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Tweet Shoutouts\n\n\nNONE\n\nSend us your shoutouts:\xa0@iohyespodcast\n\nThe Discussion\n\n\n\n Quick revisit of Widgets and Extensions\n\n What \u201cToday view\u201d widgets are you using?\n\n Darryl - Transit, Pedometer++. I wish I could move the Tomorrow Summary above 3rd party widgets\n John - Paste+\n Jason - Omnifocus, Yahoo News Digest, Duolingo\n Chad - e*trade\n\n\n What extensions are you using?\n\n Darryl - \xaf\\_(?)_/\xaf\n Jason - Camera+ photo editing, 1Password Safari extension\n Chad - 1Password, Transmit\n\n\n What do you still want to see exist?\n\n Jason - VSCO CAM photo editing, more 3rd-party 1Password integration\n Chad - Better YouTube support\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Metal - Low-overhead GPU access for iOS 8\n\n What is Metal?\n\n Modern, Thin API for GPU programming (graphics and simd compute)\n Designed for A7 and newer SoCs (iPhone 5S and newer)\n Shader/kernel language based on C++11\n\n\n Who should/will use Metal?\n\n In-house/roll-your-own 3D engines/frameworks\n\n For most folks, using Metal or OpenGL directly is overkill (but fun!)\n Alternative, higher-level APIs include SceneKit (3D) and SpriteKit (2D), which provide much more than just graphics rendering support, including graph management\n\n\n Third-party 3D engines/frameworks\n Compute-heavy applications and filters with highly parallelizable work\n\n DSP\n Image filters\n Protein folding?\n Note: Swift currently doesn\u2019t support importing C unions or SIMD vector types. Chris Lattner acknowledged this, citing feature prioritization (so it\u2019s reasonable to be hopeful it\u2019s coming in the not-so-distant future). In the meantime, if you need to work with SIMD, you may want to stick with Objective-C when using Metal.\n\n\n\n\n Practical differences between Metal and OpenGL ES\n\n In Metal, command buffers are exposed, giving control over when the commands are sent to the GPU to the application and putting the onus of asynchronous framing on the application\n Most state is stored in immutable state objects that are created at setup, not in each draw cycle, allowing for quick state change that doesn\u2019t require expensive recompilation of shaders/validation\n Streamlined API. OpenGL provides many ways to do (effectively) the same task largely due to its evolution. Metal sheds many of the legacy techniques.\n Metal provides direct access to the A7\u2019s shared memory. Thread safety/synchronization is the responsibility of the app.\n\n\n Additional resources\n\n AnandTech : Some Thoughts on Apple\u2019s Metal API\n Rendering Pipeline: What\u2019s the Big Deal with Apple\u2019s Metal API?\n Unity Blog: Metal, A New Graphics API for iOS 8\n Obligatory Ray Wenderlich link: iOS 8 Metal Tutorial with Swift\n Metal By Example\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOpen-Source Project of the Week\n\n\nScrimpyCat's Metal Examples\n\nThere are surprisingly few open source projects using Metal so far, but here\u2019s a repo with some sample code illustrating the use of basic Metal APIs and shaders.\n\ngit clone https://github.com/ScrimpyCat/Metal-Examples.git\n\n\nPicks\n\n\nJohn Follow @johnsextro\n\n\n\n Razer Tartarus a game controller repurposed (note: I\u2019m actually using an older version called the Nostromo N52)\n\n\n\nDarryl Follow @dh_thomas\n\n\n\n Mike Ash: Swift and C\nSwift provides rich facilities for OO and functional programming, but it also allows extensive bridging to C APIs. Learn all about how to call C functions, work with "unsafe" pointers, manage memory, and more.\n\n\n\nChad Follow @jazzychad\n\n\n\n AWS iOS SDK\n AWS Mobile Analytics\n\n \u201c100 million free events per month\u201d\n \u201c$1.00 per million events per month\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nJason Follow @jak\n\n\n\n UX Companion iOS app\nA glossary of user experience terms, with links on how to apply and learn more about each topic. Basically, a phrase book for speaking to designers that you work with.\n\n\n\nAlternative show title suggestions\n\n\n\n You are ruining his segue\n The patron saint of brown-nosers\n Sudo OCD\n Drunk Darryl\n Are you learning English?\n Emoticon for shrugging shoulders\n Too old a man\n Long story short\n Boy have they\n Sure\n Are you using the knob at all?\n That\u2019s a lot of letters