While I can appreciate the general concept of designing withing limitations, 1.44MB just isn't quite the limit it's being presented as. Look at Pico-8 games, for example. With the full Pico-8 runtime environment bundled in, typical games still clock in well under 1MB for Windows builds, and even smaller for Linux (macOS builds bloat up to 3+ MB, unfortunately). That's an entire virtual console + a full game, and still half a meg to spare on a floppy.
POOM, the DOOM clone, is a "multi-cart" on the Pico-8 and still only comes in at 1.2MB on Windows. I guess what I'm getting at is, if someone wants a fast-track to meeting the challenge of 1.44MB, make a Pico-8 game.
If the best someone can do within that 1.44MB constraint is a pico-8 game, then so be it. But I bet we're going to see much more impressive stuff!
Competitions for 16KB games exist. as well as 64KB. And likely everything between 0KB and 1440KB. It doesn't reduce the fun to have multiple tiers, in my opinion.
I included a shout out to ToolBook, with screenshots and comparative features, in the article. Specifically, I show how it addresses some of the complaints I had with Visual Basic's IDE.
That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.
You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).
There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.
VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.
The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.
You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.
Author here. Let me first note that the site is 100% free, and requires no account to read anything. I only use the built-in Ghost blogging subscription for those who want it delivered to their email, but it is absolutely not necessary. That's the full and total extent of anything email related with the site. I have many readers who subscribe to the RSS feed, which is free and open and requires no email whatsoever.
I have been trying to get this unblocked for some time now. I've tried reporting it as a false positive, and so did the Ghost admins, through the Google safebrowsing report mechanism. I saw my blog listed on phishtank.net, but that site isn't accepting new accounts and I have to have an account to report a false positive.
Ghost admins recommended I use a custom subdomain, and it may come to that. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is very frustrating.
FYI, I've visited and enjoyed your site previously and can't connect now. It's not due to ublock. Neither Firefox nor Edge can access it due to:
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to stonetools.ghost.io. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Thank you, that's great to know!
(I also found the method for reporting false positives to AdGuard, and hopefully that will get cleared up on their end one day.)
Commodore's CEO said in the press release about this phone that he wanted it because he, himself, had become addicted to his smartphone, so he switched to a dumbphone "And my two year-old daughter doesn’t see me staring at something she doesn’t understand for half of the day."
Not to sound overly flippant about it, but that sounds like a "him" problem, not a phone problem? He clearly doesn't see it that way. Instead he's decided that his inability to personally cultivate a healthy relationship to current technology represents a flaw in the technology itself, so we should regress it. Kind of, "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." vibes.
I'm not a father, so I can't speak with authority, but it seems to me the appropriate approach (given technology's advances will not stop) is to nurture the skills in children that help them navigate the waters, not to drain the sea.
Current phones and online services are designed by the very best in their fields to make you as addicted as possible, so you spend your whole life in front of them. It’s not a self control problem and definitely not the user’s fault. That some are realizing this and want a way out (get these toxic technologies out of their life), I think is a good thing. But you can’t really go with a dumb phone in western societies any more, where every small part of your life requires some app to function (parking, public transport, library, banking, postal services, etc). This phone gives a solution to that. I think it fits a niche and it’s probably a growing one.
Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?
They distinguish between running the application and opening a document or view. Not all applications want or need to have a document or view (onto a document or otherwise) open at all times. Some of the demo programs actually demonstrate this. Eg, iirc !maestro can keep playing with window open or closed.
Mac OS X has a variant. There's a little dot below the icons that indicate that the program is currently active in ram versus just visible in the dock.
Ps: wrt the demo programs. Did you notice you can eg. 'Save' files from !Edit and !Paint directly into !Draw (and IIRC also back into itself) ?
Note that RISC OS had to contend with running off floppy disks too. So you might start one application off one floppy disk, and the next off another, and you'd have them both in ram, but neither had any data in them yet, because that might come of a third floppy disk.
That's at least one concrete scenario where "application loaded" need not be the same thing as "having data open in a window".
It's been a while though. I just know they were extremely consistent in keeping the distinction between "application loaded" on one hand and opening a window on the other (or taking over the screen, in games) . This does help with your mental model of where your RAM is going, since you have a limited amount of it. Closing applications might free up ram you need for something, but now you might need to juggle floppies again. And so it went.
ppps
Also, windows (and some of mac os) seems to confuse opening a file with opening an application. It's not the same thing. An application can have 0, 1, or infinity files open in memory at any one time. "Why the heck does eg ms windows always open nonsensical empty windows when there's nothing to show?" I'm not sure it's a hill I'd die on today, but I used to have Opinions on this! "The window is not the application, an application can have lots of windows!" (Ha, you're reminding me of old rants back from decades ago ;-) )
I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.
I'm reminded of the utility !Menon that I used to keep track of all my important files across many floppies, once upon a time. No window at all IIRC. Just drag and drop, and the Menu button.
If you double clicked on a file it would load the associated application and open the file.
The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.
There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.
Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."
POOM, the DOOM clone, is a "multi-cart" on the Pico-8 and still only comes in at 1.2MB on Windows. I guess what I'm getting at is, if someone wants a fast-track to meeting the challenge of 1.44MB, make a Pico-8 game.