And so this is a case where you must thank heavens for the GPU because it can help keep people amused while data is loading. So it's really... we're lucky that on iOS we get to have really high powerful machines that can do this type of image blurring. But if you look at it very slowly it's kind of clear what we do. We took the box art image which we'd already downloaded, it was always cached. The title art already downloaded and cached. And then we have these kind of... we had our designers make these kind of gauzy images which you could cycle through.
So it's already blurred but it kind of simulates what video looks like even though it hasn't downloaded anything intermediary. But meanwhile it's asking the server: Please, give me some damn video. Because that's what the user wants. So and we call that effect, we call the woo-woo. Because sometimes you can have a little woo-woo in your app. You don't know how to translate woo-woo? It's not a word in English, I know. Okay, sorry. So we are coming in close to the end. I'm sorry I'm going late. So magic modem. So this is something that's really fun. So the same way that pseudo-localization allows developers to be aware of language differences we actually created some specialized Wi-Fi routers that we've put around the office and allowed people to connect to them. And it's kind of funny. It was started by this guy who was in Uzbekistan and he total nerd, And he's in Uzbekistan like: "Wow! We have interesting network conditions here. I wonder if I could model it in software". Well as it turns out you actually can. So this little device is running I think FreeBSD and something. And it basically takes a bunch of data. So as you may know the Netflix platform involves this thing called open connect. These are kind of boxes that we install in various ISPs around the world. And it allows us to kind of profile and see how long does it take to get packets from the edge to a device. We also have an app called that I showed earlier. The Fast application which measures the Internet speed all over on the world. And so then we have access to that information and we can kind of look in and see on various different ISPs and mobile network providers the world over. You can just dial that in and connect up to it and say: "I wonder what it would be like if I could travel right now to downtown Moscow or New York or Uzbekistan whatever". And we have that ability at the office. It's kind of cool. And there actually is a talk about that so if they're super networking nerds that want to look at it, come find me. I can point you out or you can just search for Magic Modem. And so the problem then you say is like: "Well what happens if I, humble developer don't have access to that?". I can strongly recommend this. It actually does work. The network link conditioner. This is something that runs on the Mac or when you're using the simulator or it actually runs on your device and you can simulate different things with you know packet loss and you know imagine what other cr*ppy network... challenge networks are using. And you can simulate it. And if you don't do this you're really doing a disservice to your users. All right so the last thing I want to say is that I talked about building world-friendly applications and I think you can't build a world-friendly application unless you have a world-friendly team. And I love the people I work with. I really do.
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AuthorKelly is a casino player on this website, slots games lover. She also loves athletics, competing in sports, and became a star of the college basketball team. Archives
March 2019
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