Supporting 64bit is not very important when most of your code is in Java. But Teppefall does have around 300kb of C++ that needs to be ported. And the process is something like this.

• Install crazy big Windows SDK and Visual Studio on Windows 7.


• Realize that the Windows documentation is wrong when it comes to "vcvarsall.bat amd64".


• Dig around for a while.


• Find the correct BAT based configuration files and drag them into the application menu.


• Create custom makefiles.


• Scratch your head as Microsoft uses the suffix "32" in paths and library names everywhere.


• More mind numbingly boring rewriting of makefiles.


• Everything compiles, but Winsock related code is broken. Might be configuration. Might be worse.


• Realize that 64bit JRE writes a registry JVM value that points to a non-existent file. My fault ?


• But the code supports that, so just use TEPPEFALL_JVM variable.


• Success!

Itanium support is probably not happening. The compiler can't find "Windows.h" under the IPF configuration and that's kind of a problem unless I want to dynamically load every method. 64bit Windows 7 also seems to crash some plug-in based systems. They keep changing the security model and developers are behind all the time for some reason. Although, the same problem exists on 64bit Linux. Which is stranger since 64bit compiler support is just a GCC parameter away.

Posted by JP at 12:46 AM | Permalink

By being hell bent on "finishing" JavaFX instead of augmenting Swing Sun has more or less destroyed their credibility as a desktop platform company. The reality is that Swing plus a scene graph, accelerated layers and a new media framework is more valuable than the entire JavaFX ecosystem. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla and Google all believe that XML is the future of layout and yet Sun believes a non-standard syntax based on Lisp and JSON is the way to go. And the fact that C#, Actionscript, Dalvik and Javascript are all Java clones seems to indicate that Java is just fine as a user interface language. Adobe even exports twine animation code as XML and vectors as SVG. I sit here working in Adobe Creative Suite and wonder what Sun is thinking.

Continue reading "Sun is missing out on a huge opportunity" »

Posted by JP at 10:54 PM | Permalink

Looks like it. Lots of Apple people in my web logs as well. Maybe my mind tricks are working ! Lima Lima Lima.

Posted by JP at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not sure if this is just randomness at play, but I develop software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and my download statistics are showing some very interesting tendencies.

Almost all the people who download software are Mac users, even though my download page has an audience that is pretty much split 50/50 between Windows and Mac. Linux and other Unix systems amounts to around 4% of traffic.

Windows users read my stuff, but almost never download anything. Are they afraid of software ? Or are my statistics lying because of Chinese-American spammers scraping my website for content five million times a day ?

Or is this the real reason Web 2.0 is such a hype ? Because Windows users get angst every time they install a piece of software that is not from a Fortune 500 company ?

Here are my Download.com (Windows) and VersionTracker (Mac) pages. Maybe this trend will change over time.

Compete lets you compare Download.com and VersionTracker.

Posted by JP at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)