jwells89

68 ms·

601.
by jwells89 3y ago
Swift on its own is already much more usable than Obj-C is and will only become moreso with the Foundation rewrite. It has a way to go but it’s possible to write useful software with it without Cocoa/GNUStep (especially if one is wil
602.
by jwells89 3y ago
Tooling is also a factor I think. Last time I was playing with writing Swift on Linux, the official LSP with VS Code was alright (surprisingly even supporting debugging) but I found myself wanting a proper IDE.
603.
by jwells89 3y ago
I really, really hope that the energy cross platform Swift has been seeing lately continues and accelerates. It’s not perfect, but I find it productive and enjoyable to write. It strikes a nice balance between being strict and getting out o
604.
by jwells89 3y ago
The stick and dongle streaming device variants in particular are astonishingly weak. The current Chromecast 4K dongle for example is handily outgunned by a first gen Apple TV 4K, which this year will be a 7 year old device.
605.
by jwells89 3y ago
Probably just boils down to differences in mental models but the Windows implementation of workspaces makes the problem even worse in my opinion, since without per-app grouping on the OS level there’s no way to see or manage all windows of
606.
by jwells89 3y ago
Early 20s energy is really something else. I can’t even begin to imagine what would be possible if I could somehow send to my 22 year old self my present day 35 year old brain.
607.
by jwells89 3y ago
To each their own, but that drives me nuts personally. I use spaces constantly but full-screen spaces are probably the bit of Mac UX I find most unappealing.
608.
by jwells89 3y ago
If an app doesn’t populate the menubar under macOS, I’m probably not going to use it unless I absolutely have to. It’s a strong signal of bad design, low-effort port, poor functionality or some combination thereof. There are few application
609.
by jwells89 3y ago
I can’t answer that question definitively, but it’s moot because of you have C compatibility, bindings for anything else are trivial to create.
610.
by jwells89 3y ago
It’s less about languages “mattering” and more about meeting devs where they are. Projects, especially those of a FOSS nature which are often hobbies, are more likely to happen when a dev can write in their preferred language.
611.
by jwells89 3y ago
Many of the listed bindings are in varying states of repair and likely not used much if at all. The listed Go bindings for Qt for example saw their last commit 4 years ago. By contrast GTK bindings tend to get maintained and used by devs mo
612.
by jwells89 3y ago
GNOME 3 and up definitely isn’t “mac-like”, despite having been given that label by many. A few aspects have similar designs to macOS counterparts, but the resemblance is skin-deep at best. It more closely resembles iPadOS than anything.
613.
by jwells89 3y ago
Which is great, but GTK still has it solidly bested for language choice.
614.
by jwells89 3y ago
And a big reason for GTK’s continued proliferation (even beyond GNOME) is that GTK is easy to write/generate language bindings for, enabling it to be practically used with many different languages. Qt being restricted to just C++ and&#
615.
by jwells89 3y ago
The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases. The fact that the taskbar
616.
by jwells89 3y ago
FWIW, it’s not uncommon for Mac users to also not maximize their windows. In fact I’d say Mac users disproportionally don’t (maximizing everything is more of a Windows thing). Menus being in a bar at the top of the screen just doesn’t bot
617.
by jwells89 3y ago
This is what comes to mind for me, as well. Campaigns designed to above all else scratch emotional itches with brittle underlying logic/reason.
618.
by jwells89 3y ago
Connect isn’t bad if your primary method of listening to music is through smart speakers or a home entertainment setup with a receiver or something, but it’s unnecessarily complicated if you just want to listen through headphones on your PC
619.
by jwells89 3y ago
The way their apps are pushy about whatever tangentially-related audio product they’re decided to burn money on this month also isn’t great. If that stuff really has to be part of the main app, it should be sequestered to its own tab and no
620.
by jwells89 3y ago
> For reference, 192kbps mp3 is considered "transparent" for most people. With the caveat that the right encoder has been used. Late 90s/early 00s 192k MP3s will sound audibly worse than those encoded by LAME[0] some time
621.
by jwells89 3y ago
Also surprisingly, Apple Music is also one of the few streaming services that allows playback-capable third party clients. One can use Cider[0] among other options instead of iTunes or the Music apps. With as opinionated as people are about
622.
by jwells89 3y ago
Similarly, on Apple Music with some tracks I can hear a difference when switching between AAC and lossless modes. In fact the reason I know this is because one day when listening to music, one particular track sounded unusually bad and swit
623.
by jwells89 3y ago
To make all this worse, I believe the issues outlined may be magnified by distance from major urban centers. I have family in a rural part of the US and the quality of care immediately available there is poor, with only marginally better tr
624.
by jwells89 3y ago
SF Pro works well as a body text font, too. Very legible and easy on the eyes. It’s not unusual for me to set text-heavy sites (like HN) to use it via userstyles.
625.
by jwells89 3y ago
As a result of this, memorization is also what does well on standardized testing, and guess what’s prioritized above all else in the modern US school system? Test scores. Little else matters to schools so long as students are getting good e
626.
by jwells89 3y ago
The thing about message history is that many of the times it’s been useful, I’ve had no way of knowing the messages had any importance in the moment. It’s only been months or years down the road that they’re needed, by which point the perso
627.
by jwells89 3y ago
One thing that the post oddly omits but has been possible and reasonably easy to implement on iOS for ages is simply bundling up messages, keys, etc into an archive in internal app storage and then letting the user AirDrop it to a Mac or an
628.
by jwells89 3y ago
Of course, but it’s not just UX that’s being traded off but also potential for mass adoption, and evangelism is likely not enough to close the gap.
629.
by jwells89 3y ago
Yeah Telegram absolutely nails the desktop experience like few other chat apps do. The way they put all the functional bits into a library to make it easy to build high quality third-party clients helps, too; while the Qt client is quite go
630.
by jwells89 3y ago
Echoing this. Services and other types of macOS system plugins (e.g. color palette plugins) are great with how they enable app-agnostic functionality but are unfortunately underused.

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