4 ms·

On the other hand, their Windows software is universally bad. The ending of Safari for Windows probably means they recognize this to some extent. My guess is th

by Kye 5y ago

On the other hand, their Windows software is universally bad. The ending of Safari for Windows probably means they recognize this to some extent. My guess is they rely heavily on the quality of their libraries and tooling to make good software on OS X and iOS, and they struggle on Windows since it's an alien world. So maybe it's accurate to say they do understand tooling, and that negates the need to understand software as long as they stick to a world they control.

pram 5y ago
I realized this with Quicktime 7 and Quicktime X. X is my favorite media player, and yet the experience with 7 on Windows was like a time machine back to the shittiest parts of the 90s.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  You thought Quicktime 7 was bad? How about Quicktime 4.0 (released on June 8, 1999)? It took a few versions and a lot of hubris to get Quicktime 4.0 Bad. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm >Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player -
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Ha ha, that is the shittiest part of the 90's right there.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
It served its purpose. Back in 2009, iTunes on Windows was fantastic.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I think that is not a universally agreed upon statement. Checking my receipts, at that time I paid significant money to 3rd parties to sync my iPods to PC without iTunes. It was massively over bloated for what I needed it to do, UI was behind, and once installed it refused to uninstall itself. (and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound coming from my office when, every few months , I try to copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc. It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up) It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to avoid that particular reputation :). On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
- temp8964 5y ago
  I tried to use iTunes in 2012(?). iTunes is the most confusing software I have ever used. Maybe it was good in 2009? I wouldn't know.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    It wasn't good then either. Still a bloated mess and even worse you were more forced to use it as literally nothing else could do something like put a CBZ in a 3rd party app unless it happened to support Dropbox or something similar. It's just terrible.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Maybe it was good in 2009? It was not. Though at least it did the job, which was rare enough (then again I’ve had to use sonicstage, now that was some bottom-tier irredeemable garbage). I’m pretty sure iTunes was at its best when it was SoundJam and got worse every time it got touched afterwards, until Apple managed to declare software bankruptcy… and replace it by something worse than it’d ever been.
fnord123 5y ago
Even on osx. Pages is bad. Numbers is bad. Calendar is bad. AppStore is slow and cumbersome. Safari is quite ok.
- Aloha 5y ago
  I quite disagree on Pages, it's a perfect 80% product. Nothing replaces Excel however - literally nothing. As has been said before, its the world most widely deployed programing environment.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Yep. I do X-Y charts like this https://www.dahosek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NewImage-2.png https://www.dahosek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NewImage-... with Excel and Numbers doesn't correctly handle gaps in the date sequence or duplicated dates for the vertical lines (unless they've fixed this since I last checked) so I still keep Office around for that and a few other minor UI affordances that I prefer in Word.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    > [Excel is] the world most widely deployed programing environment. It’s curious to note, then, how utterly peculiar of a programming environment it is: it is a first-order (pre-LAMBDA) purely functional array dataflow language with a sometimes-graphical interface and little to no capacity for any kind of abstraction. Because of the last point, I would perhaps call it half a programming environment (if programming = make a computer do stuff + assemble simple doings into larger ones, Excel only does the first part). This is alleviated by a clever choice of basic datatype: a two-dimensional array of crufties over which scalar operations (usually) propagate automatically; this affords a rich set of operations that are not so low-level that the absence of abstractions or side effects would be crippling and at the same time not so high-level that you’d have an impulse to drill down into their inner workings and change something. In particular, you can’t store these arrays as elements inside other arrays: the layering is impermeable. That this is a clever choice of datatype has been noticed elsewhere: witness APL, MATLAB, or even in some sense SQL. Among of all of these, though, Excel is distinguished by how very little it can actually do from a programming perspective (as opposed to a practical perspective or even a primitive-counting perspective). It’s almost like someone sat down and decided to see how little programming functionality a practical tool could contain to still qualify as programming, ditched everything else, then slashed half of the result. But if it’s a shamelessly minimal programming language (if it qualifies as one at all), it’s quite striking to consider how rich of a programming environment it is. You get intermediate results. You get visual indication of where the values used in the computation came from. You get help for every function as you type it in. You get to change the inputs, or any other detail, and be dropped into an impeccably updated state of your program. You get to see your changes propagate, live, without messing around with REPLs, reloading notebook cells, or restarting hung servers. You get more IDE for your money than CLion and Mathematica combined. On a computer from 1997. I mean, of course Excel is cheating. If you read papers on “visual programming”, and “differentiable computation”, and “provenance”, and “incremental recompilation”, and all the official names for all that jazz I just described—you’ll see that Excel avoids all the hard problems the academics are struggling with by not having the respective features. (It’s well known that everything gets easier in a purely functional language or without first-class functions, for example.) It even insulates the programmer from the problems of naming and of factoring (and thus avoids having to provide attendant features) by not allowing names or factoring. Now, I’m not saying that Excel is somehow lacking in features or that it is a pleasant programming environment—it both has a tremendous amount of features and is a pretty miserable programming environment past a very low complexity ceiling. But, for all that is holy, why isn’t everybody trying to figure out how to cheat even harder?

by Kye 5y ago

pram 5y ago

I realized this with Quicktime 7 and Quicktime X. X is my favorite media player, and yet the experience with 7 on Windows was like a time machine back to the shittiest parts of the 90s.

DonHopkins 5y ago
You thought Quicktime 7 was bad? How about Quicktime 4.0 (released on June 8, 1999)? It took a few versions and a lot of hubris to get Quicktime 4.0 Bad. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm >Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player -
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Ha ha, that is the shittiest part of the 90's right there.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

It served its purpose. Back in 2009, iTunes on Windows was fantastic.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
I think that is not a universally agreed upon statement. Checking my receipts, at that time I paid significant money to 3rd parties to sync my iPods to PC without iTunes. It was massively over bloated for what I needed it to do, UI was behind, and once installed it refused to uninstall itself. (and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound coming from my office when, every few months , I try to copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc. It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up) It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to avoid that particular reputation :). On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
temp8964 5y ago
I tried to use iTunes in 2012(?). iTunes is the most confusing software I have ever used. Maybe it was good in 2009? I wouldn't know.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  It wasn't good then either. Still a bloated mess and even worse you were more forced to use it as literally nothing else could do something like put a CBZ in a 3rd party app unless it happened to support Dropbox or something similar. It's just terrible.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Maybe it was good in 2009? It was not. Though at least it did the job, which was rare enough (then again I’ve had to use sonicstage, now that was some bottom-tier irredeemable garbage). I’m pretty sure iTunes was at its best when it was SoundJam and got worse every time it got touched afterwards, until Apple managed to declare software bankruptcy… and replace it by something worse than it’d ever been.

fnord123 5y ago

Even on osx. Pages is bad. Numbers is bad. Calendar is bad. AppStore is slow and cumbersome. Safari is quite ok.

Aloha 5y ago
I quite disagree on Pages, it's a perfect 80% product. Nothing replaces Excel however - literally nothing. As has been said before, its the world most widely deployed programing environment.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Yep. I do X-Y charts like this https://www.dahosek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NewImage-2.png https://www.dahosek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NewImage-... with Excel and Numbers doesn't correctly handle gaps in the date sequence or duplicated dates for the vertical lines (unless they've fixed this since I last checked) so I still keep Office around for that and a few other minor UI affordances that I prefer in Word.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  > [Excel is] the world most widely deployed programing environment. It’s curious to note, then, how utterly peculiar of a programming environment it is: it is a first-order (pre-LAMBDA) purely functional array dataflow language with a sometimes-graphical interface and little to no capacity for any kind of abstraction. Because of the last point, I would perhaps call it half a programming environment (if programming = make a computer do stuff + assemble simple doings into larger ones, Excel only does the first part). This is alleviated by a clever choice of basic datatype: a two-dimensional array of crufties over which scalar operations (usually) propagate automatically; this affords a rich set of operations that are not so low-level that the absence of abstractions or side effects would be crippling and at the same time not so high-level that you’d have an impulse to drill down into their inner workings and change something. In particular, you can’t store these arrays as elements inside other arrays: the layering is impermeable. That this is a clever choice of datatype has been noticed elsewhere: witness APL, MATLAB, or even in some sense SQL. Among of all of these, though, Excel is distinguished by how very little it can actually do from a programming perspective (as opposed to a practical perspective or even a primitive-counting perspective). It’s almost like someone sat down and decided to see how little programming functionality a practical tool could contain to still qualify as programming, ditched everything else, then slashed half of the result. But if it’s a shamelessly minimal programming language (if it qualifies as one at all), it’s quite striking to consider how rich of a programming environment it is. You get intermediate results. You get visual indication of where the values used in the computation came from. You get help for every function as you type it in. You get to change the inputs, or any other detail, and be dropped into an impeccably updated state of your program. You get to see your changes propagate, live, without messing around with REPLs, reloading notebook cells, or restarting hung servers. You get more IDE for your money than CLion and Mathematica combined. On a computer from 1997. I mean, of course Excel is cheating. If you read papers on “visual programming”, and “differentiable computation”, and “provenance”, and “incremental recompilation”, and all the official names for all that jazz I just described—you’ll see that Excel avoids all the hard problems the academics are struggling with by not having the respective features. (It’s well known that everything gets easier in a purely functional language or without first-class functions, for example.) It even insulates the programmer from the problems of naming and of factoring (and thus avoids having to provide attendant features) by not allowing names or factoring. Now, I’m not saying that Excel is somehow lacking in features or that it is a pleasant programming environment—it both has a tremendous amount of features and is a pretty miserable programming environment past a very low complexity ceiling. But, for all that is holy, why isn’t everybody trying to figure out how to cheat even harder?