APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
On saying words clearly
Someone has been trolling Apple’s Siri team hard on how they think numbers are pronounced. Today is the second day where I’ve missed a turn due to it. The first time because I didn’t understand the direction, the second because … Continue reading
The manifesto for anarchic software development
Go on, read the manifesto again. You’ll see that it’s a manifesto for anarchism, for people coming together and contributing equally toward solving problems. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The best architectures, requirements, … Continue reading
Dos Amigans
Tomorrow evening (for me; 1800UTC on 10th Sept) Steven R. Baker and I will twitch-stream our journey learning how to write Amiga software. Check out dosamigans.tv!
Posted in Amiga
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Free as in Water
The whole “Free as in beer versus free as in freedom” thing confuses people. Or maybe it doesn’t, and it allows detractors to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over free software by feigning confusion. Either way, people express confusion. What … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware
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Six Colours
Apple has, in my opinion, some of the best general-purpose computing technology on the market right now, and has had some of the best for all of this millennium. However, their business practices are increasingly punitive, designed to extract greater … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL
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Nvidia’s ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley This tech giant up for … Continue reading
There are two different questions of fairness when it comes to the App Store rules. Apple always spin it to mean “these rules are applied fairly”, which is certainly not true. Putting aside questions of why Netflix get to do … Continue reading
grotag
Lots of Amiga documentation was in the AmigaGuide format. These are simple ASCII documents with some rudimentary markup to turn them into hypertext, working something like TeXInfo manuals. Think more like a markdown-enabled Gopher than the web though: you can … Continue reading
Posted in Amiga, Java
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Concrete freedoms
Discussions about free software or open source software can always seem a bit abstract. Who cares if I’ve got the source code, if I’m never going to read it or change it? Why would I want “free” versions of my … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware
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NeXT marketed their workstations by letting Sun convince people they wanted a workstation, then trying to convince customers (who were already impressed by Sun) that their workstation was better. As part of this, they showed how much better the development … Continue reading
