jwells89

64 ms·

811.
by jwells89 3y ago
Yeah in my PNW suburb most people have barely enough space to park a Civic, let alone an RV…
812.
by jwells89 3y ago
Open source with big asterisk. AOSP grows more anemic by the day as more and more of the Android that ships on consumer devices becomes proprietary, even on Google devices. While custom ROMs exist you’re then at the mercy of cat and mouse h
813.
by jwells89 3y ago
On the other hand, Spotify spent a lot of money trying to lock up and monetize what used to be one of the most free and democratic mediums in existence (podcasts), have been hostile towards third party devs and manufacturers by way of depre
814.
by jwells89 3y ago
I think that the Mac convention of control-clicking to open context menus, introduced somewhere around Mac OS 8, is easier to remember for the average person than right-clicking is. In my experience people generally grasp conditionals like
815.
by jwells89 3y ago
The problem with Pantheon is that it only captures the skin-deep aspects of macOS. Power user features and progressive disclosure thereof (which are a big reason why macOS has a technically capable userbase) are mostly stripped. Like GNOME,
816.
by jwells89 3y ago
App UIs should be optimized for their use case, yes, but I would argue that the idea that a one-off app UI design can do common widgets and interactions as well or better than a platform with tens of thousands of dollars and man-hours poure
817.
by jwells89 3y ago
In the case of Windows, that consistency wasn’t ever really there at any point. DOS was the Wild West when it came to UI and much of that carried over to Windows — it wasn’t unusual to come across Windows programs that looked nothing like t
818.
by jwells89 3y ago
Talking about out-of-the-box configs (which are important because a lot of users run default or near-default), the argument that Linux DEs that ship with distros have a heavy bias towards the Win9X desktop paradigm holds up pretty well. The
819.
by jwells89 3y ago
Classic Mac OS all the way up through OS 9 handles 1-bit and grayscale displays quite well. I’ve thought for some time now that if one were build a System 7.5/Mac OS 8 laptop with an e-ink or high quality transflective display (like th
820.
by jwells89 3y ago
Long battery life isn’t so much about contiguous use as it is about not needing to think about charging as often and being able to not carry a laptop charger brick on excursions. It also lets you still have “normal” laptop life left over af
821.
by jwells89 3y ago
I think the expectation for battery life for most these days is closer to what can be found on e.g. M-series MacBooks or in the x86 world, HP Dragonfly and some ASUS Zenbooks, which range between 14 and 22 hours.
822.
by jwells89 3y ago
I’ve been hopeful for more keyboard options on Frameworks too. Ideally I’d like HHKB layout with trackpoint and accompanying trackpad module with three buttons at the top, but would be happy with only HHKB layout or only trackpoint.
823.
by jwells89 3y ago
For me the adjustability has been worth even though I don’t stand all that often, because it allows me to dial in the height of the desk in addition to chair height to make the setup perfectly suited to me. Addition of high quality desk cla
824.
by jwells89 3y ago
Yeah, I’m not averse to things like critical information being on a screen, but the software powering that screen needs to be ridiculously stable and well-built, which is unfortunately unlikely as long as big car companies continue to contr
825.
by jwells89 3y ago
> The only viable solution is an independent safety board (paid for out of Boeing profits) that supervises every aspect of design and production at Boeing and its contractors until Boeing learns how to build safe airplanes again. At this
826.
by jwells89 3y ago
It all depends on what one’s looking for I guess. As an aesthetically inclined technical person, seams can be annoying to the point of distraction if they’re not thoughtfully worked into the design (90% of the time, they’re not).
827.
by jwells89 3y ago
For me a big part of it is how gestures track, the curves used by animations, inertia, bounciness, etc. Under iOS it all feels refined and naturalistic, whereas Android’s counterparts land somewhere in the uncanny valley and come off as mor
828.
by jwells89 3y ago
My hope is that if third party stores and sideloading come to iOS, Apple greatly incentivizes devs somehow to leverage a new unified subscription control panel API to help keep subs all in one list even if you don’t subscribe through the ap
829.
by jwells89 3y ago
> People refer to toxic masculinity, a set of problematic behaviors some men exhibit as part of attempting to appear "manly" that includes traits such as: homophobia, glorifying unhealthy habits (e.g., drinking like a man, don&
830.
by jwells89 3y ago
Not entirely sure about Obj-C version. Disagree regarding frameworks, though. The newer snapshot-based APIs for NSTableView, NSOutlineView, and NSCollectionView (added in 2020 as part of macOS 11) are a massive improvement over the old inde
831.
by jwells89 3y ago
> They also multiply the number of potential customers, so I don’t see that being a problem. This is something I believe requires some research, because each platform is a bit of a different market. Point in case, the market for Magnet e
832.
by jwells89 3y ago
My guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.
833.
by jwells89 3y ago
Part of this is that it’s only been recently that mobile OSes have started to approach a similar level of maturity as their desktop counterparts, while also introducing and developing new concepts that desktop OSes never had (like permissio
834.
by jwells89 3y ago
How demanding/complex upkeep is may be a big factor here. For something like a single platform utility, the burden is relatively low because the number of things that can break is bounded (as long as public APIs are used, private API u
835.
by jwells89 3y ago
I know what you mean. Would love to just have AppKit/UIKit with some platform integrations (e.g. correct widget themes) on other platforms. Closest that exists to that is GNUStep, but it’s stuck on an old version of Objective-C (no S
836.
by jwells89 3y ago
Vastly better hardware and software support too by virtue of being x86. Preferred flavor of *nix, Windows, Haiku, whatever, as well as the possibility of virtualization of any of the above. Not to knock ARM SBCs — ARM is great and I think h
837.
by jwells89 3y ago
ML generalization and human abstraction are very different beasts. For example, a human artist would have an understanding of how line weight factors into stylization and why it looks the way it does and be able to accurately apply these
838.
by jwells89 3y ago
Imitation isn’t the problem so much as it is that ML generated images are composed of a mush of the images it was trained on. A human artist can abstract the concepts underpinning a style and mimic it by drawing all-new lineart, coloration,
839.
by jwells89 3y ago
The way these ML models and humans operate are indeed quite different. Humans work by abstracting concepts in what they see, even when looking at the work of others. Even individuals with photographic memories mentally abstract things like
840.
by jwells89 3y ago
I would say that the problem is larger than that, with how Spotify worked to close up and monetize a historically free and open medium (podcasts) and aggressively pushed their new business to users who were only interested in music. The way

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