Wednesday, June 30, 2010
iPhone 4 review
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Announcing OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS 4
type='html'>Okay, it's finally time for me to announce Super Secret Project B, which is a new book I'm writing on OpenGL ES 2.0 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Yes, I know I said I wouldn't be writing any books in 2010, but the nice folks at the Pragmatic Programmers approached me after I made that statement with an economically feasible way for me to write a book this year. I couldn't say no.
My original plan had been to take my OpenGL ES from the Ground Up blog posts, supplement them, and turn them into a book with step-by-step projects to reinforce the points of each posts. My week at WWDC has caused me to change that approach. I went to all the OpenGL ES sessions and spent a fair amount of time bending the ear of Allan Schaffer, Apple's Graphics and Games Evangelist, as well as a number of Apple engineers who work on or with OpenGL. After a lot of hard thought, I came to the conclusion that the approach needed to change. Although modern hardware supports the fixed pipeline, Apple has stopped making phones that require OpenGL ES 1.1. The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad all not only support OpenGL ES 2.0, but they all require it if you want to take full advantage of the hardware.
OpenGL ES from the Ground Up, however, focused on the OpenGL ES 1.1 fixed pipeline.
Since OpenGL ES doesn't maintain backward compatibility the way workstation OpenGL does, much of the material from the fixed pipeline, such as lights, the model view and projection matrix, and the stock functions for submitting vertex, texture, and normal data are all gone from OpenGL ES 2.0. Instead, you have to handle all that work manually when you write your shaders. Shaders add some complexity to the process, but give you a tremendous amount of power and the ability to write more efficient OpenGL code.
In the Desktop world, it still makes sense to learn immediate mode first, then regular fixed pipeline, and then finally the programmable pipeline, because workstation OpenGL maintains nearly 100% backwards compatibility across releases, and you can get up and running quickly. On Workstation OpenGL ES, you can even mix and match the different modes, accessing the model view matrix and lights from your shaders. That's not the case with OpenGL ES, so spending a few hundred pages teaching things that won't be applicable to the programmable pipeline seemed like a poor use of time, both mine, and my readers'.
But, for the new programmer, the programmable pipeline is really hard to grok. I've been banging my head this past week looking for a way to present that rather complex topic in a way that people without prior graphics or OpenGL ES experience will be able to understand.
Thanks to a lot of people willing to talk with me, I think I've come up with an approach that will work, and I'm really excited about it. So, if you find OpenGL ES confusing, especially if you find the programmable pipeline and shaders confusing, look out for OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS4. I don't have a release date yet, but I will post here when I have updated information about the production schedule.
Yes, I know I said I wouldn't be writing any books in 2010, but the nice folks at the Pragmatic Programmers approached me after I made that statement with an economically feasible way for me to write a book this year. I couldn't say no.
My original plan had been to take my OpenGL ES from the Ground Up blog posts, supplement them, and turn them into a book with step-by-step projects to reinforce the points of each posts. My week at WWDC has caused me to change that approach. I went to all the OpenGL ES sessions and spent a fair amount of time bending the ear of Allan Schaffer, Apple's Graphics and Games Evangelist, as well as a number of Apple engineers who work on or with OpenGL. After a lot of hard thought, I came to the conclusion that the approach needed to change. Although modern hardware supports the fixed pipeline, Apple has stopped making phones that require OpenGL ES 1.1. The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad all not only support OpenGL ES 2.0, but they all require it if you want to take full advantage of the hardware.
OpenGL ES from the Ground Up, however, focused on the OpenGL ES 1.1 fixed pipeline.
Since OpenGL ES doesn't maintain backward compatibility the way workstation OpenGL does, much of the material from the fixed pipeline, such as lights, the model view and projection matrix, and the stock functions for submitting vertex, texture, and normal data are all gone from OpenGL ES 2.0. Instead, you have to handle all that work manually when you write your shaders. Shaders add some complexity to the process, but give you a tremendous amount of power and the ability to write more efficient OpenGL code.
In the Desktop world, it still makes sense to learn immediate mode first, then regular fixed pipeline, and then finally the programmable pipeline, because workstation OpenGL maintains nearly 100% backwards compatibility across releases, and you can get up and running quickly. On Workstation OpenGL ES, you can even mix and match the different modes, accessing the model view matrix and lights from your shaders. That's not the case with OpenGL ES, so spending a few hundred pages teaching things that won't be applicable to the programmable pipeline seemed like a poor use of time, both mine, and my readers'.
But, for the new programmer, the programmable pipeline is really hard to grok. I've been banging my head this past week looking for a way to present that rather complex topic in a way that people without prior graphics or OpenGL ES experience will be able to understand.
Thanks to a lot of people willing to talk with me, I think I've come up with an approach that will work, and I'm really excited about it. So, if you find OpenGL ES confusing, especially if you find the programmable pipeline and shaders confusing, look out for OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS4. I don't have a release date yet, but I will post here when I have updated information about the production schedule.
WWDC 2010 Post Mortem
type='html'>WWDC. The Dubdub. Christmas in June.
If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know Apple's annual developer conference is my absolute favorite week of the year, and it just seems to get better every year. For the days leading up to leaving for San Francisco, I'm like a kid on Christmas eve. I can't sleep from excitement and the time passes way too slowly.
Every year, there are less "must-see" technical sessions for me, personally. That was especially true this year because something like 60% of the attendees were first timers who haven't shipped their first app yet and the session schedule was designed accordingly, with quite a few beginner and intermediate level sessions. But WWDC is so much more than the sessions (and those come out on video anyway). Your first year or two attending, it's all about the sessions, but by this point for me, it's about the sessions that focus on new technologies, labs and, most importantly, a chance to catch up with people I only see once or twice a year. Well, it wasn't just new technology sessions. For obvious reasons, I also attended all of the OpenGL ES sessions this year, and they were great. They were much deeper technically than last year, and were much more focused on the OpenGL ES 2.0 programmable pipeline.
Even thought it was the same number of attendees as the last two years (5,200 attendees plus the various engineers and other staff), this year felt way busier than past years. Lines to get into sessions were often very long, and many sessions filled up. Some even filled up an overflow room. Although we've seen long lines for sessions going back to the introduction of the iPhone, it's never been like this year. Last year, for example, for the State of the Union addresses, I meandered into the overflow room ten minutes late and found a seat in one of several empty rows. This year, I sat on the floor of the overflow room for the overflow rooms. I guess that's good - people were serious about learning this year.
One negative aspect of the massive influx of newbs this year was a certain loss of etiquette. I've always been super impressed by the way my fellow WWDC geeks treat the staff and the facilities. I've never seen garbage left around or more than isolated cases of people being rude to the catering or cleaning staff. This year, unfortunately, that respect was somewhat lacking. During the keynote line, hundreds of people just left their litter laying around on the floor. It was really disgusting and I was embarrassed at that moment to be part of the group. And it didn't end with the keynote line, either, unfortunately. I saw many examples of people not bothering to pick up after themselves, or being rude to the staff. Even a few instance of people being rude to Apple engineers who were trying to help them with problems. I almost feel like I need to add a few items to my annual first timer's guide with things I had assumed any decent person would already know, like throw out your garbage, treat people with respect, and be nice to people who are trying to help you.
Let's be better next year, okay? Almost everybody I met or talked to seemed like super people, so I'm hoping this was just a one-time anomaly. I really, really would like it to be an isolated occurrence. Enough said on that topic.
Although the new iPhone 4 was the belle of the keynote ball, the real buzz at WWDC this year, as you probably know by now, was Xcode 4. For the first time in history, Apple has released the session videos to all registered developers for free, so if you haven't done so yet, you should go watch the Developer Tools State of the Union and the handful of Xcode 4 sessions. Apple's Developer Tools teams have been working really hard for quite a long time on this upcoming release, and even in the early preview state it's in, I already wish I could use it full-time. Fortunately, the Xcode team foresaw this and they made the project file format 100% backwards and forwards compatible between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4, so I can work in Xcode 4 then switch to Xcode 3 to do my ad hoc and release builds.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of this particular WWDC was having the opportunity to buy a few rounds of drinks for some of the engineers who worked on Xcode 4. I'm not sure if those engineers have forgiven me yet, so I'm not going to call them out by name, but it's important to me during WWDC to show my appreciation to as many as I can of the people who make all the cool stuff I work with everyday. Steve Jobs gets a lot of credit, and rightly so, but he doesn't do it alone. It was really nice to see him call out some of the people who worked on iPhone 4 and iOS 4 during the keynote, but there are a lot of unsung heroes working at Apple, and most of them don't get a lot of recognition for teh awesome they bring. WWDC is the one week a year where we get to show our appreciation in person.
The User Experience lab appeared to be the biggest hit among the labs this year. Each morning, within minutes of the Moscone West doors opening up, there was a long line extending around the corner waiting for the UX lab to open. People waited in line literally for hours to get a UX review. I guess word got out this year about how good those reviews were. I know I saw several people raving about them last year. In general, I think people have really started to grok the fact that the labs represent an incredible opportunity to get questions answered by the people who really know the answers. If you're having a problem or an issue with a certain part of the system, likely you can find someone who actually works on that part of the system to answer your questions.
As for MartianCraft, we gave out all of our away team shirts pretty quickly this year. Sorry to those who wanted one but didn't get one. We way underestimated demand for the shirts and just didn't have enough with us to give them to everyone who wanted one. We'll be better prepared next year, and we're looking into making the shirts available online for anybody who's interested, but that probably won't happen until we've dug ourselves out from the hole that got created as a result of all three of us not working for a week.
If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know Apple's annual developer conference is my absolute favorite week of the year, and it just seems to get better every year. For the days leading up to leaving for San Francisco, I'm like a kid on Christmas eve. I can't sleep from excitement and the time passes way too slowly.
Every year, there are less "must-see" technical sessions for me, personally. That was especially true this year because something like 60% of the attendees were first timers who haven't shipped their first app yet and the session schedule was designed accordingly, with quite a few beginner and intermediate level sessions. But WWDC is so much more than the sessions (and those come out on video anyway). Your first year or two attending, it's all about the sessions, but by this point for me, it's about the sessions that focus on new technologies, labs and, most importantly, a chance to catch up with people I only see once or twice a year. Well, it wasn't just new technology sessions. For obvious reasons, I also attended all of the OpenGL ES sessions this year, and they were great. They were much deeper technically than last year, and were much more focused on the OpenGL ES 2.0 programmable pipeline.
Even thought it was the same number of attendees as the last two years (5,200 attendees plus the various engineers and other staff), this year felt way busier than past years. Lines to get into sessions were often very long, and many sessions filled up. Some even filled up an overflow room. Although we've seen long lines for sessions going back to the introduction of the iPhone, it's never been like this year. Last year, for example, for the State of the Union addresses, I meandered into the overflow room ten minutes late and found a seat in one of several empty rows. This year, I sat on the floor of the overflow room for the overflow rooms. I guess that's good - people were serious about learning this year.
One negative aspect of the massive influx of newbs this year was a certain loss of etiquette. I've always been super impressed by the way my fellow WWDC geeks treat the staff and the facilities. I've never seen garbage left around or more than isolated cases of people being rude to the catering or cleaning staff. This year, unfortunately, that respect was somewhat lacking. During the keynote line, hundreds of people just left their litter laying around on the floor. It was really disgusting and I was embarrassed at that moment to be part of the group. And it didn't end with the keynote line, either, unfortunately. I saw many examples of people not bothering to pick up after themselves, or being rude to the staff. Even a few instance of people being rude to Apple engineers who were trying to help them with problems. I almost feel like I need to add a few items to my annual first timer's guide with things I had assumed any decent person would already know, like throw out your garbage, treat people with respect, and be nice to people who are trying to help you.
Let's be better next year, okay? Almost everybody I met or talked to seemed like super people, so I'm hoping this was just a one-time anomaly. I really, really would like it to be an isolated occurrence. Enough said on that topic.
Although the new iPhone 4 was the belle of the keynote ball, the real buzz at WWDC this year, as you probably know by now, was Xcode 4. For the first time in history, Apple has released the session videos to all registered developers for free, so if you haven't done so yet, you should go watch the Developer Tools State of the Union and the handful of Xcode 4 sessions. Apple's Developer Tools teams have been working really hard for quite a long time on this upcoming release, and even in the early preview state it's in, I already wish I could use it full-time. Fortunately, the Xcode team foresaw this and they made the project file format 100% backwards and forwards compatible between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4, so I can work in Xcode 4 then switch to Xcode 3 to do my ad hoc and release builds.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of this particular WWDC was having the opportunity to buy a few rounds of drinks for some of the engineers who worked on Xcode 4. I'm not sure if those engineers have forgiven me yet, so I'm not going to call them out by name, but it's important to me during WWDC to show my appreciation to as many as I can of the people who make all the cool stuff I work with everyday. Steve Jobs gets a lot of credit, and rightly so, but he doesn't do it alone. It was really nice to see him call out some of the people who worked on iPhone 4 and iOS 4 during the keynote, but there are a lot of unsung heroes working at Apple, and most of them don't get a lot of recognition for teh awesome they bring. WWDC is the one week a year where we get to show our appreciation in person.
The User Experience lab appeared to be the biggest hit among the labs this year. Each morning, within minutes of the Moscone West doors opening up, there was a long line extending around the corner waiting for the UX lab to open. People waited in line literally for hours to get a UX review. I guess word got out this year about how good those reviews were. I know I saw several people raving about them last year. In general, I think people have really started to grok the fact that the labs represent an incredible opportunity to get questions answered by the people who really know the answers. If you're having a problem or an issue with a certain part of the system, likely you can find someone who actually works on that part of the system to answer your questions.
As for MartianCraft, we gave out all of our away team shirts pretty quickly this year. Sorry to those who wanted one but didn't get one. We way underestimated demand for the shirts and just didn't have enough with us to give them to everyone who wanted one. We'll be better prepared next year, and we're looking into making the shirts available online for anybody who's interested, but that probably won't happen until we've dug ourselves out from the hole that got created as a result of all three of us not working for a week.
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