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Nova by Panic

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Re: Nova by Panic

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of the time for me, I wouldn't wipe my butt with a trackpad, let alone use one for work. It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.

Tabs or spaces ?

It depends. For lists, I do spaces. Allows for more levels than a tab would. But for everything else, tabs.

I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky.

I loathe centered text too.

I'm not a rounded rectangle person.

I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.

Re: Nova by Panic

#512
post #418
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs, with their amazing touchpads, are (at least for the moment and the last ten years or so) general purpose computers that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. This is a false dichotomy. From GP: > use a closed source operating system That's not "Windows".

> that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. That's just not true, though. Here's a git repo listing what works and doesn't work in Linux for all of the macbook pro models since 13,1 (released in 2016): https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux You'll notice that power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model, wifi only works for a few select models, and support for au…

> BSD support is much, much, much worse--it basically doesn't work at all for any relatively recent model

Well, would probably work fine with an external keyboard/mouse :D

NVMe should crash right now like it did on Linux before 5.4, but the Linux patch for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/66341331ba0d2de4ff4... is absolutely tiny, I could probably replicate these quirks in FreeBSD in a few minutes.

The SPI keyboard and touchpad thing though is just.. WHY?? Everyone went with HID over I2C, Apple went with a completely new protocol over SPI. So annoying. I wouldn't want to work on supporting that crap.

> power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model

um, that page says that you have to disable a power saving state on NVMe and it would work on any model with Intel GPU.

Re: Nova by Panic

#513
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you . It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

If linux wouldn't require you to send patches upstream that would be great. Last time I checked the font rendering was off. So Linux seems to need to catch up to system 7 maybe? Certainly it's lagging osx 10.0.

Re: Nova by Panic

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Panic’s products a lot, particularly Transmit, but for something I use day in and day out to write code, munge datasets to solve production incidents, build and run code, etc., I can’t imagine improving upon a terminal with vim and standard Unix utils. I’m not a total console-chauvinist, I use a GUI email client. But every time I’ve tried any IDE or graphical editor like this, no matter how customizable it is,…

Have you tried VS Code in Remote Development mode?

I’ve only just read about it thanks to your comment, but I’m wondering what advantage it has over just mounting a file system to share between your VM And host OS and just running commands via SSH.

Re: Nova by Panic

#515
post #504
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us prefer the Xerox PARC experience, and gave up on the promise of Linux Desktop with its fragmentation and continuous churn. My MFC/VCL applications work just fine today, and can be easily extended to take advantage of modern UWP APIs.

In what way(s) does Linux fail to follow in the footsteps of PARC?

It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience,

You can start by having a look at,

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

"SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w

You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS,

"NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA

Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas.

Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack.

So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top.

On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS.

The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions.

Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available).

And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant.

It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

Re: Nova by Panic

#516

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

That was a fantastic read, thanks for sharing it.

Re: Nova by Panic

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch has been like that for a while. The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines. Sketch made a thing about leaving the App Store. But the App Store licensing and update process was way better than what it has evolved to.

> The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines. That's the one thing that pushed me to Figma. It was bad enough that it's MacOS only. Now I can only have it on 2 machines?

Sketch customer service recently described it to me:

"Your [sketch] license can accommodate up to 2 devices — one for each seat you've purchased, plus an extra one we offer as a special perk."

I had to reply specifically calling out that this was not a special perk. I've paid the full license price at least three times. It should be available to install on as many machines as I want if I'm the only one using it.

It is Sketch's job to catch when someone is abusing this and create tech to handle that.

I think that this is actually not about preventing privacy, it is to try and get people to move to their cloud product.

Re: Nova by Panic

#519
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost agree; but in my experience, JetBrains IDEs are worth every cent. I am more productive on them than in Visual Studio Code, even for "simple" tasks, like raw HTML/CSS/JS editing.

Weird, I can't stand them. Mine falls over on a moderately sized project and it feels like it's always melting while re-indexing-- which also totally blocks inspection operations.

JetBrain products (in my experience) are a ram eater, much more than any other IDE I've ever used, but in that similar vain no other IDE is as powerful as IntelliJ is for me.

Re: Nova by Panic

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch has a 'soft' way into making you constantly buy subscription. Plugins usually target only the latest released version of Sketch, so if you are dependent on plugins (and you ARE dependent on plugins if you use Sketch), then you either upgrade or eventually lose extended functionality. Because plugin manager will update plugins regardless of their compatibility with your current version.

if you need to hold back on an old version (whether because your license lapsed or whatever else), you should stop updating your plugins as well. They don't force auto updates or anything.

A lot of plugins require some external APIs. They get obsoleted way faster than you can imagine. And it doesn't end at plugins. If you use any design resources, they are more almost always using the most recent version, so you are doomed to load them with issues.

I use Sketch rather rarely once in maybe few weeks, but i've found out that it quickly becomes uncomfortable to use if you don't renew the license.

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