811–820 of 912 posts
WebOS, the palm smartphone OS. It was beautiful at the time and predicted many of the swipe gestures iOS and Android adopted much later.
Now in LG TVs
I still pine for features that Palm/HP WebOS had, Android and iOS are still downgrades to this day
WebOS, the palm smartphone OS. It was beautiful at the time and predicted many of the swipe gestures iOS and Android adopted much later.
It took years for Android to adopt it, and then iOS, and even today, it's a copy of what WebOS did, but somehow worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the day Microsoft sent someone to our university to demo all of their new and upcoming products. I remember Vista (then named Longhorn) and Silverlight being among them. I also remember people being particularly impressed by the demo they gave of the latter, but everything swiftly falling apart when someone queried whether it worked in other browsers. This was at a time when IE was being increasingly challeng…
Are you sure? Even at launch, Silverlight 1.0 supported IE, Firefox, and Safari
The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…
Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, th…
The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…
> The reasons it died are likely: The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box. (As I have written many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539 >, https://news…
Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…
I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it, it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of having to manually check channels for updates except X 100 (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded…
Mailing lists use hierarchical threads and they haven't gone away.
Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/ In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then. I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will bui…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?
They have to an extent. The /proc file system on Linux is directly inspired by plan 9 IIRC. Other things like network sockets never got that far and are more related to their BSD kin.
The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…
UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist hist…
My graduation project was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP to Windows.
At the time, my X setup was a mix of AfterStep or windowmaker, depending on the system I was at.