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Unifying iPadOS and macOS

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Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#131

Post by emodendroket »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #116
emodendroket wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the average person learn these skills in particular rather than plumbing, cooking, woodwork, auto repair, or any number of other useful skills they could also learn?

I don’t see your point. I think people should learn those too if they want. And we do need people to learn them. But nobody would suggest that someone that can only put together an IKEA nightstand is qualified for carpentry on the level of house building or fine cabinetry. Just because you can water a garden with a hose doesn’t qualify you to work on water mains.

Right. But most people do not work on water mains or as professional carpenters, nor does society need them to be able to start at any time.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#132

Post by emodendroket »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #112
emodendroket wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the average person learn these skills in particular rather than plumbing, cooking, woodwork, auto repair, or any number of other useful skills they could also learn?

Because most of those skills are relatively easy to be picked up at any stage in life, whereas computer literacy - or even a new programming language - is quite hard to introduce into people after they are 30 or so. Take this with a grain of salt, as it is based mostly on my own experiences, although I remember at least an essay from Paul Graham talking about how rare it is to have a programmer switch languages after…

I have changed languages every time I started a new job and sometimes just switching projects on the same job. I don’t think learning a language is really that big a deal for a programmer.

I’m sure it’s hard to learn to be a serious programmer past a certain age. But it’s not easy to learn a new (human) language or get really good at many of the other skills I mentioned that quickly either.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#133

Post by emodendroket »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #123
emodendroket wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

Your argument applies to all kitchen sinks, regardless of whether they are considered one application like VSCode or an operating system withs collection of applications like Unix. Both still have all the capabilities for text editing, syntax highlighting, version control and executing scripts. You can spread complexity around in different ways but you can’t eliminate it. Personally I find GUI discoverability to be l…

Maybe with something like PowerShell, with very consistent command names and arguments, this model is believable, but I don't know what other than memorization is going to tell you that "less" is for reading a file and "dd" is for copying one disk to another.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#134

Post by amelius »

amelius wrote: post #88
flohofwoe wrote: post #4

It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…

iOS is also great as a software copy protection scheme. You can't have that in an open OS without compromises.

It's basically like DRM at the device level.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#135

Post by woah »

adrusi wrote: post #130
f6v wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But no desktop operating systems are well suited to being used primarily by professionals I love macOS and I’m a professional. I mean, I get paid for what I do. I’m a professional, right?

Well it's roughly as good as your other two options, none of which are terrible. I'm not trying to insult the people who use.. literally any operating system available today. But surely you can imagine ways that macOS could be better suited to your needs. Why (to give an example that's easy to explain briefly, not necessarily the most important one) are the various things you have open organized primarily by which ap…

You can use separate desktops. I don’t bother though

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#136

Post by emodendroket »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #113
emodendroket wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

I agree with you about discoverability, but in practice I find that tasks aren't completely new every time, there usually are common principles . With usage, you kinda get to know what is and isn't possible, even if you don't recall the precise details of each and every command. So you can look them up, knowing more or less what you're looking for. On Linux, `--help` usually... helps. Or there's the man. On Windows,…

Hm, well, part of the problem is, what man page are you even looking for? You already have to at least know the command you want. Honestly I usually end up resolving my queries with Google instead.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#137

Post by linguae »

musesum wrote: post #127
linguae wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree; the app-centric model of today's desktop environments is the antithesis of the Smalltalk vision of composability. In an environment where everything is a live object, programmers can send messages to those objects. Thus, in the Smalltalk environment you end up with something even more powerful than Unix pipes and redirection. Now, Smalltalk provides the infrastructure for composability, but Sm…

> another way of looking at the cancellation of OpenDoc is that its success would have completely upended the software industry. Ironically, that was the main interest of Brad Cox who, with Tom Love, created Objective-C, which was acquired by NeXT, and became the way forward for Apple. In my experience, it is very hard to build a business around software objects. I spent a couple years trying to build an App around t…

I concur; I believe selling software components is a difficult business model for the reasons that you mentioned. This may have contributed to Steve Jobs' decision to cancel OpenDoc in 1997: Apple needed the support of its existing base of software vendors, especially Microsoft and Adobe, in order for the Mac to survive, and OpenDoc, which was designed with the express purpose of challenging the types of monolithic, large applications that Microsoft and Adobe developed, was not going to win the support of Microsoft and Adobe. Even when it came to the question of whether Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop would be ported to NeXT's APIs (later named Cocoa), both Microsoft and Adobe balked, which forced Apple to develop the Carbon API to make it easier for software developers to port programs written for the classic Mac OS. If Microsoft and Adobe balked at having to use Cocoa, imagine the howls that would have came from a demand to port their software to OpenDoc.

However, I believe that component-based software is a natural fit in the FOSS community. One of my favorite Hacker News comments of all time is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373, where the author makes the case for why component-based software would have been a better fit for the Linux desktop than the standard approach of trying to build a FOSS replica of large, commercial platforms.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#138

Post by whywhywhywhy »

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now.

The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be shifted to be the ones living in the emulation layer like Classic OS9 apps to eventually be removed completely.

If you think I’m wrong, forget your own opinions and prejudices to iPad and walled garden computing and imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#139

Post by eecc »

emodendroket wrote: post #110
vladvasiliu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure how many users (outside of the ones who got used to it) want UNIX-like flexibility vs "give me an app that does everything I need". If the later group keeps getting larger the walled garden approach to apps might actually work. I think this is crux of the matter. Even outside the Apple ecosystem I see a tendency in people to not think about composing multiple tools but to look for an app that does eve…

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

Uh no.

Take clicking around a Microsoft ISS configuration on Windows 2000 vs an Apache httpd config file and it’s online doc.

I briefly tried both, and didn’t look back

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#140

Post by imiric »

simonh wrote: post #93
flohofwoe wrote: post #4

It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…

Are Windows, Linux and MacOS really better platforms for lots of tasks, performed by mainstream and professional users for daily tasks, principally because they are used to pipe text between command line tools? This is delusional. I have good news, iOS user's productivity woes are solved. Using iSH you can pipe text between command line tools all day every day. Finally the power of the iPad is unleashed!

This must be sarcasm... There's much more to being productive with an OS than piping text on the command line in an emulated and highly restricted environment. The command line is a management interface to the OS, not a sandbox you get to play in with the tools the manufacturer allows you to.

I would like seamless interoperability between CLI and GUI apps, a unified file system, the ability to run virtual machines, containers[1] or maybe just nginx[2].

And then you have the usability issues of the iPad(OS) like external displays being mirrored only, or only recently being able to actually access files from a USB drive...

The iPad is a great media consumption device, that has some limited professional use (art, video editing maybe), but let's not fool ourselves that it's anywhere near being a replacement for a fully functional computer.

[1]: https://github.com/ish-app/ish/issues/63

[2]: https://github.com/ish-app/ish/issues/137

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