGL was the path out of the tiny market they were in and what NeXTSTEP used anyway, nowadays all relevant game engines support Metal anyway.
I know people below are disputing your retelling based on how they externally viewed development, but from talking to people who were in the development committees at the time, your retelling is the one that matches up best.
I'm no more a fan of this than I was of Google trying to shove Chrome in my face any time I used to visit any of their properties with a different browser. These 2 deserve each other. For now I just avoid both of their products.
