alexdbird

Curiously, the iOS filesystem is case-sensitive. A bit of a trap for developers on macOS. I’d expect plenty of third-party stuff to break switching the system drive to case-sensitive.

On the other hand, they’re great for classic TV and academy ratio films.

And yet people have been impressed by my bespoke toaster

I've always wondered if this was the secret motivation behind it. I hated this bit of design when I switched from a smooth edged Thinkpad ~15 years ago. But I changed my typing posture for the better and it became a non-issue.

> to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other

I'd expand on this: used well, they show the user than a state change is happening directly because of a particular action of theirs, and hint at how they might reverse or modify it.

In fact I'd disagree with masking. If something appeared instantly with no hint as to why, that is a distinct anti-pattern on a touch screen.

You can't deny it, mass is much more stylish in Latin ;)

My experience studying 'Computing and Electronics' - a combined degree - was that we could get practically any extensions or leniency we wanted by blaming the other specialism. To each the other was mistrusted and magic.

My work laptop is M3 and it needs to be because the security crapware makes some things literally 10x slower. Meanwhile my personal M1 is more than adequate for normal work.

This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.

Definitely don't make it too shallow either. People are forever jamming oversize books in ours and damaging the doors/hinges/catch.

In fact, the real crime of the Magic Mouse is how awkward it is to switch it between machines.

It's called the Action icon, a generalisation of its original Share meaning. It's used throughout the Apple ecosystem so knowing that's where actions live is not a big expectation.

You've mangled the steps. You only press one Action icon in this sequence, then you select Print, then you need to select the printer and any other options, then you tap Print. Which of these steps do you think 'abstruse'?

Are you suggesting they should use a little icon of a printer, peripheral that takes many wildly different forms, instead of the word Print?

Honestly, as a user of the mouse, I think the main reason people talk about the mouse is bike shedding. Charging isn't a problem in actual use, but everyone sure has an opinion on it.

There are plenty of contenders for 'worst ideas they ever had' and this just isn't up there.

I personally like the status quo that PNGs don't encode orientation. I can dump PNGs when I'm debugging and I know I'm looking at the bits the same way up as the code is!

> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.

Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.

Not having to think about it is just a nice little win every time. Abort is really very different from copy.

Indeed they do, as they did 25 years, in OS 9.

And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.

Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there!

I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bastardised.

I insisted on a full size Mac keyboard for nearly a decade afterwards. Then I realised that, barring the niceness of full height cursor keys, it was a useless appendix that meant I had to move my hand ~8 inches more every single time I needed the mouse/trackpad.

> reduced key availability

Genuine question, what do you think is missing?

I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.

I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.

I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.

When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.

Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.

What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.

[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]

We had dozens of 2013 MBP with discrete GPU mux where I worked. I bought one afterwards and used it until the M1 laptops came out, for pretty much everything you can use a laptop for. Never had or saw this problem in any of them, FWIW!

This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol.

The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't.

Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.

We are all vulnerable at some point. I'd even go as far as saying we all fall for something at some point. Even if it's something small the psychological effect can be large, and there can be a lot of shame, so many do not share their experience.

To be fair, we had a keyboard setup like that at school in the nineties. I can’t remember using it more than a handful of times though.

I had a couple of these over the years. I ended up using specialist graphics cards to use them with a PC. The crude scaling built into the cards made old PC games and NES games gloriously blocky, on top of the gorgeous colours and blacks.

Yup. I worked for a media company that made IP part of the access token for media playback. An absolute PITA for the mobile app, and made (reliable) background downloads impossible on iOS. A bad idea. They went out of business.

The sensor was only needed to park spinning disks when the laptop was in free fall. Without the spinning disks they no longer fitted the sensor.

We have ones made by Lexon. A non-radio-controlled version of this: https://lexon-design.com/en/product/flip-plus/

It's a nice concept, though the execution isn't perfect. The biggest flaw, which may have been fixed since, is that the power supply decoupling isn't good enough, such that when the batteries get low and the alarm tries to make a noise, the clock detects it as a touch, which instantly snoozes the alarm. We haven't had it since the original batteries though, which were ironically the ones Lexon supplied.

N.B. These are only just big enough to put a glass of water on top, and it might not play well with the touch sensitivity.

I often save things as PDF. The 'export as PDF' option in Safari creates a long PDF that I find much better for reference on screen than 'printing' to PDF.

But the big flaw in this, especially for saving programming related pages, is that it loses the parts of scrollable content which is not currently in view, e.g. the ends of lines in a code block.

Those will still have a ceramic resonator in them, as they’re cheaper than a quartz crystal. Hard to imagine them being audible, but not impossible.