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The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

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Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#51

Post by mgkimsal »

jolux wrote: post #42
webwielder2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Venn diagram of people who use BBedit and NetNewswire is roughly a circle.

What am I missing about BBEdit? I’ve tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.

perhaps some weird nostalgia thing? I first saw it in... 1998? was at a web dev shop, and most of the Mac people there were all in love with bbedit. it seemed fairly odd and slow (as did most of the Mac stuff they ran), but it might have been one of the only decent text editors around at that time? I wasn't much of a Mac person then (as likely evidenced by my comments above).

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#52

Post by eindiran »

addicted44 wrote: post #45
throwqwerty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the difference between your hypothetical tweet and this article is that humble qualifier "I think". what I've seen hn (and startup culture in general) distort is people's confidence in their own opinions. this is probably because it is repeated ad nauseum that you cannot start a successful startup without being an iconoclastic innovator. what isn't repeated ad nauseum is that you should save that kind of arrogance fo…

One of the first things I learnt in English 101 is that "I think" is redundant. Your writing something automatically implies that it's what you think. Unless you explicitly say something is a "fact" or quote a 3rd party.

Linguists call "I think" when used this way a "stance marker"[0]. It's definitely not redundant: it reveals pragmatic information[1] about the context you're speaking in, namely by tempering your stance and revealing your level of confidence in the statement you're making.

See this for example: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SC59wwEkK64tvQsDb9hC/full

[0] Here, "stance" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stance_(linguistics)

[1] For more info, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#53

Post by Wowfunhappy »

leejoramo wrote: post #46
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda. The original NetNewsWire was made by the same guy behind the current NetNewsWire. It's just that there was a period in between where NetNewsWire was owned and developed by someone else.

Same guy. 100% different project. He required the NetNewsWire name well after the start of this new open source RSS reader.

If it does the same thing and has the same name and creator, is it really a different project? Many software releases are actually complete rewrites under the hood.

The only reason what became Net News Wire 5 originally had a different name is because NNW was owned by BlackPixel at that point.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#54

Post by WoodenChair »

sdegutis wrote: post #44
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.

* I’m practically never so productive that I’m counting seconds for an app to open. * VS Code is just as quick to use as Xcode, actually more responsive in many actions, demonstrating effectively that it’s the algorithm which must change for a serious speed up * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time * The rest of the OS hasn’t…

> * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time

Probably because you’re using so many electron apps. This is not the case in lab testing by MacWorld, etc.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#55

Post by chirau »

addicted44 wrote: post #45
throwqwerty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the difference between your hypothetical tweet and this article is that humble qualifier "I think". what I've seen hn (and startup culture in general) distort is people's confidence in their own opinions. this is probably because it is repeated ad nauseum that you cannot start a successful startup without being an iconoclastic innovator. what isn't repeated ad nauseum is that you should save that kind of arrogance fo…

One of the first things I learnt in English 101 is that "I think" is redundant. Your writing something automatically implies that it's what you think. Unless you explicitly say something is a "fact" or quote a 3rd party.

Then let's hope you did not end at 101

Q: What's the best phone out there buddy?

A1: The iPhone Super Max

A2: I think it is Samsung S20, but there are several options out there

A3: I think it is the iPhone Super Max, though i agree, there are plenty of competing options around.

--

"I think" is very important in establishing/shaping context and clarifying the source of the opinion you are referring to.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#56

Post by gnachman »

hellofunk wrote: post #33
gnachman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write both: iOS during the day and macOS at night. iOS is significantly less buggy and has less legacy baggage than macOS. iOS has some features that macOS doesn't, so there is more to learn. I spend a lot less time working around platform brokenness on iOS than on macOS. macOS lets you do a lot more than iOS in ways that are unmaintainable (e.g., private APIs), which helps you create accidental complexity for your…

I’m curious which features you would advise a dev to avoid in iOS, because their problems, i.e. toxicity. I’m getting more into iOS programming and it would be great to know some pitfalls on the roadmap.

Anything added after iOS 6 is the cheeky answer, but it’s not totally wrong either. Auto layout is incredibly hard to debug; it’s great when it works right, though, fwiw. The audio APIs are a garbage fire (equally on both platforms, at least!) Mapkit has a lot of sharp edges if you try to do anything more than Apple envisioned, which is true of a lot of iOS and macOS APIs. View controller transitions are a mess, but they may have fixed the bugs by now—I’ve stayed away since being traumatized by them five years back. The Metal shader compiler is an absolute shit show of bugs on the Mac, but is better on iOS. Core Bluetooth has caused me pain (just doesn’t work sometimes). Stringly types objective c-isms like KVO. In app purchases are a mess (I’m told, haven’t used it myself). CoreData might look like a good idea but you will live to regret it if it’s an important part of your app. UITableView is really powerful but also gets complex fast, with legacy baggage showing up when you try to get fancy (like auto layout and dynamic row height). The security API is hard to use correctly, also on both platforms.

Mostly though Xcode is the worst piece of software I’ve ever used, besides Wind River’s IDE and Windows ME.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#57

Post by _bxg1 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40
sdegutis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately. Look and feel may not be as consistent as the ideal but it generally never was in the first place, even among native Cocoa apps. The web has won on desktop.

> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.

In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#58

Post by millstone »

sdegutis wrote: post #44
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.

* I’m practically never so productive that I’m counting seconds for an app to open. * VS Code is just as quick to use as Xcode, actually more responsive in many actions, demonstrating effectively that it’s the algorithm which must change for a serious speed up * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time * The rest of the OS hasn’t…

I mean VSCode is the best Electron app ever made and it still kind of sucks. The median is miles underground.

Consistency is a sliding scale but Electron is a whole new (lower) level. Extremely basic interactions like "the menu bar highlights to acknowledge key equivalents" are missing.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#59

Post by dclusin »

yborg wrote: post #27
oefrha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure BBEdit has wider appeal than NetNewsWire. For one thing BBEdit is the only decent text editor on Mac App Store (not that it’s a high bar to clear).

I've switched to CotEditor for lightweight text editing.

Thank you for this. I've been using SublimeText as a text editor but always felt weird since its targeted as a more powerful quasi-ide... This fits the bill nicely for what I want.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#60

Post by adiabatty »

jolux wrote: post #42
webwielder2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Venn diagram of people who use BBedit and NetNewswire is roughly a circle.

What am I missing about BBEdit? I’ve tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.

I'm a fan of vim, BBEdit, and Visual Studio Code, but "less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor.

While I'm using VSCode a lot more these days, I still like BBEdit a lot. It's a Mac-native programmer's text editor that manages to remain performant on large files.

I think part of the problem is that in order to make a good programmer's text editor, you need a large community of people who're able and willing to make good plugins for it, and any text editor with a userbase smaller than "half of all linux nerds" isn't going to have enough engineer hours put into all its per-language tooling. Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers and whatnot, but the granddaddy of all Mac text editors can't attract that much attention.

Plus, I get a _lot_ of mileage out of multiple cursors. Way more than I'd have expected ten years ago.

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