171–180 of 245 posts
I can say that Growl and desktop notifications are the very first thing I disable. Not once on 20 years of computing did I ever think: “I want applications to interrupt what I’m doing and steal my limited ADHD focus because they’re lonely and need attention”.
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> This has always been the domain of the carriers, not Apple. Maybe in the US. In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered. All they provided was a SIM-card for that device.
They did have a say, before iPhone and Android happened, devices have been branded, sim-locked, locked down etc by the carriers. I think they mostly stopped doing that in recent years.
We’ve never had carrier-branded phones. Not one. Only thing sold has been generic phones which accepts a generic SIM.
And that’s how the market is supposed to work. Free competition on devices. Free competition on service. Customers can combine as they like.
Granted you could buy carrier-locked phones rebated through a contract, but the carrier lock was time-limited and reversible and the phone was a generic, international model.
Carrier-branded phones was definitely not a EU-wide phenomenon.
If anything the introduction of the iPhone in Europe (launched using the very confusing US carrier-model) was what started pushing carriers into attempting to making new restrictions on how people were allowed to use their (formerly unrestricted) subscriptions.
So you got it pretty much 100% backwards.
> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…
There’s one issue, which is that of “Sherlocking” a third-party solution with a first-party implementation. Then there’s another, which is having an open enough system to support such innovations in the first place. Something like Growl, or f.lux (mentioned down-thread) could never have come about if macOS had been as restrictive as iOS. I have little doubt that we’ve missed at least a few such innovations over past…
Admittedly the pool of developers was restricted to those who were able and cared to jailbreak...
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Huh? Notifications that pop up in the corner aren't a "great design innovation". They are an obvious one. Just because there are some non-obvious great design innovations out there, doesn't mean every little interface component is one. Some things are just the logical solution to a problem.
Oh? In your estimation, how many years passed between Growl being technically possible and it actually existing? I was using NeXT OS, which is what later became OS X, circa 1990. Growl apparently launched in 2003. So that's a minimum of 13 years that something "obvious" was missed. And it's probably more fair to count from the mid-1980s, when GUIs first started becoming popular. That doesn't sound obvious to me. Most…
Timing is a factor, too. For such a thing to be successful, you also need a OS/hardware combo that can draw the notification without slowing down using the main window (rules out early Mac OS) and users who think the added distraction of notifications is worth it. I would that added distraction goes down with screen size. I doubt it would have been a success on 640×480 displays, for example.
Also, Apple had something similar in 1997 or 1999, with Mac OS 8 or 9.
I can say that Growl and desktop notifications are the very first thing I disable. Not once on 20 years of computing did I ever think: “I want applications to interrupt what I’m doing and steal my limited ADHD focus because they’re lonely and need attention”.
Same on Windows. I find desktop notifications to be extremely annoying. On Windows applications can highlight themselves on the taskbar; that is more than enough to call my attention.
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Surprising from a European perspective. I have used tethering since before phones had a HTTP/HTML browser (~ 2001, remember WAP?). The question has always been do you have packet data or not, what is your bandwidth and volume. Nothing else is the operator's business.
Not really. They still separate on-device use from modem use. At least Bouygues Telecom in France does. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25243710
So technically, how do they differentiate the traffic?
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This has always been the domain of the carriers, not Apple.
> This has always been the domain of the carriers, not Apple. Maybe in the US. In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered. All they provided was a SIM-card for that device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did have a say, before iPhone and Android happened, devices have been branded, sim-locked, locked down etc by the carriers. I think they mostly stopped doing that in recent years.
I’ve been living in Norway since I was born back in the 70s. We’ve never had carrier-branded phones. Not one. Only thing sold has been generic phones which accepts a generic SIM. And that’s how the market is supposed to work. Free competition on devices. Free competition on service. Customers can combine as they like. Granted you could buy carrier-locked phones rebated through a contract, but the carrier lock was tim…
In the UK there were DEFINITELY carrier branded phones, tethering was disabled by many carriers, and you couldn't even use a regular SIM card in a non-phone device - you needed a "data sim".
I travelled around Europe for 2 years using local SIM cards - and also encountered carriers which disabled tethering.
There were even android apps specifically to work around these tethering restrictions, by making the phone act as a proxy.
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There aren't really that many ways to do notifications. If you want something that pops up on a large screen but isn't overly intrustive, a rectangle with text in it in the corner next to a menu icon to control them is what you're going to come up with. And if you're Apple it'll be a rounded rectangle. And Apple absolutely did not rip off Growl "pixel for pixel", the visual styles are totally different. I don't know…
All great design innovations seem dead obvious in hindsight. But they're not.
I was designing a mobile paint app for example and had to make choices like how you bring up the colour picker, move layers, change tools, preview brush settings etc. There's only so many ways to do certain things on a tiny screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always been the domain of the carriers, not Apple.
> This has always been the domain of the carriers, not Apple. Maybe in the US. In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered. All they provided was a SIM-card for that device.