Archives for June 2013

The bridge to happiness

Everyone is talking about the flatness, but I love to look around and see some of the smaller wins on the developer side of an iOS SDK.

I am really excited about something that I haven’t seen mentioned much, and that is a new bridge between the worlds of JavaScript and the runtime of iOS and OS X:

Introducing a new Objective-C API to JavaScriptCore. iOS developers can now integrate scripting into their apps without having to bundle custom language interpreters. This API builds on top of the existing C API to JavaScriptCore available on Mac, and makes programming with JavaScript much easier and less error-prone.

As mentioned, the desktop world had this bridge, and there are various ways to embed a JavaScript interpreter and the like, but getting this first class support is exciting.

The API is pretty clean, so the JavaScript code that calls into Objective-C looks sane OtherThanSoVeryVeryVerbose, and vice versa.

If you have areas of your application where “scripting” would fit in, then this could be a fantastic solution. Areas such as gaming have already done this for a long time. Even though the “apple rules” talk about not being able to download code and run it, games have been doing just that for ages (in Lua, or other languages). Anecdotally Apple seems to not care any more (don’t quote me on that / your mileage may vary).

Beyond games though, I see a lot of use cases where I would love to A/B test areas of the app, and JavaScript could “drive” those tests quite nicely indeed.

I haven’t been able to go deep and see what limitations exist, but man, I am excited to see what can be done.

Course correcting for back pain and “low fat” mistakes

I recently spent some time with the Gokhale Method which aims to help solve the posture problems that so many of us have these days. As I read about the work of Esther Gokhale, and the geo-history behind the issues that our society faces, I started to get a lil angry, just as I did when I read Why We Get Fat.

When someone is doing something knowingly bad to themselves, it is frustrating, sad, and madenning. The next level though is when people think they are doing the right thing and we are sending them down a destructive path.

For nutrition, Gary Taubes highlights the wrongness of the “low fat” revolution, and walks it back to the Nixon administration. A couple of senate committee decisions, and boom…. we now lie with massive obesity problems, and although many actually try to do the right thing, they are not actually attacking the problem. To make low fat work, we see a ton of processed foods, and tricks to hide the taste… normally resulting in a shed load of sugar. Thus, the problems keeps getting worse.

For posture, the lumbar support and expert analysis may not be solving your problem at all. It is quite amazing to see how powerful immitation is, and how our postures have changed, not just due to folks sitting in front of computers.

How much bad science is out there?

As engineers we are used to be able to A/B test and run experiments to prove out hypotheses. We are accelerating the feedback loop and can thus make constant progress.

It sometimes feels like we are in a “modern” world that is using technology for amazing good (groundbreaking medicine) but also takes us away from knowledge that we have collected over our entire existence.

Subtle changes have massive effects. I was reading about “Pepsodent” (excerpt from the Power of Habit book I am reading) and how Claude Hopkins took teeth brushing from 7% to ubiquity in a few years, all through some marketing tricks.

These changes can happen so fast, how can we make sure that mistakes that are bad for us aren’t killed off as quickly?

Or then again maybe I am just forgetting scale. What does “quickly” mean in the grand scheme of things. Maybe I should let evolution take its course.