Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

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Some things one agrees with and some that sound like typical non-programmer (and sadly, some-programmer) lists.

E.g "Return Apple to its roots with minimalism - does a photo manager have to be 707 MB?"

Yes it has. People think the binary is "bloated", while in actuality it's mostly templates for photo books and such, that doesn't get loaded or impact performance at all if you don't use them.

>Unix package manager - basically an official version of Homebrew/Macports/Fink.

And what good would that do? Do you really want to wait for Apple to release new versions of third party programs?

>Replace AppKit with UIKit.

Does not even make sense.

>[re: iTunes] Apple, this needs to stop. Even if the segregation of all of these components into separate, modern apps was the only new feature in 10.9, I would gladly pay my money and walk away a satisfied customer.

Really? People keep saying that, to sound smart (in how they condemn "bloat"), but I think it's wrong. You know what is worse than using one app to handle 15 tasks related to your media/app collection? Using 15 apps to do the same. How would that work? At best they can break it down to 2-3 apps --which you would still have to use every time you want to sync your phone.

>We all know the Mac needs a new, modern file system to ditch the ancient HFS/HFS+.

I for one do not know that. What's the problem with HFS+ again? I mean the actual problem that matters for the common user and that ZFS is supposed to solve in a desktop/laptop machine.

Does this guy even know how ZFS works? In a space constrained SSD disk it would be a disaster. And managing logical volumes and consistency with 1-2 drives is not exactly it's core strength. It's design is all about the enterprise and the server space.

Myself being somewhat of a minimalist, I don't really like the idea of the application shipping with its own set of music and other graphic assets i'll never make use of. But I do recognise it's hard to strike a balance between leaving enough of this content in and removing it simply for the sake of storage reductions.

There's a reason I included the idea of a package manager in 'Crazy Pipe Dreams' - I'm not at all thinking this would happen, and you raise a valid point about Apple being the one to co-ordinate releasing the programs.

Have you had any experience with Mac development? UIKit is far more pleasurable and easier to work with than AppKit IMO - I was simply meaning trying to introduce more framework consistency between platforms, hopefully resulting in apps being far easier to be ported to and from each platform.

I didn't say ZFS should replace HFS+, simply noting that Apple promised inclusion of it in Snow Leopard. Although things like snapshots would be a welcome addition to some power users, but I am well aware that ZFS & OS X won't ever really happen.

> People think the binary is "bloated", while in actuality it's mostly templates for photo books and such, that doesn't get loaded or impact performance at all if you don't use them.

A huge hunk of it is in databases for the location features, too.

> "You know what is worse than using one app to handle 15 tasks related to your media/app collection? Using 15 apps to do the same."

Funny, it works out just fine from the iOS side. And that's even when I consider additionally managing podcasts in downcast, comics in comixology and reference PDFs in goodreader.

Because you don't manage them there, you mostly consume them, and one at a time at that. In any case, you do it at your leisure, while delving into them. Consuming them, and mostly one at a time is the main reason for having the iPhone/iPad.

On the contrary, when you want to sync/manage/backup your collections from your desktop to your iDevices, it would feel like madness to have to use 15 or even 8 different apps. You want to be able to backup/sync everything with 1-2 clicks, drag new songs (and maybe some movies), etc.

There's nothing that says an iTunes rewrite would necessitate opening X programs to sync content. It's trivial to envision an architecture where a sync service is aware of and can pull from those X repositories.

In fact, iTunes already works like that with regards to contact sync'ing (from Mail) and the optional iPhoto/Aperture photo sync'ing.

And the only time someone need open those individual apps is when they want to consume or manage that content.

I agree that so many apps would be overkill, but I literally only use iTunes for 1 thing: to add comics to my iPad. The process of doing so is ridiculous in its complexity and lagginess. If they simply let me add files to an iPad via Finder it would make the process 100x easier than it currently is.

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