OS X' idea of "maximise" was "some random window resizing nobody really used anyway", so I'm glad Apple finally replaced it with something else. Too bad OS X' fullscreen view is way too disruptive for my tastes to be of any practical use.

Apple's WWDC kicked off today, with the usual keynote address. Apple unveiled OS X 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8 - packed with new features, but I can't detail all of them. There's a lot of catch-up going on here with the competition, but even so, they're still great features for iOS users. In fact, I would go as far as to say that iOS 8 may provide a pretty convincing argument for a number of Android users to come back to iOS - especially combined with all the other new features.

For instance, iOS is finally getting a form of Android-like inter-application communication called Extensions. The implementation details will differ, of course, but essentially, iOS is getting Android's Intents for a far more seamless multitasking-like user experience. For applications updated to support Extensions, you no longer have to jump in and out of applications; instead, one application can call up specific parts of another. Similarly, iOS will also finally allow third party keyboards for those of us who don't like the default iOS keyboard. Apple is also opening up the notification tray to third party widgets.

An area where Apple is not playing catch-up but is clearly ahead of the game is a set of features that personally impressed me the most about iOS: Continuity. Essentially, using Bluetooth and proximity information, your iPad/iPhone and Mac can work together to a far greater (and easier) degree than ever before. For instance, an incoming call on your iPhone automatically pops, and can be answered, through your Mac. Working on a Keynote document on your iPad? Keynote on the Mac will notify you of it, allowing you to easily pick up where you left off on your iPad - and vice versa.

There's tons of other examples, and I'm really excited about its potential. To me, this approach to bridging the gap between PC and mobile seems far more useful than Microsoft's one-operating-system-for-all approach. Coincidentally, it highlights Google's problem of not being in control of a major PC operating system.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite is intriguing. It constitutes a complete visual overhaul of OS X, with a lot of blurred transparency, iOS-like visuals, and a sidebar full of widgets. Some of the language used regarding the blurred transparency and the sidebar were the exact same words used by Microsoft for Aero and the Vista sidebar, but overall, I'm really liking the new design. It's a fantastic step forward from a design that, in my view, had become quite stale and messy, to a more unified set of visuals and UI elements that, at least on the stream looked absolutely fantastic - especially in the new 'dark mode', which replaces the white with blacks.

All the above (plus the huge amount of stuff I haven't mentioned) would be more than enough for a really strong keynote, but Apple had one more major trick up its sleeve - and for the developers among you, this is a big one: Apple introduced Swift, a new programming language set to replace Objective-C. Apple claims - of course - that it will be faster and easier than Objective-C, but we'll need proper hands-on from developers to substantiate those claims. It's a huge deal, though: Apple essentially just introduced the way forward for its developers, after twenty years of Objective-C. And nobody saw it coming.

All in all, this keynote was Apple at its very best, in optima forma, showing a set of improvements, new features, and new products that really constitute major steps forward for Apple's ecosystem. iOS still can't grab my attention in any meaningful way (too little, too late), but OS X 10.10 is shaping up to be a fantastic (free!) update, and I can't wait to pull my 2012 iMac out of storage and try it out.

That being said - all the amazing stuff Apple showed today made one distinct part of the keynote stand out like a bright yellow Lumia in a unitary sea of grey iPhones: the competition bashing. The bashing has reached such a low point this year that Tim Cook had to resort to flat-out lying to smear Android. Not only did Cook lie about Android version adoption rates, he also trotted out the baseless scaremongering from anti-virus peddlers about malware writers focusing on Android. Sure, those people target Android - but Android is so secure that despite all this effort from malware makers, their results are absolutely laughable.

With such an incredibly strong showing, the bashing stood out more than usual, especially because many of the features and improvements demonstrated by Apple today consist of things the competition has been enjoying for years. All this bashing detracted from the amazing work done by Apple's engineers, and simply wasn't necessary.

Strong showing marred by unnecessary pettiness.

iTnews points to a study performed by Joseph J. Mueller and Timothy D. Syrett of IP firm WilmerHale, and Ann Armstrong of Intel, which concludes that for an average $400 smartphone (no subsidies), patent royalty costs may be higher than component costs.

Let me repeat that last line for you - savour it and let it sink in.

Bingo. This is exactly why the patent system will never change: this construction benefits the large players immensely. Smaller players will have a hard time keeping up with the patent costs, since they most likely won't have much to barter with patent-wise. The result is less competition for established players.

For better or worse, this is exactly why many people seem to hold Google in higher regard than they do Apple. Both Apple and Google are rich and wealthy beyond average-person-measure. Now, which company will be liked more: the one that uses said wealth to develop crazy may-or-may -not-work technologies that can change the world at a massively substantial scale, or the one that stuffs $150 billion in shady bank accounts to avoid having to pay taxes?

The more wealth you hoard, the less sympathetic people will be towards you. Unless, of course, you use that wealth in a very public way.

I have a better solution. No registry hacks required!

I'm still waiting on the Tizen phones Samsung has been promising for years. Even though it's essentially 'TouchWiz OS' (in other words, cringe-worthy), it's still an alternative operating system I would love to play with.

After the feature-rich release 14.02, the Genode developers took the chance to thoroughly revisit the tooling and overall structure of the framework. The goal was to improve its scalability with steadily growing amount of third-party software combined with the framework. Genode-based system scenarios combine the work of up to 70 open-source projects. However, until now, the framework lacked proper tools to manage such third-party code in a uniform way. In particular, upgrades of third-party software were poorly supported. To overcome those problems, the project took the wonderful Nix package manager as inspiration, created a set of new tools, and reworked the build system to make the porting and use of third-party software much more enjoyable and robust.

Most ported 3rd-party software relies on a C runtime. Genode offers a fairly complete libc based on FreeBSD's libc. However, translating the POSIX API to the Genode API is not straight forward. For example, Genode does not even have a central virtual file system service. Hence, different applications call for different ways of how POSIX calls are translated to the Genode world. Until now, the different use cases were accommodated by specially crafted libc plugins that tailored the behavior of the C runtime per application. However, as the number of applications grew, the number of libc plugins has grown too. In the new version, the framework consolidates the existing libc plugins to a generic virtual file system (VFS) implementation. In contrast to a traditional VFS that resides in the OS kernel, Genode's VFS is a plain library embedded in the C runtime. To the C program, it offers the view on a regular file system. But under the hood, it assembles the virtual file system out of Genode resources such as file-system sessions, terminal sessions, or block sessions. Since each process has its own VFS configured by its parent process, the access to resources can be tailored individually per process.

In addition to the infrastructural changes, the new version comes with plenty of platform-related improvements. Genode's custom kernel platform for ARM devices named base-hw has received multi-processor support and a new memory management that alleviates the need to maintain identity mappings in the kernel. The NOVA microhypervisor has been adapted to make static priority scheduling usable for Genode. Thereby the kernel becomes more attractive for general-purpose OS workloads on the x86 architecture. Also related to NOVA, the project has continued its line of work to run VirtualBox on this kernel by enabling support for guest-additions, namely shared folders, mouse-pointer synchronization, and real-time clock synchronization.

In line with the project's road map, the new version features a first solution for using encrypted block devices. The developers decided to use NetBSD's cryptographic device driver (CDG) as a Genode component. One motivation behind the use of CDG was to intensify the work with the rump kernel project, which allows the execution of NetBSD kernel subsystems at user level. After the project successfully used rump kernels as file-system providers with the previous release, extending the use of rump kernels for other purposes was simply intriguing.

These and more topics are covered in the comprehensive release documentation for Genode 14.05.

I've been looking at a lot of these 8bit fonts because of recent emulation efforts. I'd like to throw Visi On's fonts into the fray, too.

I still have no idea why Apple is buying these guys. Then again, that's probably why I'm not a billionaire.

Coincidentally, I find it highly entertaining that technically, this is now an Apple product.

As a follow up to this and this story - Steven Troughton-Smith goes a step further.

Software sucks. It really, really sucks. I have yet to meet a piece of software that didn't make me go "...eh." several times per hour - whether it be a videogame, a browser, or an operating system.

Like most of you, I've always wanted want to code and compile 68k Mac OS applications in OS X that work on System 1.1. This question kept me up night after night, but thanks to Steven Troughton-Smith, we now know that it is, indeed, possible. It started with a 68k application on System 6. Not long after, he managed to compile a simple application that worked on System 1.1. This test application's code is available on github.

This is possible using ksherlock's MPW Emulator, which, as the name implies, is an emulator that allows you to run the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop on any OS X 10.9 system (a case-insensitive HFS+ volume is required).

I'm glad this matter has been settled. In all seriousness, while the number of useful applications for this is probably limited, it's still very cool.

An incredibly detailed look at the state of iOS and OS X development. Grab a drink.