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Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

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Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#81

Post by kitsunesoba »

frozenport wrote: post #64
mschuster91 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the JS ecosystem learns things! They implement tree shaking and other stuff to improve performance! Obviously real programmers learned all this decades ago - same for the "NoSQL" followers who after years of struggling with piles of cr.p finally (re)discover what a true ACID-capable database is... I'm just waiting for the JS world to rediscover threads and proper multitasking, but given the track record I don't e…

But C++ GUI toolkits are disaster. While any kid can put together a reasonable looking JS app, the default options in toolkits like Qt are junk. Common features like centering a QComboBox aren't there. Quickly, you're going to have to custom build every widget. Then you need to hire engineers to manually press all the buttons. These engineers won't be too good at art stuff, so guess what, now you need to hire graphic…

Assuming this is Qt Widgets we're talking about, this issue can be sidestepped entirely by just going with native style controls with tastefully placed brand accents. The need for each app to have a unique UI theme unto itself is questionable at best.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#82

Post by userbinator »

One thing I've always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn't just follow an existing time formatting standard...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA-eI/AAAAAAAABw...

...and invented their own:

https://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image_...

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#83

Post by deathanatos »

stefco_ wrote: post #79
mschuster91 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be. Hyperswitch combined with SizeUp works wonders in this case (you use Hyperswitch to directly target individual windows and SizeUp to properly full-screen them). Why Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows (Cmd-tab only allows to select the foreground app, not…

> Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows False. Cmd-~ will switch windows within an app. Control- and Control- will move left and right between spaces (including fullscreen apps). I use these hundreds of times a day. I do wish we had more robust features, like keyboard-based window placement/resize. As far as I can tell, third-party tools are the only way to enable that. But I find the a…

Yet what I as a user want is to switch to just the next window in the stack, regardless of application. Ala, the Alt+Tab that Windows had back in Windows 95.

(I usually have multiple browser, terminal, and/or editor windows open, but I'm usually only using one of each at a time. Dragging the entire app to the foreground almost invariably means that some window that I'm not using and don't care about ends up on top of a window from a different app that I do care about. That is, me indicating that I care about a particular window of an app doesn't imply that I care about all of them, but OS X thinks it does.)

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#84

Post by eropple »

throwaway32617 wrote: post #59
throwaway2016a wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have really bad luck with Macs. As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator. Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it f…

You must not work in an organization that insists on installing security software for you. If I have >2w uptime on my machine I generally have to restart for some reason or other. It's like people have forgotten that computers can and should have more uptime than that. A faulty update from one of our security software vendors caused a once-per-hour kernel panic and forced reboot for a day or two. It was really nice.…

I feel you there. It got to the point at one gig where engineering folks--who were given root on their preconfigured laptops--often spent their first day figuring out how to kill and extricate Sophos from their machines. For developers who weren't seasoned jerks, it could be a real challenge until somebody took pity on them and helped them find single-user mode, yank out the kexts, and manually delete everything. (The happy .pkg BOMs helped out, too!)

Ordinarily I wouldn't do this and just punch out on a gig (because seriously, it's that annoying and that effectively-useless), but we were a recently-acquired startup subsidiary, so we were also our own IT shop--the CTO actively approved.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#85

Post by toast0 »

userbinator wrote: post #82

One thing I've always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn't just follow an existing time formatting standard... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA-eI/AAAAAAAABw... ...and invented their own: https://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image_...

From the screenshot, someone not familiar with strftime would be lost; but most people would be able to figure out the invented format. Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#86

Post by JosephHatfield »

phkahler wrote: post #4

On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes c…

I concur. I think it would be a great option if users could specify the granularity of time they wanted to see. I'd probably set mine to 30 minutes.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#87

Post by LeoNatan25 »

tracker1 wrote: post #80
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What saddens me is that instead of improving the web software development process with tried and tested methodologies, the inverse happened, and the web and its terrible software ecosystems and perpetrators are somehow seen as the "cool kids" of software development. When observer pattern is seen as the holy grail of modern web development, you know we are in trouble.

The observer pattern isn't sold to everyone... The thing is, Web browsers have been nearly as diverse as OSes both historically and recently... But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be said for that. As to the "cool kids", they exist in every corner of things that get done by people. I think WebASM will open u…

> But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be said for that.

Only "lowest common denominator" comes to mind.

But to the point of this thread, what bothers me is the transcendence of web tech outside of browsers, where a technology known historically for terrible practices with a very low barrier to entry is now considered the "assembly" of all these platforms, such as mobile and desktop, and the developers, that until yesterday could only make a web page that loads 20MB of dependencies to show a few paragraphs of text, now call themselves "mobile developers" or "full-stack developers".

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#88

Post by [deleted] »

eridius wrote: post #78
throwaway32617 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not work in an organization that insists on installing security software for you. If I have >2w uptime on my machine I generally have to restart for some reason or other. It's like people have forgotten that computers can and should have more uptime than that. A faulty update from one of our security software vendors caused a once-per-hour kernel panic and forced reboot for a day or two. It was really nice.…

My Macs regularly go for 30-60 days before I restart them, and when I do restart, it's not because the computer is misbehaving.

[deleted]

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#89

Post by Larrikin »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #51
rabbidruster wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an external display? Mine crashes about once a week after I've unplugged it from the thunderbolt display

I switch between two external displays at work then go home and plug the computer into a single external display. Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be. The only major issue I've had is sometimes bluetooth gets confused and it takes me a few minutes to get my track pad connected when I switch between home and work. (by a few I…

My Bluetooth mouse has about a 50 percent chance of being recognized when my laptop is coming out of sleep.

My workaround has been to just open the Bluetooth panel via Alfred and so long as Bluetooth has not totally shit the bed (Bluetooth has turned itself off and the Turn On button does nothing) my mouse is connected in less than 30 seconds, often times under 10.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#90

Post by johncolanduoni »

corndoge wrote: post #72
movedx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll probably get down-voted for your choice of language, but I agree. I actually feel what's going to happen is the JS community will start implementing WebASM and other very low-level mechanism to improve the speed of slow software components and, given enough time, will eventually just have entire binary applications being delivered through the browser (automatically installed, without asking you.) We'll go from…

I agree with you. Actually I think that at this stage, the browser should be viewed as a sandbox that can fetch and execute arbitrary binaries; then we can finally get past all the hacks that Web tech (js/dom/html/css/templates) is using to approximate that and actually build it for that express purpose, which should lead to better security (since we aren't pretending about what's happening -- it's untrusted code exe…

I don't think the developers of any of the main browser's JS engines pretend they're not going to be executing hostile code. In fact I struggle to think of better embeddable software sandboxes than V8, SpiderMonkey, etc., especially now that they support WebAssembly.
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