Virtual Studio Project

The goal of the Virtual Studio project is to make it much easier for musicians and singers to play music together remotely. Most current solutions require each player to install, configure, and update sophisticated software and hardware on their computers. This necessitates significant technical expertise — including for computers, real-time audio, and even networking — to attain acceptable results. Another big problem with playing music together remotely is avoiding audio delays, called latency. The Virtual Studio project solves these problems in several ways:

• Virtual Studio is based on a self-contained device that includes the necessary computer hardware and software, pre-installed…

Here are the things that led me to cancel Amazon Prime, including reasons you should think about dropping it too. I’m not trying to single out Amazon, this is primarily a cost-benefit analysis.

Full disclosures: I’ve had various relationships with Amazon for a long time. I buy a lot of uncommon stuff that is hard to find, so I order things from Amazon frequently. In 2019 I averaged more than one order a week from them, typically containing multiple items. I also watch videos and read ebooks from Amazon Prime.

In addition, I used to be the CEO of a…

This article will be of particular interest to people who are curious about how powerful encryption can be implemented in high performance systems. It is also for people who just want to know a bit more about how strong encryption works and how all the pieces fit together.

Introduction

Making a system secure is very difficult. Data breaches of large and widely used systems — for example, at Adobe, Anthem, eBay, Equifax, Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase, Marriott, Sony, Target, Uber, VeriSign, Yahoo, the US Office of Personnel Management, and even good security companies like RSA Security — have cost billions…

It has been over a year since What’s Revolutionary about Flutter was published (it is still a good introduction). When I wrote that article, few mobile developers had heard about Flutter, but things have come a long way since then. Now I can’t keep up with all the articles and videos being created about Flutter by an active, vibrant, even exploding community. Developers have discovered Flutter, and they love it. Here’s an animated GIF of just one of the wonderful apps created using Flutter, by Reflectly:

Developers often tell me that one of their biggest challenges now is convincing their…

tl;dr — The Transform widget allows you to do amazing things in your Flutter apps. Here’s a one-minute video showing off what developers have done with Transform widgets:

This article builds a simple demo program that shows how to use Flutter’s Transform widget to provide 3D perspective, a graphic demonstration of the ease with which Flutter can do something that would be rather difficult to implement in a system based on native widgets. It is also fun to play with!

Here’s the app we are going to build in action (the little circle reflects the position of the user’s…

Many linguists believe that the natural language a person speaks affects how they think. Does the same concept apply to computer languages? Programmers working in different kinds of programming languages often come up with radically different solutions to problems. As a more extreme example, computer scientists eliminated the goto statement to encourage more structured programs (not quite the same as totalitarian leaders in the novel 1984 expunging heretical words from natural language to eliminate thoughtcrimes, but you get the idea).

What does this have to do with Flutter and Dart? Quite a bit actually. The early Flutter team evaluated more…

What is Flutter?

The Flutter mobile app SDK is a new way to build beautiful native mobile apps that break away from the “cookie cutter” apps that have been so common in the past. People who try Flutter really like it; for example, see this, this, or this. Or here’s a list of articles and videos compiled by a third party.

As with any new system, people want to know what makes Flutter different, or put another way, “what is new and exciting about Flutter?” …

[If you’re the kind of person who loves programming on your smallish laptop, you can stop reading now.]

If you are a software developer and you’re like me, you may find that you are far more productive when you have enough real estate. I’m not talking about cubicle space, I’m talking about screen real estate: large monitors and usually more than one of ’em (at least until now).

I own three 30-inch Apple Cinema displays, but I typically used only two of them on a single computer (most laptops can only drive two of them at once; some can only…