Hi, I'm Weiran Zhang. I'm passionate about technology and building thriving software teams. This blog is where I write about things I find interesting. You can follow me on Mastodon.
Today Hackers 4.2 shipped to the iOS App Store. The headline feature is it can now automatically adapt to the device’s system theme.
Hackers originally gained dark mode in a May 2018 update 1. I don’t think I could’ve picked a worse time to ship an app with its own custom theme system, because in June Apple announced at WWDC that iOS 13 would have native support for dark mode! Hackers now had a shiny new theme system that understood none of the new iOS 13 APIs, but still looked fine as long as you manually selected the right theme in Hackers to match iOS. This was okay but not great, however my motivation to refactor the theme system just after I shipped it was very low, and it’s been that way ever since.
The beauty of working on an open source app is that I don’t have to be the only one with motivation to get something done. Three months earlier EkilDeew started working on adding a setting to use the system theme which has led to us collaborating on overhauling the Hackers theme system to work with iOS 13 natively.
The simplicity of the UI and interaction shrouds the complexity of adapting Hackers’ theme system for iOS 13. Themes are now defined in asset catalogues and native iOS UI will always match the picked theme. Hackers will respond to system theme changes, so if you let iOS automatically change theme depending on the time of day, Hackers will also change.
It’s a great feeling to pay off technical debt while developing a new feature, and especially great it was done with the generosity of individual contributors to the open source community. These are the types of releases that really help keep my motivation to continue working on this project even though it’s feature complete for my purposes.
Checkout the issues and milestones on GitHub to see what’s coming up next.
Download Hackers from the App Store.
- This is not the entire truth. Early versions of Hackers also had a dark theme, however this feature was lost when the app had it’s big Swift rewrite in 2016.↩
When I got my 27” iMac in 2017 it came with 8GB of RAM. Being one of the few Apple Macs with user upgradable RAM1, I decided to avoid that part of the Apple tax and buy my own. The stock 8GB came in two 4GB sticks to enable dual channel memory. The iMac had 2 spare slots, so I ordered 16GB more as two 8GB sticks.
It was only when I opened the package that I realised I bought a single 16GB stick instead of two 8GB sticks. This would give the iMac three sticks RAM, which meant it couldn’t use dual channel memory.
Being impatient, instead of exchanging it for what I really wanted, I kept it and thought I would just buy another 16GB stick when the price is lower.
###You don’t know what you’re missing
It turned out that for over 18 months RAM prices would remain above what I paid for my original 16GB stick. I didn’t really use all of the 24GB of RAM I had, so I decided to keep on waiting. I never really felt like my iMac was slow2, and didn’t think single channel memory would make much of difference.
Recently that the price dropped to a point where it didn’t feel like I was just burning money to satisfy a curiosity,
So now I had dual channel memory again, is there any real difference?
###You probably weren’t missing much
I ran Geekbench 4 just before and after installing the final 16GB RAM stick, and I was surprised to see over 10% increase with dual channel memory. Single-core test resulted in 5,799 vs 5,249, and multi-core 20,403 vs 17,485. The detailed results show small increases across the tests, with memory bandwidth almost doubling. Certain multi-core tests had a big difference, probably ones which were being limited by the memory bandwidth rather than CPU performance.
I also tried testing the time it took to do a clean full archive of Hackers, but it was only faster by one second3 with dual channel memory. Apart from playing games4, compiling swift is probably the most taxing thing I do on this Mac. Adding that new memory stick will make no noticable difference to that.
###Final words
Does dual channel memory make a difference? Only if you’re doing something that is constrained by memory bandwidth. If you don’t know if you’re doing something that is memory bandwidth constrained, that means you probably aren’t. I’ve spent £60 and gained nothing except a slightly better Geekbench score, but your mileage may vary.
- The others being the Mac mini and the new Mac Pro. You can upgrade the RAM in the iMac Pro but it involves cutting sticky tap holding the display to the chassis and a fairly lengthy disassemble process to get the motherboard out. I’ve done this before on an old 2011 iMac that needed GPU replacing, but I don’t think I’d have the guts to do it on a brand new £5,000 iMac Pro.↩
- This is the 2017 model with the i7-7700K which for its time was an incredibly fast processor. Even now the single threaded performance is pretty good, and the iMac has the cooling to let it turbo boost to 4.4GHz pretty regularly. Although the noise the iMac’s fans make when at full load is a different story.↩
- 34 vs 35 seconds with single channel memory. This is well within the margin of error as my timing methodology relied on using the iPhone’s timer app. I think it also shows the synthetic nature of Geekbench, and doesn’t always represent real world usage.↩
- I should’ve ran some gaming benchmarks before so I could do some comparisons, but my gut feeling is that most recent games are constrained by the Radeon Pro 580 GPU rather than the CPU or memory.↩