[Q] Do you guys memorize the frameworks you use? - General Topics

I've been an iOS developer for about 5 years. There are still things that NSString and NSArray do that I didn't know they could. All optional attributes and behaviors that I haven't seen, because I've never actually sat down and memorized all of the optionals and capabilities of the NSString class. I know the most of the basic stuff off the top of my head, but I typically google for the fastest way to do it if I can't on the fly. My question is: Do you guys have most of the classes of your most commonly used frameworks memorized? (For me it would be Cocoa Touch). Does this have any effect on the classification of "level" of programmer you are? Technically I'm a senior and do well at my job but the above makes me wonder... Who's on the same page, if anyone?

Related

Favorite calculator?

I guess I'm getting older than I realized. When I was in school there were scientific calculators and adding machines... both allowed to do long calculations with reasonable ease but it in different ways. Now there is a third class... pathetically cheap calculators, which unfortunately seems to be the class of calculator that comes on these devices. Maybe I was just somehow never aware of these because.. well they are bad?
All I want is a calculator that when given
2+4/2=
replies with the number 4, not 3. If you don't understand why then never mind. I don't need trig. I don't need calculus or hex or lots of memories... I just want it to know that it should divide and multiply before adding and subtracting. This is programatically not even as hard as it first seems... not that it even seems hard, and it allows to do long arithmetic calculations without needing to stop to write stuff down or start over or deal with memories just becuase you ran into a fraction somewhere.
So there seem to be several "scientific" calculators programs out there, does anyone have a favorite?
I don't want alot of screen space wasted with advanced features (although i don't mind them if screen real estate is somehow cleverly managed)... I just want to be able to do basic arithmetic in a reasonable way.
Use 1-calc Bro, It Works Just Like That 2+4/2=4
I found MyCalculator. It is free. It is simple. It does math correctly. It has an unusually easy way of doing memory/recall which is good, because on the downside you must use the memories to operate on the last answer. The keys aren't huge, but still thumbable. There is still room for me to find a more perfect solution, but this one will work quite well for me.
also check out http://wiki.xda-developers.com/inde...Instruments' calculators under Windows Mobile and http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Emulating HP's calculators on Windows Mobile
I use HiCalc. It is not free and it's not cheap, but it is really great calculator if you need something that you can call scientific. In new version you can change between different calculator pages with left/right gestures. You can even see how would your equation look like if it was written on the paper.
If you need something more advanced (like 2D/3D graphing, advanced equations...) you can try SpaceTime.

Possible convert my iPhone-app to Android?

Hi!
Ive just finished an iPhone-application, and Im looking into the possibility to convert it to an android-application.
Let me tell you the basic structure of the app:
- It has a simple drill-down-menu, with three levels of lists. Pressing a list-item will bring you deeper down into the hierarchy, and pressing a back-button will take you up a step.
- At the bottom of the hierarchy is a webview that loads a unique webpage depending on the hierarchical path the user has taken. These web-pages (html and javascript) are all localized on the device so it never goes online.
- The webpages has two main resources: images, and sound (mp3). The sound should be playable from within the webpage. All these resources are also loaded from the device.
- When exiting the app, it should save its location and when relaunched it should reopen that location.
As you can see, its a pretty simple application. Im wondering if anybody could detail a little what I need for this to come alive on Android. Perhaps the application-layout Im after is so generic, even, that there is a template for this?
My background as a programmer is mostly C++ and C#, so Im more at home with the Java-syntax than the awful Objective-C that iPhone uses.
So far Ive installed the development-environment, and have tried out the basic "Hello Android"-sample. Thats about it for the moment.
porting your iphone add to android
hi there,
i'm a android programmer and did many games already. you can see my games at:
not sure you still need help to port your iphone app to android. may be you can send me the source code. i can do it for you. very easy for me.
Tony Chan
[email protected]
Android uses java syntax and java libraries
so if you like java, then you would probably like android
layouts are done in XML
chingy1788 said:
Android uses java syntax and java libraries
so if you like java, then you would probably like android
layouts are done in XML
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hehe well said
I don't think anybody can tell you what you need to do. Just start by reading through all of this: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html and you should be able to handle this.
Note: your application appears to be trivial.
One thing that I suggest is that you forget about locally-stored web pages and just rewrite those pages in Android/Java. The reason I suggest this is that unlike apple, you can't make any assumptions about what browser the user has installed (if any), or what rendering engine their browser happens to have, or javascript engine, etc. There are AT LEAST three different rendering engines in use on Android, including khtml, gecko, and presto. There are at LEAST two different JAVASCRIPT engines, including SquirrelFish and V8, and soon you will be able to add SpiderMonkey to this list (when Firefox launches). And no, you can't force your application to call on a particular browser since this would violate the modularity designed into the platform.
DANNEMAN101 said:
Hi!
Ive just finished an iPhone-application, and Im looking into the possibility to convert it to an android-application.
Let me tell you the basic structure of the app:
- It has a simple drill-down-menu, with three levels of lists. Pressing a list-item will bring you deeper down into the hierarchy, and pressing a back-button will take you up a step.
- At the bottom of the hierarchy is a webview that loads a unique webpage depending on the hierarchical path the user has taken. These web-pages (html and javascript) are all localized on the device so it never goes online.
- The webpages has two main resources: images, and sound (mp3). The sound should be playable from within the webpage. All these resources are also loaded from the device.
- When exiting the app, it should save its location and when relaunched it should reopen that location.
As you can see, its a pretty simple application. Im wondering if anybody could detail a little what I need for this to come alive on Android. Perhaps the application-layout Im after is so generic, even, that there is a template for this?
My background as a programmer is mostly C++ and C#, so Im more at home with the Java-syntax than the awful Objective-C that iPhone uses.
So far Ive installed the development-environment, and have tried out the basic "Hello Android"-sample. Thats about it for the moment.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
look at the NDK
Freedomcaller said:
look at the NDK
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The NDK is *NOT APPLICABLE*.
Why don't you create a converter from iPhone to Android? There are few Italian app.. only this is better than Android for Italian user.. but I love Android!
I have an app that has been created for android, and I need help creating it for the iphone. I'll share the source code if someone will create the app for me please.
DANNEMAN101 said:
Hi!
Ive just finished an iPhone-application, and Im looking into the possibility to convert it to an android-application.
Let me tell you the basic structure of the app:
- It has a simple drill-down-menu, with three levels of lists. Pressing a list-item will bring you deeper down into the hierarchy, and pressing a back-button will take you up a step.
- At the bottom of the hierarchy is a webview that loads a unique webpage depending on the hierarchical path the user has taken. These web-pages (html and javascript) are all localized on the device so it never goes online.
- The webpages has two main resources: images, and sound (mp3). The sound should be playable from within the webpage. All these resources are also loaded from the device.
- When exiting the app, it should save its location and when relaunched it should reopen that location.
As you can see, its a pretty simple application. Im wondering if anybody could detail a little what I need for this to come alive on Android. Perhaps the application-layout Im after is so generic, even, that there is a template for this?
My background as a programmer is mostly C++ and C#, so Im more at home with the Java-syntax than the awful Objective-C that iPhone uses.
So far Ive installed the development-environment, and have tried out the basic "Hello Android"-sample. Thats about it for the moment.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it possible to post this in the Q&A and not development section?
sparksco said:
Is it possible to post this in the Q&A and not development section?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is from the first half of 2009, I highly doubt that they care where it should be posted (now).
Converting iPhone app to Android will be greate.
I would like to have All My Recipes iphone app in my Galaxy Tab
It was be great if somebody can port the secret of mana game from iphone to android ! =)

Interest for WisBar Advance Desktop

I'm interested to know how many people would like to see a WisBar Advance Desktop build for Android. Just let me know. Thanks!
+1
I think WAD was a very cool launcher in WMobile
Fantastic loved it on win mob
Sent from my Pulse Mini using Tapatalk
I loved wisbar!
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using Tapatalk
Well, so far it's looking like there's at least a little interest. I'll get started.
Count me in a interested. Never ran wm without it!
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk
Its funny that you mention it. I just visited the wisbar forums thinking there may be something about it coming to android. Before switching to android I had purchased and used Wisbar and WAD. As good as WAD for WM was, it just never really worked perfectly. And thats only because of the limitation of WM and the hardware not WAD itself.
I think android is the perfect platform that would be ready to embrace WAD. I will be looking forward to using it in the future I think WAD for android will be what the long term goals of WAD for WM had striven for.
I'm glad that you finally decide to make an android version of WAD2(I've ask for that a long time ago in your forum).
I hope that this best wm UI will come on android devices very soon.
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I use WAD (now 2) since a long time. I could not do without it. It is the only reason to stay at WM6.x.
If there would bei WAD2 for Android, it would be great and I think I would change over to Android too
Interestng...I also used WAD when I had a PPC device. I would be interested too.
I would be interested too... On WinMo Wisbar Advanced Desktop was amazing!
Thank you everyone for your interest. I've been doing some thinking about this as it will be a major step for me as I've been a long-time supporter of Windows Mobile (I've been around since PPC2000).
Given how powerful Android is, I can only think of one UI limitation at the moment: since there's no taskbar with an ever-present start menu, I'll have to make the app-drawer/launcher available on every page. At least, that's probably the best way to go right now unless someone has a different opinion/preference.
Another thing I was thinkg about: do you want a variable number of pages (being added through Menu > Add Page) or should I add a preference like some other launchers have to specify the number of pages?
These are very good news.
I can't wait to be able to use WAD again. I just hope that HTC Tattoo will be supported.
As for pages, I prefer the way of wm WAD2(pages added via menu).
So, I'm thinking about approaching this from a different direction than I did with Windows Mobile.
The first major change is I'm thinking about using a scripting language to describe how things are laid out and how they behave rather than just dragging and dropping items. The reason is two-fold:
1) This will give the script designer more control about how things look and how they work.
2) We won't run into the problem of shortcuts that open apps and widgets that are not installed on someone else's device (a major shortcoming of WAD2's).
So, the language would say something like: create a folder at x, y. This "button" will open it and this button will close it. You would also be able to specify an area where shortcuts could be added, such as "create a shortcut grid at x, y", but you would not be able to specify the shortcuts (this would be left up to the user who is using your theme).
One downside of this is that the layouts would have to be created on the desktop and then uploaded to your phone.
The other downside is that this would severely hamper the ability to launch specific apps using scripts. But, this is really a limitation of Android itself as, unlike Windows Mobile, not every device comes with the same core set of apps. And, for the apps that are included in most devices (such as the calendar), the intents to launch them may vary depending on the OS version (i.e. the calendar changed in between Eclair and Froyo).
I'm just brainstorming here. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Right now I'm in the planning stages to see how close I can keep it to Windows Mobile, but at the same time implement new technologies in order to make it the most robust launcher around.
hells yeah man!!! i used it on my tilt for a while.....i think its ironic how similar android really is to winmo...just more refined but very similar in the idea
I found this thread quite late but i can just say +1. =)
I would really like to see Wisbar Adv Desktop on Android. Hope you are making good progress
I just finished asking your to offer support for android on your forums.
Feel free to plus one over too, guys.
http://forum.lakeridgesoftware.com/showthread.php?p=106717#post106717
See it for the first time. +100000
I used to love making themes!!
Sent from my X10i
Awesome. Back in the days WAD was one of the best applications for WM, I've always been impressed by how much one could do with it.
I like the idea of creating themes on the desktop and then uploading them to the phone, because creating themes has always been kind of difficult and work-intensive.
You can map the app drawer to the home button or you might even be able to implement the ability to create shortcuts that open the app drawer.
Concerning the number of homescreens, I think Menu > Add Page is a bit more convenient and less likely to mess things up (since removing non-empty home screens could create issues, as it did with some launchers).
chmckay said:
Thank you everyone for your interest. I've been doing some thinking about this as it will be a major step for me as I've been a long-time supporter of Windows Mobile (I've been around since PPC2000).
Given how powerful Android is, I can only think of one UI limitation at the moment: since there's no taskbar with an ever-present start menu, I'll have to make the app-drawer/launcher available on every page. At least, that's probably the best way to go right now unless someone has a different opinion/preference.
Another thing I was thinkg about: do you want a variable number of pages (being added through Menu > Add Page) or should I add a preference like some other launchers have to specify the number of pages?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just stumbled over this.... is it for real?
WAS with all the functionality will be ported over to Android? This will be the killer app taking all other launchers / home screen apps out of biz.
I am here to betatest!
chmckay said:
So, I'm thinking about approaching this from a different direction than I did with Windows Mobile.
The first major change is I'm thinking about using a scripting language to describe how things are laid out and how they behave rather than just dragging and dropping items. The reason is two-fold:
1) This will give the script designer more control about how things look and how they work.
2) We won't run into the problem of shortcuts that open apps and widgets that are not installed on someone else's device (a major shortcoming of WAD2's).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hopefully you can get the HTC Sense Widgets to work as well at least on HTC devices where this should not be a violation of copyright laws. I will gladly offer to borrow you a european HTC Desire for testing purposes if that is of any help.
I second your notiong of requiring a script language, but of course it would take one that is not laid out for programmers but also still understandable for regular designers. Search around here in the Forum for SlickUI and KiteUI, both which are still deep in the "maybe wel will do this stage" for some decent ideas on how people imagine their ideal design, and therefore gfgiving you an idea how much flexibility your framework needs.
Things that should really be in the to-do-list: radial icon menus. That means you assign say 6-8 icons to a WAD icon placed on the homescreen, upon tapping this the home screen blurs and the assigned icons circle around the pushed icon. This is a terrific way to organize similar apps IMO, much better looking than the folder blocks we have gotten used to.
WAD actually was one reason I found it very hard to aprt with my WM phone. Thie level of adustability had not been reached before. People who do not know what the heck I am creaming my pants about should use google image search for "wisbar advance desktop". It was a pure naked framework, allowing beasically every freedom any designer could wish / hope for.
Anotherr important thing to note is the touch features which have come quite a long way since WM6.5. You would need to extend the framework in order to allow rotating dials for menu control, swipe movements for changing screen left to right and vice versa.
If you could actually manage to pull the old stunt where you made an app run constantly on a "homescreen" it would be awesome. Imagine 3-5-7-whatnot screen with widgets laid out side by side, but a simple upward stroke brings you into the already preloaded browser (from which you return with the back key into the regular homescreen).
God, I am bursting with ideas.
As I said, I will beat test all days long if you need someone.
So, the language would say something like: create a folder at x, y. This "button" will open it and this button will close it. You would also be able to specify an area where shortcuts could be added, such as "create a shortcut grid at x, y", but you would not be able to specify the shortcuts (this would be left up to the user who is using your theme).
One downside of this is that the layouts would have to be created on the desktop and then uploaded to your phone.
The other downside is that this would severely hamper the ability to launch specific apps using scripts. But, this is really a limitation of Android itself as, unlike Windows Mobile, not every device comes with the same core set of apps. And, for the apps that are included in most devices (such as the calendar), the intents to launch them may vary depending on the OS version (i.e. the calendar changed in between Eclair and Froyo).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm just brainstorming here. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Right now I'm in the planning stages to see how close I can keep it to Windows Mobile, but at the same time implement new technologies in order to make it the most robust launcher around.[/QUOTE]
#Pinch to zoom and similar gestures will go a long way in allowing to extend the possibilites and ways the users can interact with the interface. Instead of an always visible appdrawer you could just use a gesture predefined that will launch the app drawer
Should we make a thread where all former WAD users and upcoming UI design freaks post their wishlists?

[Q] Android graphing calculator app with science and engineering functions

I am looking for a graphing/scientific calculator program for android with very specific capabilities, primarily related to science and engineering tasks:
1. Standard built-in scientific functions, like exponents, exponential, trigonometric functions, and logarithms.
2. The ability to specify custom functions, which are saved and can be used anywhere in the program
3. The ability to handle complex numbers
4. The ability to do limits, derivatives, definite integrals, and indefinite integrals
5. Equation solver
6. Unit conversion, with the ability to create
7. The ability to create and save custom units
8. Log-log or semi-log axis in plots
9. The ability to use expressions in axes and axes ticks (like being able to set an axis to be from -2pi to 2pi with tick marks in pi/4 steps)
To put it simply, I am looking for something that can do what I consider to be the most critical tasks of my TI-89. The closest I have been able to find is handycalc, but functions are restricted to particular worksheets, and it doesn't have 3, 4, 7, 8, or 9 at all.
Note that I would ideally want an application with all of these capabilities, but could live with 2 or 3 applications that each do part. At the very least I would need an application that can do 1-5, an application that can do 6 and 7, and an application that can do 8 and 9. Obviously a free application or applications would be best, but a commercial one or ones would suffice.
Some extra features that would be nice, but are not deal-killers:
1. 3D plotting
2. The ability to use units in formulas
3. Polar and/or complex plane plotting
4. Differential equation plotting
5. Simultaneous equation solving
6. Binary, octal, and hex mathematics
Thank you very much for your help.
This link may show some science calculator, you can use different search to see if any of them fit you:
https://market.android.com/search?q=science+calculator&so=1&c=apps
After checking through a few different calculators I found this one that could work well for you.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/algeo-graphing-calculator/com.algeo.algeo
Also this page can probably be helpful as well.
http://www.techpoweredmath.com/top-6-calculator-apps-for-android/
From the looks of it the 4th one on the list would probably be the best bet for you.
Hope this helps!
Thanks!
I tried algeo, it lacks most of the features I am looking for. 1 on the list you gave me is handycalc, which as I said had the most features but still lacked some of the critical ones. 4 on the list also lacks most of the features I need, and I can't seem to get a keyboard to use it, either.
However, I think I found one that fits most of my needs called MathScript Calculator (sorry, I apparently cannot post links yet).
It costs money, but it should get the job done. It also supports python scripting, which is good for me in general since that is my preferred language. However, there is apparently a major update coming up so I will wait and see what it is like then.
Thanks for your help

Porting Chromium to Windows RT

So, I've been at this for about 48 hours now (not continuously, but closer than you might think) and I figured I should take a break from modifying project files and puzzling over alignment issues to discuss the project, share some of the problems I've been having and ask if anybody can help, and so on.
The general idea is "Chromium build for Windows (on x86/x64) and build on ARM (for Linux), so there must be a way to build it for Windows on ARM". For the most part, that even looks like it's true. Probably at least 80% of 654 Visual Studio projects (no, that's not a joke) either build just fine with only minor amounts of work, or are things that we don't actually need (I'll try building the test suites... once everything else builds!!)
Areas that have given me problems (caution: some chance of brief rants ahead):
v8. Less than you might think, though. Setting the flags for Arm seems to have been enough.
Sandbox. There's a fair bit of thunking coded in assembly going on in the sandbox for x86. Not sure what's up with it (I don't know exactly how the Chromium sandbox works) but it'll have to come out or be replaced. The Linux (including ARM) sandbox seems to be SELinux-based, which doesn't help at all.
Native Client (NaCl). I think all the assembly is in test code, though, so I may just boldly #ifdef if all away.
libjpg-turbo (libjpg). Piles of carefully optimized assembly... for x86 and x64. There is a set of ARM assembly (for Linux) that Visual Studio won't compile, but something else might... or I may tweak until it works. Of course, I could also just accept the speed hit and use the version of libjpg implemented in nice, portable C.
Anything where the developers tried to use some SSE to speed things up. I may be able to replace it with NEON code, or I may just remove it and hope **** doesn't break. We'll see.
Inline assembly in general. Even when it's ARM assembly, Visual Studio / CL.exe don't want anything to do with it (__asm is apparently now an invalid keyword). I suspect I'll have to just pull the assembly out into stand-alone functions in their own files, then compile them to object files and link them back in later. If I can figure out the best way to do this (for example, I'll want to inline the asm functions) then it shouldn't impact performance. Seriously though, I kind of hate inline assembly. I can read assembly just fine, but I'm usually staring at it in a debugger or disassembly tool, not in the middle of source code I'm trying to build...
Everywhere that the current state of the CPU is cared about (exception and crash handlers, in particular) because the CONTEXT structure is, of course, CPU-specific. They're pretty easy to get past, though.
Low-level functions, like MemoryBarrier. Fortunately, it's implemented in ntdll.h... but as a macro, which breaks at least half the places it's referenced. Solution: where it breaks things, undefine the macro and just have it be an inline function that does what the macro did.
Running out of memory. Not even joking... well, OK, a little bit. I've got 32GB; I won't actually run out. Both Visual Studio and cl.exe do at times, though!. Task Manager says VS is currently using 1,928 MB, and before I restarted it, it broke 2.5GB private working set. Pretty good for a program that for some reason is still 32-bit...
Goddamn compiler flags. Seriously, every single project (I mentioned there are over 600, right?) has its LIBPATHs hardcoded to point at x86. Several projects have /D:_X86_ or similar (that's supposed to be set by the build tools, not the user, you idiots...) which plays merry hell with the #ifdef guards. Everything has /SAFESEH specified, not in the actual property table where the IDE could have removed it (unneeded and invlaid on ARM) but in the "extra stuff we'll pass on the build command line" field, which means every single .EXE/.DLL project must be modified or the linker will fail.
My current biggest goal is the JPG library; nobody wants to use a browser without it. After that, I'll tackle the sandbox, leaving NaCl for last... well, last before whatever else crops up.
Anyhow, thoughts/comments/advice are welcome... in the mean time, I'm going to go eat something (for the first time in ~22 hours) and then get some sleep.
Kudos for having the patience to look though this monster.
It's my understanding that NaCl is still a pretty niche thing at the moment. Is it possible to easily either disable it or completely hack it out, or do other more critical parts of Chromium now depend on it?
I don't think anything truly depends on it. I'll look in the VS dependency hierarchy and see how many things list it, and how awful it would be to remove them.. after I get the other stuff working. I may pass on the sandbox as well, if possible; it makes the security guy in me cringe something awful, but as they say, shipping is a feature..
great
Please make that happen !
Working on it! I've gotten over half of the projects to build and link, but some other stuff is adamantly refusing to work. I'm beginning to suspect I'll need to work from the other direction - rather than starting at the bottom and building all the dependencies, then combining them into browser components, and then eventually combining all the components into a complete piece of software, I may have to work from the top, removing components until the whole thing builds (at which point it will likely be useless, or all-but) and then seeing what I can add back in. I thought it would be faster to just assume everything can be made to work and only exclude something if it proved intractable, but at this point I've got a ton of very small components and almost no ability to combine them.
It would also help if VS was better at managing such truly immense tasks. For example, I have no simple graph of what all is and is not building, so I'm being forced to manually map that onto the VS dependency tree and see what is blocking a given component from building successfully, and how much is dependent upon it, one erroring project at a time (and there are a *lot* of erroring projects - my last attempt to build any substantial part of the system saw 50 of 400 projects fail).
GoodDayToDie said:
Working on it! I've gotten over half of the projects to build and link, but some other stuff is adamantly refusing to work. I'm beginning to suspect I'll need to work from the other direction - rather than starting at the bottom and building all the dependencies, then combining them into browser components, and then eventually combining all the components into a complete piece of software, I may have to work from the top, removing components until the whole thing builds (at which point it will likely be useless, or all-but) and then seeing what I can add back in. I thought it would be faster to just assume everything can be made to work and only exclude something if it proved intractable, but at this point I've got a ton of very small components and almost no ability to combine them.
It would also help if VS was better at managing such truly immense tasks. For example, I have no simple graph of what all is and is not building, so I'm being forced to manually map that onto the VS dependency tree and see what is blocking a given component from building successfully, and how much is dependent upon it, one erroring project at a time (and there are a *lot* of erroring projects - my last attempt to build any substantial part of the system saw 50 of 400 projects fail).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I thinkt tht is a mutch better taktic and mutch less frustrading.
I would love to see just a minimal version of it. After that all the small componens can follow.
50 of 400 is pretty good i think. Better then i expected
Bear in mind that the entire thing is 650 projects. If 50 fail at that level, many of the higher-level ones (dependent upon the lower-level) will fail too. I'll see what I can do. I may or may not be able to get v8 actually working (without it, the JS speed will be very bad, think IE8 at best) and I may have to fall back to the legacy libjpeg (which will cut JPEG render speeds by at least a factor of 2). Skia (2D drawing library used by Chrome) has a bunch of assembly optimizations that I need to get it to use the Arm version of instead. There's a couple of total hacks with the library files I've had to pull, which may or may not result in a working final build. We'll see.
GoodDayToDie said:
Bear in mind that the entire thing is 650 projects. If 50 fail at that level, many of the higher-level ones (dependent upon the lower-level) will fail too. I'll see what I can do. I may or may not be able to get v8 actually working (without it, the JS speed will be very bad, think IE8 at best) and I may have to fall back to the legacy libjpeg (which will cut JPEG render speeds by at least a factor of 2). Skia (2D drawing library used by Chrome) has a bunch of assembly optimizations that I need to get it to use the Arm version of instead. There's a couple of total hacks with the library files I've had to pull, which may or may not result in a working final build. We'll see.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the v8 engine ( used in nodejs ) has been ported to ARM :
I still can't link : htt p://ww w.it-wars.com/article305/compiler-node-js-pour-arm-v5
perhaps it will help you
Edit : oups, I just see that another great user of this forum made the port of nodejs to RT
Yep... but they did it without v8. That's not an encouraging result, but I feel like I'm so close...
Is there a GitHub repo so we can help or track the progress of the project ?
Sorry, not at present. There probably should be. The sheer size of the codebase is incredible (about 2.4GB) and having some way to share it practically would be good.
Also, I suspect this would go a lot faster if I don't have to repeat the work of others. I know that there's a working Webkit DLL out there, for example (though with several features, including the V8 JS engine, missing) and if I could get my hands on that it would drastically reduce the number of additional components I need to build. Currently I'm working on the sandbux, but expect that I will need to rip the whole thing out and basically have the browser run as though it was always passed the --no-sandbox parameter, at least for the first build. Too damn much assembly.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/22/google-chrome-native-client-arm-support/
This wouldn't have any impact on this project, would it?
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It probably means that NaCl on Windows RT will be possible in the future. At present, I'm cutting it out of the build - too much x86-specific stuff there to port it over myself, and it owuldn't be able to run x86-compiled NaCl code anyhow.
You might have bit off more than you could chew. It'd better if you put your current progress under version control on some public site so that other people may be able to help you.
It's a big and complex project. You are taking a lot of time, and understandably so. But just open up to other people and you could get this done faster.
Yeah, this is probably true. My life also got unexpectedly *busy* in the last week; a couple weeks ago I had many times as much free time as I do now, and so porting has slowed down.
My upload speed would take ages (literally probably at least a day of solid activity; it's embarassingly slow) to push the full source anywhere, but I may make the effort anyhow. I'll have to post it somewhere for GPL compliance in any case...
You may upload only the diff files, they'll probably be smaller then the whole distribution.
Not to pour cold water on you however, IE10 is already faster than the latest Chrome build in Windows Phone, Windows 8.
I don't see the point of this.
I have personally jumped from IE8 > FF > Chrome and finally back to IE10 over the years depends on its usability, smoothness, speed, etc
Speed isn't the only reason to use a browser. I actually prefer IE myself, but there are some things that other browsers do better than it (in the case of Chrome, parts of HTML5, the syncing across Google services, etc.) Also, Chrome gets updated far more often than IE; IE9 was equal with Chrome on speed at its release, and was far behind by the time IE10 came out.
The reason for this project, though, is a mixture of interest in what it takes, and a desire to benefit the community. Microsoft has deeped that only software which they have blessed may run on the Windows RT desktop. I disagree, and have chosen (among several other things) to port a web browser because I feel that it's important for users to have choice.
LastBattle said:
Not to pour cold water on you however, IE10 is already faster than the latest Chrome build in Windows Phone, Windows 8.
I don't see the point of this.
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Some websites do not get along with the trident rendering engine. Some webdevs are so "Oh f*** IE I don't care" and block access to features just because it is IE. I have experienced this first hand on IE10 on my surface where it tells me to come back when I have a decent browser, only to not have the choice to do that.
This really isn't the webdevs fault either, for years IE was the scum of the internet, only recently has IE caught up to the rest of the browsers (and in my opinion exceeded some) but the years of IE being bad have left a lot of disjointed webdevs who won't even consider giving the latest IE a chance.

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