26 Dec 2011 MichaelCrawford   » (Master)

I Cannot In Good Conscience Release Warp Life Through The Apple App Store

After a great deal of consideration I have decided to protest Apple's nasty behaviour by refusing to release Warp Life through the Apple iOS App Store. Instead binary installations will require that iOS devices be first jailbroken through the use of a tool such as Cydia.

I won't place it in the Cydia App Store either. Instead I'll make the App package available for free download from Solving the Software Problem's web site.

GNU General Public License version 3 tarballs of the source as well as a written discussion of The Warp Life Algorithm - a particularly fast, if not actually the fastest Conway's Game of Life generation update algorithm will be provided at www.warplife.org. (Link to be un-broken Real Soon Now.)

Development will continue in a public way via Solving the Software Problem's Public Subversion Repository.

The code is mature and stable enough that I don't really need "Many Eyeballs" to help with its development, but if you're into optimizing implementations of Conway's Life as I am, rather than the usual take of experimenting with the automata themselves, you may find my Objective-C and Cocoa Touch code enjoyable to work with.

You will find my code strangely uncommented. That's because while I once commented my code slavishly, the boss I had at my very first real job pointed out that comments are rarely maintained in sync with the source code.

Instead I've spent years developing a coding style that the simplest fool can readily understand. If you cannot understand my code despite its lack of comments, I regard that as my own failure as a coder, rather than any inability on your part.

It's going to take a day or two to relicense Warp Life's sources as well as to fix a configuration problem that I'm having with my SVN server. I'm also moving Dulcinea's site to a new box that runs a different distro than the old box. But try to be patient, for the next few days my focus will be first on the release of Warp Life's source as well as a detailed written explanation of why I decided to do all this.

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