_alastair

5 ms·

1.
by _alastair 9mo ago
It’s fascinating to see so many implementations targeting the same thing, along with the crazy variation in runtime size. I’d love to see memory usage comparisons too but I suppose you’d need to establish what you’re actually measuring firs
2.
by _alastair 1y ago
Thanks! I'm hoping to continue down this path and write up some thoughts on how you might actually achieve seamless in-app webviews at some point but, y'know... time. In the meantime (hey, it's already a thread of self-promot
3.
by _alastair 1y ago
"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.
4.
Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content(alastair.is)
356 points by _alastair 1y ago|196 comments
5.
What happens when you use a CSS transform(alastair.is)
2 points by _alastair 2y ago|0 comments
6.
What happens when you use a CSS transform?(alastair.is)
1 points by _alastair 2y ago|0 comments
7.
by _alastair 7y ago
This is interesting! If anyone from WebKit is in the comments, can you provide link(s) to the bugs discussing the bytecode caching API? I'd love to take a look but my Bugzilla search skills are evidently weak.
8.
by _alastair 7y ago
I was part of a team that used web notifications as an experiment in sending live election results to people's devices: https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/genera... It's a pretty fascinatin
9.
by _alastair 9y ago
The project I'm working on doesn't use any UI (that's still native), so I'd disregarded Flutter - but perhaps that's not fair. Looking at it, it seems to have straightforward ways to use native functionality, but I&
10.
by _alastair 9y ago
This is a really interesting development. I've been poking around with making a cross-platform library lately, and had settled on Go because it does such a great job of building for iOS and Android simply (though the go bind tool), but
11.
Ask HN: Best language for cross-platform mobile (non-UI) code? (Go? Haxe? C++?)
5 points by _alastair 9y ago|2 comments
12.
by _alastair 9y ago
I have a tiny insight into this, as I've been working on a Service Worker implementation for iOS webviews (i.e. in apps, not Safari): https://github.com/gdnmobilelab/SWWebView I'd disagree with your assertion
13.
SWWebView: An Experiment in Adding Service Worker APIs to an iOS WKWebView(github.com)
1 points by _alastair 9y ago|0 comments
14.
by _alastair 9y ago
The main reason is that the phone will download the image each time you post a notification, and with 650 alerts throughout the night (for 650 constituencies) the user would end up downloading a lot of data with very little to show for it (
15.
by _alastair 9y ago
Interesting, I'll have to take a look. Thanks!
16.
by _alastair 9y ago
Huh! That's a really fascinating library. My gut instinct is still that it would be a heavy lift, though. Without the Canvas API in the middle you'd need to reimplement pixel by pixel drawing of different shape/curves (PngPon
17.
by _alastair 9y ago
You can't use an SVG as an image in a notification. A real shame as it would have solved all the device pixel ratio problems, but the SVG spec is absolutely huge (and includes stuff like animation) so I'm not overly surprised th
18.
by _alastair 9y ago
> especially since the block sizes are undocumentedly little-endian, while everything else is big-endian. Yes! That stumped me for a long time. Along the way to solving it I found this great Stack Overflow answer where the creator of ADL
19.
by _alastair 9y ago
Author here. The post is a combination of two separate things: creating a PNG file via JavaScript typed arrays, then using that PNG in an (Android-specific) web notification. I added a subtitle to the Medium post, but should have considered
20.
Generating Images in JavaScript Without Using the Canvas API(medium.com)
4 points by _alastair 9y ago|0 comments
21.
Accessing Native iOS APIs from JavaScript, via NativeScript(medium.com)
2 points by _alastair 11y ago|0 comments
22.
by _alastair 11y ago
I just checked my e-mail - it looks like we decided that we were definitely going to do it approximately two weeks before the first round went live. That's not typical but not necessarily unusual, if that's a sentence that even ma
23.
by _alastair 11y ago
Glad you noticed that! It's proof of the difference a great designer (in this case, Rumsey Taylor of our News Design team) can make. As a developer it can be quite humbling to realise how many seemingly tiny yet actually really importa
24.
by _alastair 11y ago
I hate to throw to Wikipedia but I won't be able to do a better description than they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering
25.
by _alastair 11y ago
I think he enjoys a challenge. Case in point, the last photo in this set: http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot...
26.
by _alastair 11y ago
Thanks for the question, pervycreeper! The concept is not new at all - Spot the Ball is a competition that ran in UK (and possible other) newspapers going back at least as far as the 70s. It was a cash prize competition and was pretty popul
27.
by _alastair 11y ago
I'm trying to come up with a good joke for this, Dan, and I'm failing. So I will tell you that last year Nicholas Kristof scored a respectable 54%: https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/posts/10150426093994999
28.
by _alastair 11y ago
This isn't really my area of expertise - we have people at the company dedicated to studying this kind of thing in far more detail than I know how, who may end up reading this - hi! - so I don't want to speak out of turn. But in m
29.
by _alastair 11y ago
...sort of? That's kind of the genius of puzzles like these (we can't take credit for inventing it - Spot the Ball has existed for a long time in the analog world) is that it's a mix of skill and luck, so you can fool yoursel
30.
by _alastair 11y ago
The accuracy is calculated compared to other readers, so if you all clicked on the wrong corner you can still be better than 80% of them! I mostly did it this way because there's no hard number that makes sense here - we don't kno

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