Florian Boesch, a graphics programmer, writes about WebGL, OpenGL, and browser technology limitations, with demos.
HN commenters link it for his Craftscape WebGL demo, his Minecraft-style OpenGL rendering write-up, and his list of iOS WebGL issues.
Yeah, the more information you require the less likely people are to fill it in.
I've been a fan of "search" not categorise for bugs for this reason. People are more likely to blog about, or tweet about a bug than put it into a bug tracker.
The role of an issue gardener is a really useful one too. A person whose job it is to go into issues, and make them useful for developers. To communicate with all sides, and enhance the process for everyone.
A great example of this is when @pyalot tested out various webgl implementations on different browsers. Then he went to all the bug trackers, and made notes. Then linked to various specifications, and pointed to test cases.
http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios-webgl-implementation/
This one guy through this has done a massive service to WebGL and the web. I've seen too often various bugs and issues go through 2-3 browser iterations because that's how long it takes for people to seriously test out features and report bugs.
The collaboration going on now because of open bug trackers in web browsers is amazing.
Hi,
Completely agree with you that Mom & Pop shops still rely in technology. They still arent conversant with Dropbox or Google Docs as much as we think they are. In any case they wont be the early adopters of such technologies.
On data
1. on dev stats-about 52K independant devs out there hacking on iOS and Android. Not sure if there organizations out there that have 52K dedicated devs building mobile apps.
2. on WebGL stats-51% of browswers support it currently.
http://codeflow.org/entries/2012/apr/25/webgl-statistics-and-the-state-of-webgl-html5/
HTML 5 seems to be around 58% (Slightly dated data)
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/stat-of-the-week-html5-desktop-market-share-at-581-max.html
3. On Digital natives-
http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/content/us/en/products/building_efficiency/gws/gwi/projects_workplace_innovation/digital-natives.html
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Older-adults-and-internet-use/Main-Report/Internet-adoption.aspx
From the paper: "We use the rasterizer as a potentially-visible set optimization to iterate only over pixels
for which rays might intersect a voxel, and then execute a small ray tracer in the
pixel shader. That is, we “splat” billboards that give coarse visibility and compute
exact visibility in a pixel shader. This works for any pinhole perspective projection,
including eye rays and shadow rays, so we use it for the shadow map rendering pass
as well"
Neat - I used a similar technique [1] in the last iteration of Voxel Quest, but I only rasterized single points/pixels then raytraced them into filled cubes (was not efficient other than on fill rate). However I did not invent the technique (I'm not sure who did, but I first got the idea from talking to Florian Boesch [2])
[1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/717265068086308865
[2] http://codeflow.org
Safari in iOS is missing many newer APIs. For example WebRTC is not in Safari but it is in Chrome/Firefox. No idea if it's been added to iOS8. Even WebGL in iOS8 is currently hobbled.
http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios-webgl-implementation/#hardcoded-constraints-on-ios
Also it's not a matter of "clamoring". People have no idea what they're missing. Do you think anyone would have been clamoring for Firefox on Windows in the 90s for they had never seen it and were limited to IE?
Maybe I'm showing my bias here but remember the browsers before Chrome and V8 came on the scene and heated up the competition? Well there's no competition on iOS because you can't write your own browser. Heck, I'd certainly like to see ASM.JS on iOS as one example.
WebGL support on iOS 8 is the best new feature for me.
It looks like there are still some limitations that Apple could fix: http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios-webgl-implementation/
about 75% of all user already have a browser with WebGL support: http://webglstats.com/
Yup, operator overloading. I miss it and I wonder why you don't.
Check link at the end of the post - http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/sep/11/webgl-and-html5-challenges-for-the-future/ it includes most of what you said and I'm a little to lazy to rewrite what this guy has already listed.