661–670 of 801 posts
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Why should I? That's not my job.
b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your conviction may be unsupportable?
Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-worthy productive discussion.
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Search feels to me like a good compromise between memorizing terminal commands (including the correct set of parameters to do what you want) and navigating through a UI to find what you're looking for.
Search is fine as a one-off thing, but if you repeatedly have to use search to find some common setting, that's a clear UX fail. To be fair, it's hard to say whether the Settings app is more broken in Windows or macOS these days. I think I'd have to give the crown to macOS here on account of search itself being more broken.
On my iphone, I have one page of apps, everything else in the app drawer, and use the search all the time. It often gets what I want in one or two chars.
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Using search as a UI means you can only find things that you know exist, but there are plenty of important settings that I've only discovered by actually navigating through the UI.
Just type "settings" then and you go to the main menu.
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That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless.
TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
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Permissions needs a complete rewrite. Layers and layers of permissions screens. To get anything done takes 4-5 forward and reverse UI stack traversals
Absolutely. And turning off Siri's "Learn from this app" should not require the user to navigate to every single app's menu, when Siri has a top level page in Settings.
I think they should just throw in the towel and duplicate settings. Meaning, we can turn off Siri learning from an app or from the Siri page. Or we can turn off banners from the app or the notifications page.
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The difference: in Linux it is a usability issue to be fixed, whereas on macOS it is a feature and explicit design goal to make it that way. In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult, not because the people who make my computer have paternalistic attitudes about my usage of it.
> In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult [...]. Hard disagree. Audio mixing is not difficult[1]. The Linux kernel guys were right - it does not belong in the kernel. The userspace story however, has been a complete shitshow for decades . I think Pipewire mostly fixed that? Not sure, sometimes I still have to log out and back in to fix audio. The funni…
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The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics. It's related to why companies with great marketing and fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology often win over companies with deepe…
Great insight—thanks for sharing. It strikes me that bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once established, it rewards compliance over creativity, steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and marketing—it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.
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As an actual dyed in the wool game developer. There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those. The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in us…
So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today? There is certainly such thing as native, one thing is the platform where the APIs were originally designed for and battled tested, and the other is other platform emulating / translating them, by reverse engineering their behaviours with various degrees of success. Valve's luck is that so far Microsoft/XBox Gaming has…
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Also as a former Apple engineer.... I've explained in another thread how this kind of thing happens. It may be the same at other large companies. Bugs come in (via Radar) and are routed to the team responsible. Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course n…
> Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not. It's unclear how much explanatory value this has, because the Snow Leopard that everyone is pining for was during the Jobs era. After all, a…
Aqua, the new UI, came down from above soon enough. Drawers, toolbars were new UI elements that arrived. In time Jobs' designers were going through the shipping apps with these new UI elements with changes for the engineers to implement.
Certainly by the time the iPhone had arrived the transition to marketing (and design) calling the shots was complete.