YES! So many things to read, and I hate having a million tabs open at once. Even if I don't get around to something until months later, bookmarks are an indispensable tool.
The goal is to create a social media platform that does for content creation what previous social networks have done for distribution. Create in an open space, collaborate dynamically, and remix any other content on the platform.
Building a social, collaborative creation platform. Starting with vector images, with other media types coming soon: https://www.formgraph.com
Working on a market where users can sell prints of collaborated-on works. Also in the process of building similar web based tools for composing music.
Also, I'm dangerously close to running out of money and having to go back to getting a job, so if you have any full stack web or iOS work you want done on contract, reach out to me! (jwatson@formgraph.com)
This is the first iteration of an idea I've had brewing for a while. The broader vision is to have a hybrid social network/repository with web-based tools that can be used to collaboratively edit any kind of media. I'm starting small with vector illustrations, but the important aspects of this are the ability to openly create and collaborate in real time, and having a corpus of material that you can frictionlessly remix from with attribution.
As for the current state of things, I'm well aware that the experience leaves quite a bit to be desired on mobile. I'm not really sure what my mobile strategy is going to be yet. I could optimize the HTML5 editor or opt to create native iOS and Android apps. Also, I'm making decreasing project load times a priority. There's so much work that could be done to make this a fluid experience, but, baby steps.
For anyone interested in the stack, the app server is written in Go, and uses RethinkDB for real time stuff, and Postgres for CRUD stuff. The client side is pretty light on frameworks, but Vue.js and JQuery make appearances in quite a few places.
Right? I don't get the mindset of Microsoft having to support an antiquated product line over a decade past its expiration date because a few business IT customers are incompetent at writing client software and keeping their systems up to date. It's not like all of this is coming out from nowhere.
An easy solution to the problem would be to stop being a racist piece of shit, or else own up to it and accept the social consequences.
Another idea would be to have user ratings and feedback. I'm not sure if these services already do something like this, as I've never used them, but it could give hosts and drivers a means of rating their users so that they have some additional criteria by which to judge whether they want to loan their resources to a particular customer. That won't really solve the problem of new black customers who would have no prior rating, though. Maybe a criminal background check for customers is in order if people are really worried about being robbed or assaulted or some other nonsense. Of course that could cost time and money and could destroy the convenience factor of such services. A real bummer of a problem. I wish people were better.
As someone who has felt mostly sour grapes toward Microsoft for introducing D3D in the first place instead of adopting OpenGL, it's nice to read a convincing rationalization for why that wasn't done initially, coming from someone who was involved in the process.
The 'caps bits' problem is really the core of it. OpenGL in that era was a nightmare for anything resembling game rendering. The OpenGL we have now is pretty reasonable, but back then, Direct3D was a breath of fresh air and DirectDraw was a much saner way to push pixels around efficiently as well. It was hard for me to ever understand why people preferred OpenGL at the time (other than the obvious benefit of theoretical portability). Vendor-specific shader bytecode, UGH.
It was hard for me to ever understand why people preferred OpenGL at the time
OpenGL was elegant and very simple to use, quickly becoming close to invisible. DirectX, in comparison, was layers upon layers of COM book-keeping code.
Of course OpenGL has become like DirectX in more recent iterations, as in the end immediate satisfaction is less important than flexibility.
For me the definition of 'layers' was having to juggle dozens of interacting state flags and mutually exclusive vendor-specific extensions just to draw a dual-textured triangle or render to a render target.
COM really wasn't that much of a hassle in comparison. A couple smart pointer templates and you're off to the races. I can see how a C developer would really resent it though - nothing but a pain compared to GL's regular C, 'everything is void*' api.
Reading this made me feel good. I feel like not enough hackers in my generation appreciate some of the history surrounding hacker culture. I read Levy's books a million times as an adolescent, and am currently going through "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff. A dream of mine has been to write a follow-up to Hackers someday. A book of the same style picking up where Hackers left off in the mid-1980s. It could cover NeXT, GNU/Linux, Netscape/Mosaic, Valve, Google, Facebook, up to modern hacking on the frontier of biology, education, and the rebirth of hardware hacking. I feel like every generation should have a volume similar to Hackers.
