Atlas · Details
The Monkey and the Apple
Author’s note
This post is a bit of a bait-and-switch. Its title and opening story are about my game, Wyvern, and the story is a fun read. But then the blog post dives into its actual substance, which turns out to be a detailed comparison of iOS and Android programming. Basically, iOS is decent-ish and Android is terrible. But I was at Google on the Android Tools team at the time, so I couldn't say it was terrible. All I could do was a side-by-side comparison.
AI Notes
The post that broke a two-year silence on Stevey's Blog Rants
in November 2016. Steve had been quietly teaching himself iOS, porting
his old game Wyvern to mobile, and wrestling with
Google's then-immature Cloud Platform. The opening is a domestic-scene
transcript: Steve's wife (Wyvern handle "Wifey," playing a naga
warrior) has lost a houseful of valuables to a pet monkey she keeps.
Steve, god of his own universe, fires up the Jython interactive
interpreter, grabs a reference to the monkey object, and commands it
to give the items back via monkey.commandNow("give amulet to
rhialto"). The monkey complies for the first four items, then
quietly stops responding, and the recovery turns into a small live
debugging session against Steve's own game world. The
second half is what the anecdote was cover for. Steve explains why he
picked iOS over Android (monetisation — iOS users outspend Android
users 4:1 to 10:1), why iOS felt instantly familiar after any prior UI
framework while Android felt alien, and tells the small opera of his
App Store rejection — Apple's IPv6-only-network requirement that no
major cloud supported at the time, six weeks of pleading for an
exception, and the surprise feature request for Wyvern accounts as
the price of approval. A quiet endorsement of Kotlin
as one of the best new languages in years closes the tech survey —
which turned out to be one of his more durable decade-predictions.
Related listings
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2020
Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had
Four years later, Wyvern becomes the day job. The Monkey post is Wyvern poking its head out of the Google cocoon; the Grab farewell is Steve leaving a real job to bet on it full-time. Read together, they show that the Wyvern startup pivot in 2020 had been quietly building since at least 2016.
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2019
The Song of the Golden Dragon
The other late-2010s essay where Steve opens a private workshop to the public. The Monkey post discloses two decades of game development; the Golden Dragon essay discloses three decades of guitar. Same impulse: write down something that has been quietly accumulating before it disappears.
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2011
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
The previous time Steve broke a long blog silence. Both posts are written by someone who has been heads-down for years and finally has something to say; both are slightly embarrassed about how long the absence lasted. The 2011 rant was an accident with consequences; the 2016 monkey post is a deliberate, much smaller re-emergence.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 10 more
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"You'll need an iPhone, iPad, or iPod running iOS 10.2 or later."
Is this a misprint? My iPhone is currently running 10.1.1, and according to the Software Update, that's the latest version. -
Good to have you back, Steve!
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Entertaining and interesting, just like it used to be! But a little bit less edgy than some posts... ;)
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Nice to have you back, I'm hoping for some programming language evangelizeing posts ;)
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Thanks, Stevey! I don't think that red wine contributed anything to this rant, but hey, that's cool too. Looking forward to hearing about Kotlin :)
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I just read your Google/Amazon platform G+ post and hoped you were still actively blogging ... my timing looks good!
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Apple's IPv6 requirement does not require that your remote servers have IPv6 connectivity, just that your app will work correctly on a NAT64/DNS64 network. Apple's documentation explains it all quite well, even if you're using raw sockets there shouldn't be any big changes required (as long as you aren't trying to connect to static IPv4 addresses or something) https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/UnderstandingandPreparingfortheIPv6Transition/UnderstandingandPreparingfortheIPv6Transition.html
— Unknown · 4:42 PM, November 21, 2016
I responded with a post of my own. I disagree with your assessment of the niceness/usefulness of Objective-C's modern features. Also, Swift has a few downsides that could be deal-breakers.
http://heath-tech.blogspot.com/2016/11/response-to-apple-good-bad-and-ugly.html
— Heath · 10:21 PM, November 25, 2016
"some X-windows work"
I like the cut of your jib!
Please keep using the term X-windows -- it really annoys the X fanatics!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
— Don · 6:02 AM, November 18, 2016