4 ms·

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?
  - jfim 5y ago
    The Excel team is adding support for abstract data types and lambdas. It's currently in the preview release. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...
brimble 5y ago
MacOS' "productivity" software is my favorite I know of. I'd have to go back to historical (10+ years old) versions of similar products to find ones I like better. Their quality is excellent. They're light on resources (I can forget them in the background), quick to launch, do everything I need (even collaborative editing), and have good-enough templates for most stuff I'd want to do. Preview is best-in-class, as far as I know. Finder may not be amazing but it also crashes ~never (which isn't impressive compared to Windows Explorer but is compared to some, ahem, other platforms) and is lightweight. The calculator is great (and I miss a couple very minor, but thoughtful, UX things about it when I use others). Digital Color Meter is awesome. I wish Notes had export and supported Markdown input, but how smoothly and sanely it handles things like embedding files, and how stable it is and the reliability/speed of sync between devices, makes it pretty damn good anyway. The email reader's stuck at some kind of local maximum like nearly all other email clients, but it's good enough. The 1st-party software quality is a big part of what keeps me around. Possibly the main thing. [EDIT] Oh, and the Terminal is one of the best there is. It's very good. Others may have more features, but it's far from minimal, yet manages to have lower input latency than most (which tells me Apple's got their priorities straight)
- microtonal 5y ago
  I largely agree. Keynote became a bit bland compared to the competition, but I love working in former iWork apps (especially since they've added no-frills support for equations), Terminal, Preview, etc. The only thing that I loved, but has become slow and buggy is Grapher. Grapher is a hidden gem, very few applications come close for quickly visualizing a function.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Whoa, there's one I didn't know about. I should probably take the time to RTFM for that stuff, after more than a decade on the platform. Every time I find another little Apple utility, I end up getting something out of it.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
015a 5y ago
And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable. And Xcode. It's always been bad. Messages on Mac? An embarrassment which gets worse with every MacOS update. Spotlight? A meme-level failure of a software product, which can single-handedly consume hours of CPU time to "index" files after every update, then fail to find an application, not even some crazy-hidden file, matching an exact string text search. Safari is ok, but in the scope of how reliably fantastic modern browsers are, it's still the worst. Not just in standards support & standards correctness, but the application itself.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable. The most impressive part is that itunes was absolute garbage, and music managed to be worse. Quite a feat really.
sizeofchar 5y ago
I love Numbers and haven’t been able to find an easy and convenient replacement for it since I left macOS :( It’s blended spreadsheeting with presentation in a free infinite canvas is the best notebook app I’ve met.
- Kye 5y ago
  Have you tried the web version? I've never used the full OS X version, so I can't compare.
  - sizeofchar 5y ago
    Yes, and it is not bad, but nowhere as smooth as the macOS app.

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?
- jfim 5y ago
  The Excel team is adding support for abstract data types and lambdas. It's currently in the preview release. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...

brimble 5y ago

MacOS' "productivity" software is my favorite I know of. I'd have to go back to historical (10+ years old) versions of similar products to find ones I like better. Their quality is excellent. They're light on resources (I can forget them in the background), quick to launch, do everything I need (even collaborative editing), and have good-enough templates for most stuff I'd want to do. Preview is best-in-class, as far as I know. Finder may not be amazing but it also crashes ~never (which isn't impressive compared to Windows Explorer but is compared to some, ahem, other platforms) and is lightweight. The calculator is great (and I miss a couple very minor, but thoughtful, UX things about it when I use others). Digital Color Meter is awesome. I wish Notes had export and supported Markdown input, but how smoothly and sanely it handles things like embedding files, and how stable it is and the reliability/speed of sync between devices, makes it pretty damn good anyway. The email reader's stuck at some kind of local maximum like nearly all other email clients, but it's good enough. The 1st-party software quality is a big part of what keeps me around. Possibly the main thing. [EDIT] Oh, and the Terminal is one of the best there is. It's very good. Others may have more features, but it's far from minimal, yet manages to have lower input latency than most (which tells me Apple's got their priorities straight)

microtonal 5y ago
I largely agree. Keynote became a bit bland compared to the competition, but I love working in former iWork apps (especially since they've added no-frills support for equations), Terminal, Preview, etc. The only thing that I loved, but has become slow and buggy is Grapher. Grapher is a hidden gem, very few applications come close for quickly visualizing a function.
- brimble 5y ago
  Whoa, there's one I didn't know about. I should probably take the time to RTFM for that stuff, after more than a decade on the platform. Every time I find another little Apple utility, I end up getting something out of it.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago

015a 5y ago

And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable. And Xcode. It's always been bad. Messages on Mac? An embarrassment which gets worse with every MacOS update. Spotlight? A meme-level failure of a software product, which can single-handedly consume hours of CPU time to "index" files after every update, then fail to find an application, not even some crazy-hidden file, matching an exact string text search. Safari is ok, but in the scope of how reliably fantastic modern browsers are, it's still the worst. Not just in standards support & standards correctness, but the application itself.

masklinn 5y ago
> And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable. The most impressive part is that itunes was absolute garbage, and music managed to be worse. Quite a feat really.

sizeofchar 5y ago

I love Numbers and haven’t been able to find an easy and convenient replacement for it since I left macOS :( It’s blended spreadsheeting with presentation in a free infinite canvas is the best notebook app I’ve met.

Kye 5y ago
Have you tried the web version? I've never used the full OS X version, so I can't compare.
- sizeofchar 5y ago
  Yes, and it is not bad, but nowhere as smooth as the macOS app.