logbiscuitswave

My professional development work is primarily done with Visual Studio and C#, but I’ve been working on some projects in my downtime with Swift and SwiftUI. I’ve found them to be pretty delightful in many ways - frustrating in others.

Xcode, of course is a big wildcard. Often times I find myself spending more time just fighting with the IDE than getting any real work done. Maybe I’m just used to Visual Studio, but Xcode has some really baffling design decisions or omissions that never fail to confound me.

SwiftUI is really cool and it’s really simple to string together some pretty UX. I really like its approach to data binding and sharing. It makes it really easy to share models across many different views with minimal fuss. That being said, it still feels immature with its out of the box controls. Just the other day I found myself wanting a simple wrapping horizontal stack control only to find nothing like this was provided out of the box. Layout can also be really frustrating - getting things where I want them is often very fiddly.

Swift itself is also quite nice - although it’s evolving really, really fast and tutorials/howtos and such go stale really quickly. Swift can and will drop language feature at the drop of a hat. Just today I wanted to do a simple C++ style for loop only to find this was removed completely from the language.

I’m also perpetually frustrated by the terseness or incompleteness of Apple’s docs. I would prefer to read docs rather than watch hours of WWDC presentations just to understand how something works but that seems to be the best way to get this information.

A few years back my cable provider got in a tiff with the local CBS affiliate about programming fees.

Each side blamed the other and neither side was willing to compromise. The cable provider dropped the channel in retaliation and for some 2 years we had no CBS. (Naturally there was no discount in the monthly cable bill as a result of this “principled stand”.)

There’s plenty of video games that do this going back to 2003’s Karaoke Revolution - if not earlier. Plenty of other games and series followed suit including as Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Lips, SingStar. There’s plenty of mobile apps that work similarly. AFAIK they basically track your pitch and timing. I remember Lips in particular rewarding vibrato as well.

The algorithms as I understand them are grading you based on sustained pitch (adjusting for octave) and cadence. Generally they are easy to fool - you can basically say gibberish but as long as it’s within the expected parameters you’ll still get a good score.

They are still rather fun though if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Joel Spolsky did a pretty good job describing these problems back in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

This is a real problem, and the FCC will deny any anonymization requests (I know, I’ve tried). The fact you can easily get so much information about someone so easily from ULS makes me extremely wary about sharing my callsign anywhere like the internet. I can only imagine how much this must suck for vulnerable populations.

This is definitely somewhere that the FCC could stand to modernize. Clearly the FCC needs your contact information - but is it necessary to share your current address _and_ all address history with the world to anybody that asks for it?

Not holding my breath for any progress to be made here, though.

I had long been interested electronics, and the study required to get my ham license really expanded my education and knowledge in this area. I’m no EE or anything but I eventually learned enough to be competent with creating simple projects or following a schematic to build something on my own from scratch. I never moved past a lowly technician license (mainly because of a lack of time and interest around learning Morse code) but I still found it immensely rewarding.

The big barrier originally for really getting into the hobby was the cost of equipment. Even newer second hand equipment could cost hundreds of dollars. Now a barrier for me is HOA restrictions that prevent me from setting up antennas and not wanting to deal with interference complaints from my neighbors.

With how cheap radios are these days maybe it’s time to get a couple handhelds to mess with again.

I agree fully with this. Sadly it seems like entirely too much software these days has pivoted to the essentially useless “oops something went wrong” error messages.

At first I thought how neat it was to see this classic screensaver rendered in the browser. Then I realized I could fly through it too! Bravo.

I get huge nostalgia for riding the subways in Tokyo whenever I hear any JR East melodies.

While I don’t particularly like the structure of the FAQ (one page per item is definitely tedious to read through - I wish it came in a PDF or scrollable form) this is a goldmine of succinct and zero frills information. I learned a few things.

It’s pretty shadowy for sure.

There’s basically no information on the web site about the company, how they operate, who finances them, what their privacy policy is, or even how to contact them. Their “blog” is an anonymous Tumblr site.

I also remember those dark days of having to use those temperamental and brittle email forms. I also remember how the turn around time was measured in days. Better hope you didn’t make any mistakes!

I remember back when you could store DDR scores on PlayStation memory cards.

Apple cables are pretty notorious for having inadequate strain relief which leads to fraying and cable failure.

It’s a shame that for all the brilliant design within the power supplies that it can get sabotaged by this very Apple-like tendency to push aesthetics (I can just imagine Jobs or Ive demanding this) above all else.

This was one of the first posts by Ken that I saw and it got me hooked.

He does such a great job at making tear downs like this interesting and accessible.

He has a great companion article with a cheapo charger for comparison: http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and... and a comparison of an Apple MacBook charger and a knock-off: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr...

Really fascinating stuff.

I’ve requested old domains of mine to get removed from archive.org and at least as of a few years ago it was an all or nothing thing. There was no surgical way to say “only remove content from between 1995 and 2005 when I owned the domain”. Maybe things have changed since then, though.

> Worse, though, Big Sur hides the (X) until you mouse over the literal bounds of the banner - not even the area where the hidden (X) will appear is initially valid.

I so intensely hate this design trend of hiding UI elements until you move the mouse cursor into a “magic” area that makes them appear. I work a lot with tools and websites that do this and it’s simply maddening.

> Now, I'm sure many of you will agree, VS Code suffers from a bit of what we call "Notification Fatigue"

Yup.

I love VS Code but the sheer amount of chatty notifications especially when browsing a large code base can be simply overwhelming. I just start reflexively ignoring them. There’s no “just shut up already and let me work” button.

I’m glad this is something they are working on improving.

I vividly remember the Sprint ads I would see on TV as a kid where they claimed their voice quality was so good that you could hear a pin drop. Their phone number was even “1-800-PIN-DROP”.

> The sound quality is surprisingly good. Now I understand why people were complaining when they moved from AMPS to the first generation of GSM — the FM with 12 KHz modulation works actually well.

I remember this. When digital voice became commonplace a frequent complaint was how people sounded like they were underwater from the compression. I don’t think it was until VoLTE became a thing that I can recall a really big increase in voice quality since the move to digital voice.

Some of those death chimes were pretty ominous! Depending on the model, there there a few different dirges, breaking glass, car crashes, and others. You knew you were in for a bad time.

https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me.

I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

Another +1. These can be great ways to learn new languages. The later stages can be quite difficult but there’s so many years worth of challenges to mine from I can guarantee you won’t get bored even with the more basic problems.

If you get stuck on a solution chances are someone else has already solved it in your language of choice which can also be great for learning.

> It seems as if the people in the design team are all working exclusively on 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Displays.

Makes me think of the complaints in video game text over the past few years and how it had become so small as to be nearly unreadable on normal TVs at normal viewing distances. The natural assumption here is that the game devs were doing all their work inches away from large fancy monitors not thinking of the so-called 10’ experience most people use to consume the content.

At least many console games now have text size sliders (with varying levels of usefulness).

https://kotaku.com/the-year-in-tiny-video-game-text-2019-184...

Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications.

Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off.

For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)

> Early stereo records often had rather drastic left/right panning (eg. some Beatles stuff) or had to hedge their bets in case they were played back through eg. mono radios/badly set-up stereos and so on…

Many early stereo mixes were so bad because the stereo mix literally just put half the channels into L and the other half into R. For Beatles’ stereo mixes you would lose basically half the song by changing the balance full L or R. This was the case for many other early mono to stereo masters. Capitol Records’ Duphonic process also added a slight delay between the two channels to give a feeling of depth. It almost certainly didn’t reflect what the original producers or engineers would have ever intended.

For many classic albums that got this “fake stereo” treatment if you were lucky you would eventually end up with a proper stereo remaster done decades later. For example, hearing the original the properly remastered stereo version of Pet Sounds released in 1997 is a drastic improvement over the Duophonic stereo mix from 1966.

The link rot in MS documentation pages is simply maddening. If it’s not a 404, it’s completely different content that is only relevant to v.latest.

Just the other day I was trying to look up a behavior specific to an older version of Windows and the content was completely replaced with content only relevant to Windows 10 (and there was no real parity here to what I needed). I had to go to archive.org to find the information I was looking for from that page.

When I can actually find the docs I need, they are usually great but all too often just finding that content is frustratingly difficult.

I’ve worked several jobs in the past where using reciprocal OSS (such as GPL) was expressly forbidden. This would leave us in the position of reinventing the wheel, buying something, or using something (possibly inferior) that’s more permissive.

(I guess in many ways this is a data point to support the “OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech companies” thesis up thread.)

There have been plenty of articles and stories from insiders about the creation of the iPhone, iPod, and other important Apple products. I’ve seen many in Wired and other tech publications. They may not have the same candor and charm of a folklore.org posting, but they are fascinating all the same.

It’s wonderful that Hertzfeld et al are willing share so much great technical and personal information about their time in that Apple era. This is the kind of stuff that people like us who read sites like this love.

I fear that similar stories of the modern era will be forever buried under the threat of lawsuits from violating NDAs and that’s a real shame. Stories like this need to be told.

As I read this article I’m reminded of the failed WinFS project that was set to launch with Longhorn (which of course became Vista). It was meant to replace the classic notion of working with named files with a seamless relational database of metadata. It was supposed to be a signature feature of Longhorn but it was likely way too ambitious for its time and was eventually cut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS