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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?

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i meant exactly what i said: it's a humble qualifier . "I think" functions as an admission of fallibility. it transforms a certain claim into a proposition subject to change. its purpose is rhetorical rather than formal.

Quoting the linked article: "I've thought for a long time that, for some types of apps, a Mac app would do as well as an iOS app." Isn't it pretty clear that when he's asserting that the relative downloads of NetNewsWire for iOS vs. macOS "confirms" that thought, he's (a) describing that as his thought, rather than trumpeting it as an immutable fact, and (b) both admitting that this is just one piece of data ("admittedly just one app") and confining even his hypothesis to "some types of apps"?

tl;dr: I get what you're saying, but I think you're giving too ungenerous a reading in this specific case.

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

#72
post #42

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.

Personally I keep it around because it can handle opening a 250MB sql dump and searching it fairly quickly. And it’ll do easy multi file searches without all of the overhead an IDE brings, but still has syntax highlighting and character conversion stuff.

Maybe it’s for people like me that have never learned emacs.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.

More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.

If the thing is 7 (!) years old it’s no wonder the battery is done. That is not an issue with Mac batteries.

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

#75
post #57

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.

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.

In user interface, sure. Performance-wise Electron usually loses even to things like GTK.

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

#76
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes, the same crowd that wonders why people won't write native Mac Apps but then rarely acknowledges the documentation is utterly lacking in significant places. I say this as someone who writes those apps.

Not only documentation is lacking, but Apple has the annoying tendency to change their frameworks every few years. Writing a MacOS app is a fight against the constant changes.

Which frameworks? AppKit is mostly stable, even too stable.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.

More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.

My Mac (just over three years old) reliably gives me 7+ hours off a full charge if I’m not constantly compiling anything; just reading mail and Hacker News can easily give 10+ hours. I very actively ensure that Electron is never running on my Mac.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree on all points... "Counting seconds" may mean little to you but by proxy you can look at conversion statistics for web stores vs response time and see a pretty clear correlation VSCode's 'performance' is the result of an obscene amount of tuning the base framework, far more than most applications would need. Most other Electron apps do not see anywhere near this level of optimization (and they desperately nee…

First of all Apple does not follow its HIG in many ways. But even aside from that, the HIG itself changes every few years, sometimes drastically such as the iOS 7 departure. And it takes many apps time to catch up. One example is Apple's own new Mac App Store which doesn't even allow selecting or copying text in app descriptions last I checked.

The Mac App Store is a fairly well known atrocity which might as well be a Catalyst app for how bad and out-of-place it is.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.

My Mac (just over three years old) reliably gives me 7+ hours off a full charge if I’m not constantly compiling anything; just reading mail and Hacker News can easily give 10+ hours. I very actively ensure that Electron is never running on my Mac.

I'll second this opinion - when I don't have Chrome running, my 2015 MBP runs forever.

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

#80
post #42

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.

For code, you’re probably right it isn’t all that great. But as text editor on the Mac it can do anything.

What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text.

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