13 ms·

WWDC 2018, from underwhelming to boring. I will lose my mind if i hear *oji one more time. Will they ever stop with this nonsense? Favicons in Safari? It took

WWDC 2018, from underwhelming to boring. I will lose my mind if i hear *oji one more time. Will they ever stop with this nonsense? Favicons in Safari? It took them 6 years for the browser to remember the zoom setting per site, now we have the luxury of having favicons.

ihuman 8y ago
Bitmoji and Animoji were already popular, so it makes sense for Apple to combine the two (and sherlock Bitmoji).
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  > and sherlock Bitmoji Considering Animoji and Memoji are only in Apple's Messaging app/iMessage, I think Bitmoji will be fine as long as Snapchat is fine (which, well, isn't certain).
erichurkman 8y ago
I wonder if they'll ever fix `localStorage` in private Safari windows. It breaks countless sites and Safari is the only browser to block it.
- janlukacs 8y ago
  I love Safari, it's my main browser - but there are so many small annoying things that take ages to fix it's just sad.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Any site that is broken by Private Browsing causing storage quota exceptions in localStorage is going to be broken by quota exceptions under "normal" operation. It's in the spec, maybe developers should make their websites a bit more resilient to the very real errors that can happen? Did they just forget about error handling?
  - rasz 8y ago
    spec? localstorage errors are not standardized, every browser gives quota exceeded error different name and number, you have to use something like '' e.name.toLowerCase().includes("quota")
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      But localStorage.setItem() throwing an error definitely is in the spec, so if someone isn't handling Safari's localStorage behaviour in Private Browsing Mode (that is, throwing exceptions) then they aren't handling the parts of the spec.
      - strictnein 8y ago
        The web isn't built on specs, it's built on conventions. Safari breaks the convention.
        madeofpalk 8y ago
        the convention is that localStorage throws exceptions. it does in every browser. if a site breaks because it doesn't do error handling, then that's the site's problem.
  - xmodem 8y ago
    You and many of the commenters miss an important point: Any apparent behaviour difference between private and non-private mode should be considered a bug, because sites can and do abuse it to detect private mode.
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      I disagree. You might be able to use it to _guess_ but all browsers can throw a quota exceeded exception under normal behaviour. I see this every now and then on mobile devices where the phone is so full the browser refuses to store more localStorage items.
- Ambroos 8y ago
  Chrome with certain privacy-conscious settings disallows access to localStorage as well. It broke something we built too.
  - Jach 8y ago
    There's also a security policy that affects IE11, accessing localStorage ends up giving an "Access is Denied" error...
- TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  I too wish they provided an ephemeral localStorage in private browsing. But in any case, your application should be interacting with localStorage through an in-memory facade, otherwise it's still going to break with lots of other edge-cases. All operations should be treated as volatile, and probably silently suppressed on failures. Using a facade also makes testing easier, and if you avoid global side-effects it becomes easier to parallelize test-cases.
Apocryphon 8y ago
I deeply suspect that the lack of features is because the releases this year internally centered around responding to the negative buzz associated with iOS 11 problems. I remember when emojis were showcased at WWDC 2016, a fairly low-feature release. Whenever that happens the true feature is unannounced: it's simply stability.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  "Whenever that happens the true feature is unannounced: it's simply stability." Can't remember which version it was now, but I remember when Apple heavily marketed a Mac OS X version dedicated almost exclusively to bug fixes and performance enhancements. It was very well received. I'm sure the same would happen if they announced they were dedicating an iOS version to bug fixes and performance enhancements. EDIT: I think the version may have been Snow Leopard. :)
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    10.6 Snow Leopard.
  - vlozko 8y ago
    That would be Snow Leopard (10.6).
  - mbourgon 8y ago
    Snow Leopard
  - labster 8y ago
    Endangered Snow Kitten, er, I mean Snow Leopard.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Worth noting that only iOS got the "double down" on performance. Probably because the userbase is larger and this idea had crossed into the mainstream news as a thing people were complaining about. They could get into this during the developer SOTU, so there's hope...
MitjaBezensek 8y ago
It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on *oji.
- acheron 8y ago
  Neal Stephenson may have not gotten the "Metaverse" prediction quite right, but he seems to have nailed "mediaglyphs".
- jcfrei 8y ago
  Always interesting to see the divergence between HN and what the average user cares about. For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other. I can't think of another linguistic feature in history which saw such widespread use within a decade and I feel like emojis don't get enough credit for that.
  - engi_nerd 8y ago
    How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
    - mmphosis 8y ago
      :(
      - engi_nerd 8y ago
        But that's an emoticon, not an emoji.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        It’s a wireframe emoji before it hits the render pupeline.
baxtr 8y ago
Great! Go and found a company that makes 10 bn USD a quarter in profit.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Well that's a pretty inane reaction. Next time I see a bad movie should I just keep my mouth shut and make my own movie?
  - dloose 8y ago
    You certainly shouldn't get indignant about it. It's one thing to express an dissenting opinion, but throwing a mini-temper tantrum on the Internet is a bit much. Not saying that's what you're up to, but I'm not as sure about OP.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    A more apt comparison would read: You watch a mediocre preview of a new movie from a company that has made the most successful movies ever and continuous to do so. They're doing something right. Instead of complaining, maybe, just maybe, we should consider whether we're the ones misjudging reality.
    - abiox 8y ago
      this seems like a fallacious appeal of one variety or another.
    - ksk 8y ago
      >from a company that has made the most successful movies ever and continuous to do so. They're doing something right. Instead of complaining, maybe, just maybe, we should consider whether we're the ones misjudging reality. That's a rather silly comparison. I guess the same logic doesn't apply to Electronic Arts/Oracle/Comcast/<insert hated company on HN>. People seem to be giving them money, and yet people also simultaneously hate them. I think we can and should criticize things we don't like, but only if we're honest with our reasons.
balladeer 8y ago
You are surprised at that? When a site requests location permission I only get the option to deny request and make Safari remember that decision for a "day", not "forever" which is what I would like Safari to do, esp. for sites like Google. Now I have looked at forums and didn't find anything that helped. Contacted Apple support (via call and chat both) and on both the occasions I was told that I need to reinstall the OS which was frustrating but heck I did just that with last major update - backed up my data and did a fresh install. I still face that issue. I called Apple Support I was again asked to do the same - reinstall macOS as Safari alone cannot be reinstalled.
0x0 8y ago
Wait for the Platforms State Of The Union video to become available. That's usually where the good stuff is. The keynote is often more consumer oriented to grab some media headlines.
- LeoNatan25 8y ago
  Very little good this year.
icy_as_blue 8y ago
Personal experience, emojis largely enrich my chats with friends and family. That’s one of the reasons I prefer WeChat over WhatsApp. In fact, WeChat even created platform to invite artists to create more emojis for the app.
- discordance 8y ago
  I guess animated icons trump concerns about privacy and monitoring by a surveillance state [1] 1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302720/wechat-deleted-messages-china-government-surveillance https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302720/wechat-deleted-m...
  - kccqzy 8y ago
    How does this article support the idea that WeChat raises concerns about monitorig by a surveillance state? The Chinese authorities in the article didn't "monitor" anything. They retrieved the deleted message from the phone itself. For all we know, it could be as innocuous as running a SQLite DELETE to delete the message and the scheduled vacuum hasn't run yet. I don't see any convincing evidence of either actual monitoring or Tencent conspiring to allow such monitoring.
dav43 8y ago
its so disappointing, with all the resources and talent at their disposal, that the pace and direction of macOS - to truly advance a desktop system - is so lack luster, "un-courageous", and as you put it boring.
- mickrussom 8y ago
  my favorite part of this all is that the last generation's retina have: 1) larger batteries, 2) better track pads , 3) magsafe vs crap connector for power USBC 4) horrific keyboards that have no travel, bad feel, no space between keys and 5) on macs with that stupid touch bar no physical ESC key. not only is it disappointing and boring but things are starting to go backwards.
- agitator 8y ago
  I'm just curious, what "courageous" changes would you like to see in macOS? Last time I saw a courageous desktop OS change, it was Windows merging their Mobile and desktop OS, and that was a hard fail. It's a workstation. I prefer reliability and consistency. I think Apple knows they need to keep the general public buying macbooks with stupid superficial features, while maintaining consistent, reliable, functionality for the power users out there before they get annoyed and migrate to Linux machines. Hopefully they address the hardware reliability issues (ie. keyboards) in their next hardware release.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    >> I'm just curious, what "courageous" changes would you like to see in macOS? Modern OpenGL? App store with useful apps?
    - blinkingled 8y ago
      Vulkan really along with OpenGL latest. The whole Metal thing was wrong headed - both iOS and macOS should have supported Vulkan. But that's nothing that affects me personally. What bugs me about macOS is how sloppy, buggy and limited it has become. Finder sucks big time. SMB doesn't work all too reliably. Wanna domain join - tough luck. (Even Linux distros are advanced in that area - Gnome 3 on Fedora allowed me to setup Enterprise Login and just entering ID / Password for my AD account during initial setup and it all worked flawlessly!). The OS updates are atrociously slow - at least they are infrequent but just goes to show how much attention they're really paying. That's just from memory - I haven't used it for last year.
Froyoh 8y ago
chill dude there's 4 more days left.

ihuman 8y ago

Bitmoji and Animoji were already popular, so it makes sense for Apple to combine the two (and sherlock Bitmoji).

madeofpalk 8y ago
> and sherlock Bitmoji Considering Animoji and Memoji are only in Apple's Messaging app/iMessage, I think Bitmoji will be fine as long as Snapchat is fine (which, well, isn't certain).

erichurkman 8y ago

I wonder if they'll ever fix `localStorage` in private Safari windows. It breaks countless sites and Safari is the only browser to block it.

janlukacs 8y ago
I love Safari, it's my main browser - but there are so many small annoying things that take ages to fix it's just sad.
madeofpalk 8y ago
Any site that is broken by Private Browsing causing storage quota exceptions in localStorage is going to be broken by quota exceptions under "normal" operation. It's in the spec, maybe developers should make their websites a bit more resilient to the very real errors that can happen? Did they just forget about error handling?
- rasz 8y ago
  spec? localstorage errors are not standardized, every browser gives quota exceeded error different name and number, you have to use something like '' e.name.toLowerCase().includes("quota")
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    But localStorage.setItem() throwing an error definitely is in the spec, so if someone isn't handling Safari's localStorage behaviour in Private Browsing Mode (that is, throwing exceptions) then they aren't handling the parts of the spec.
    - strictnein 8y ago
      The web isn't built on specs, it's built on conventions. Safari breaks the convention.
      - madeofpalk 8y ago
        the convention is that localStorage throws exceptions. it does in every browser. if a site breaks because it doesn't do error handling, then that's the site's problem.
- xmodem 8y ago
  You and many of the commenters miss an important point: Any apparent behaviour difference between private and non-private mode should be considered a bug, because sites can and do abuse it to detect private mode.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    I disagree. You might be able to use it to _guess_ but all browsers can throw a quota exceeded exception under normal behaviour. I see this every now and then on mobile devices where the phone is so full the browser refuses to store more localStorage items.
Ambroos 8y ago
Chrome with certain privacy-conscious settings disallows access to localStorage as well. It broke something we built too.
- Jach 8y ago
  There's also a security policy that affects IE11, accessing localStorage ends up giving an "Access is Denied" error...
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
I too wish they provided an ephemeral localStorage in private browsing. But in any case, your application should be interacting with localStorage through an in-memory facade, otherwise it's still going to break with lots of other edge-cases. All operations should be treated as volatile, and probably silently suppressed on failures. Using a facade also makes testing easier, and if you avoid global side-effects it becomes easier to parallelize test-cases.

Apocryphon 8y ago

I deeply suspect that the lack of features is because the releases this year internally centered around responding to the negative buzz associated with iOS 11 problems. I remember when emojis were showcased at WWDC 2016, a fairly low-feature release. Whenever that happens the true feature is unannounced: it's simply stability.

jimbokun 8y ago
"Whenever that happens the true feature is unannounced: it's simply stability." Can't remember which version it was now, but I remember when Apple heavily marketed a Mac OS X version dedicated almost exclusively to bug fixes and performance enhancements. It was very well received. I'm sure the same would happen if they announced they were dedicating an iOS version to bug fixes and performance enhancements. EDIT: I think the version may have been Snow Leopard. :)
- mpweiher 8y ago
  10.6 Snow Leopard.
- vlozko 8y ago
  That would be Snow Leopard (10.6).
- mbourgon 8y ago
  Snow Leopard
- labster 8y ago
  Endangered Snow Kitten, er, I mean Snow Leopard.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  Worth noting that only iOS got the "double down" on performance. Probably because the userbase is larger and this idea had crossed into the mainstream news as a thing people were complaining about. They could get into this during the developer SOTU, so there's hope...

MitjaBezensek 8y ago

It's amazing that so many bright minds are wasting time on *oji.

acheron 8y ago
Neal Stephenson may have not gotten the "Metaverse" prediction quite right, but he seems to have nailed "mediaglyphs".
jcfrei 8y ago
Always interesting to see the divergence between HN and what the average user cares about. For most people emojis (and animojis) have opened a whole new way to communicate with each other. I can't think of another linguistic feature in history which saw such widespread use within a decade and I feel like emojis don't get enough credit for that.
- engi_nerd 8y ago
  How is an emoji a whole new way to communicate? EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
  - mmphosis 8y ago
    :(
    - engi_nerd 8y ago
      But that's an emoticon, not an emoji.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        It’s a wireframe emoji before it hits the render pupeline.

baxtr 8y ago

Great! Go and found a company that makes 10 bn USD a quarter in profit.

EpicEng 8y ago
Well that's a pretty inane reaction. Next time I see a bad movie should I just keep my mouth shut and make my own movie?
- dloose 8y ago
  You certainly shouldn't get indignant about it. It's one thing to express an dissenting opinion, but throwing a mini-temper tantrum on the Internet is a bit much. Not saying that's what you're up to, but I'm not as sure about OP.
- baxtr 8y ago
  A more apt comparison would read: You watch a mediocre preview of a new movie from a company that has made the most successful movies ever and continuous to do so. They're doing something right. Instead of complaining, maybe, just maybe, we should consider whether we're the ones misjudging reality.
  - abiox 8y ago
    this seems like a fallacious appeal of one variety or another.
  - ksk 8y ago
    >from a company that has made the most successful movies ever and continuous to do so. They're doing something right. Instead of complaining, maybe, just maybe, we should consider whether we're the ones misjudging reality. That's a rather silly comparison. I guess the same logic doesn't apply to Electronic Arts/Oracle/Comcast/<insert hated company on HN>. People seem to be giving them money, and yet people also simultaneously hate them. I think we can and should criticize things we don't like, but only if we're honest with our reasons.

balladeer 8y ago

You are surprised at that? When a site requests location permission I only get the option to deny request and make Safari remember that decision for a "day", not "forever" which is what I would like Safari to do, esp. for sites like Google. Now I have looked at forums and didn't find anything that helped. Contacted Apple support (via call and chat both) and on both the occasions I was told that I need to reinstall the OS which was frustrating but heck I did just that with last major update - backed up my data and did a fresh install. I still face that issue. I called Apple Support I was again asked to do the same - reinstall macOS as Safari alone cannot be reinstalled.

0x0 8y ago

Wait for the Platforms State Of The Union video to become available. That's usually where the good stuff is. The keynote is often more consumer oriented to grab some media headlines.

LeoNatan25 8y ago
Very little good this year.

icy_as_blue 8y ago

Personal experience, emojis largely enrich my chats with friends and family. That’s one of the reasons I prefer WeChat over WhatsApp. In fact, WeChat even created platform to invite artists to create more emojis for the app.

discordance 8y ago
I guess animated icons trump concerns about privacy and monitoring by a surveillance state [1] 1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302720/wechat-deleted-messages-china-government-surveillance https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302720/wechat-deleted-m...
- kccqzy 8y ago
  How does this article support the idea that WeChat raises concerns about monitorig by a surveillance state? The Chinese authorities in the article didn't "monitor" anything. They retrieved the deleted message from the phone itself. For all we know, it could be as innocuous as running a SQLite DELETE to delete the message and the scheduled vacuum hasn't run yet. I don't see any convincing evidence of either actual monitoring or Tencent conspiring to allow such monitoring.

dav43 8y ago

its so disappointing, with all the resources and talent at their disposal, that the pace and direction of macOS - to truly advance a desktop system - is so lack luster, "un-courageous", and as you put it boring.

mickrussom 8y ago
my favorite part of this all is that the last generation's retina have: 1) larger batteries, 2) better track pads , 3) magsafe vs crap connector for power USBC 4) horrific keyboards that have no travel, bad feel, no space between keys and 5) on macs with that stupid touch bar no physical ESC key. not only is it disappointing and boring but things are starting to go backwards.
agitator 8y ago
I'm just curious, what "courageous" changes would you like to see in macOS? Last time I saw a courageous desktop OS change, it was Windows merging their Mobile and desktop OS, and that was a hard fail. It's a workstation. I prefer reliability and consistency. I think Apple knows they need to keep the general public buying macbooks with stupid superficial features, while maintaining consistent, reliable, functionality for the power users out there before they get annoyed and migrate to Linux machines. Hopefully they address the hardware reliability issues (ie. keyboards) in their next hardware release.
- bluedino 8y ago
  >> I'm just curious, what "courageous" changes would you like to see in macOS? Modern OpenGL? App store with useful apps?
  - blinkingled 8y ago
    Vulkan really along with OpenGL latest. The whole Metal thing was wrong headed - both iOS and macOS should have supported Vulkan. But that's nothing that affects me personally. What bugs me about macOS is how sloppy, buggy and limited it has become. Finder sucks big time. SMB doesn't work all too reliably. Wanna domain join - tough luck. (Even Linux distros are advanced in that area - Gnome 3 on Fedora allowed me to setup Enterprise Login and just entering ID / Password for my AD account during initial setup and it all worked flawlessly!). The OS updates are atrociously slow - at least they are infrequent but just goes to show how much attention they're really paying. That's just from memory - I haven't used it for last year.

Froyoh 8y ago

chill dude there's 4 more days left.