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Author: Geoff Perlman

Sorry, You’ve Run Out of Memory

Published March 4, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

Most of us build apps without thinking too much about how much memory the app will need. Sure sometimes you end up creating an app that is a real memory buster but that’s unusual. With virtual memory, gone are the days when your app would just run out of memory and crash, or are they?

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If Smartphone Encryption Is A Red Herring, How Do We Track The Bad Guys?

Published February 4, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

In the blog post Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring, I pointed out the folly of requiring an encryption back door for the Good Guys to use. So the question arises- “What can be done? If we don’t want a global encryption back door that can be used by anyone, can we still track the Bad Guys?”

The answer is yes. There are plenty of options that don’t require a global back door. I’m not passing judgment on whether these are inherently good or bad options, just that they are available when there is a reason to track a Bad Guy.

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Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring

Published January 27, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

EnigmaMachine.pngAs the Founder and CEO of a software company that makes a development tool for mobile platforms, as well as for desktop and web, I have a lot of experience with encryption. The current controversy over encryption is really important to me. During World War II, the Germans created a way of sending encrypted messages to commanders in the field. The device came to be known as an Engima machine. It looked like a typewriter but had an encryption key that changed a message into unreadable noise. That message could only be decoded if you knew the key used to encrypt it. The Allies worked very hard to get their hands on one of these devices so they could learn how it works and be able to decrypt the messages and know what the German military plans. Ultimately the Allies figured it out and it helped them win the war. If this has peaked your curiosity, check out the movie U-571 (a fictional account of the effort to obtain an Enigma machine) and The Imitation Game about the team that figured out the encryption key.

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O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

Published December 8, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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Is Apple killing off mobile ads?

Published October 2, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

The issue of mobile ads is of particular interest to me as I am forced to think of mobile ads from three different perspectives. First, as a developer since Xojo can be used to create iOS apps; then as an entrepreneur because we advertise Xojo via mobile ads; but also as a personal consumer of mobile ads.

I think I’m on firm ground when I say that mobile ads are universally hated. We hate them more that TV commercials and certainly more than magazine ads. Why is this?

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Should We Fear The Machine? Self-driving cars and the computers of our future

Published September 11, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

When I was a kid, computers were responsible for almost nothing, at least in my daily life. Big companies used computers to run their accounting departments and NASA used them for analysis, but most peoples’ daily lives were unaffected by the existence of computers.

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Left Handed: Being Outside The Norm

Published August 13, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

Being that it’s Left Handers Day and I am left-handed, I thought I’d share some interesting facts about being left-handed and how it relates to Xojo, Inc.

At Xojo, the percentage of left-handed people has always been high. Currently 33% of our staff is left-handed. I can’t explain why that is. I don’t think we have a bias towards lefties. On the other hand, my brother who is a lawyer specializing in employment law, will tell you handedness is not a protected class in the US, so we could discriminate if we wanted to do so. Nah, you righties are interesting and fun to watch. 🙂

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