makecheck

Anecdotally I have found businesses are miraculously efficient at things that benefit them (signing up for things, transferring money into banks, making payments) and need “extra time” for anything that is a problem for them in any way (processing “unsubscribe”, issuing refunds, transferring money from banks, cancelling accounts).

I feel like the only solution is a law that simply requires businesses to make it equally easy to do something as it is to undo it (especially for things like being able to “click here” to enroll but “on hold for 45 minutes” to cancel...give me a break). Some states are getting there.

Yeah I would pop entire keys off keyboards to avoid things like this. There was a Sun Microsystems keyboard with a huge Help button in the top-left corner too, which I had to pop off for my own sanity (otherwise every other time I tried to Escape my desktop would pause for a moment and then pop up the Help application window).

It really wasn’t, though; you could always hold down modifier keys like Option for really precise volume adjustments, for example. And since these keys can be found by feeling for them, it was a lot easier to just memorize how to tweak settings. I for one will never miss the Touch Bar.

Given all the other things Reddit does, it seems to me this could just be another part of the “ruin the web to push the app” strategy.

I think that makes sense. I am not in favor of a free-for-all on the implementation but I can definitely see the benefits of (say) having a bunch of anonymous crash logs telling you the things that users won’t, and such a thing should at least go through a reasonable 3rd party.

You don’t “owe” feedback but you should stay off Twitter/reviews/etc. if you haven’t at least tried to contact the developer first when there is a problem.

As I see it, your options are:

- Decide the software is not for you, for some reason, and silently uninstall it, or...

- Try to make the software better, working with the maintainer somehow (tell them what is wrong, contribute a fix or a bug report, etc.). People would be surprised how sometimes a fix is really simple but the use case may be really obscure, and it is literally just a matter of finding out that the problem exists.

My problem is that people seem to employ a “3rd option” of just deciding all by themselves that software must be poorly implemented and trash, and worthy of public scorn, because they can. If developers go long enough without any real feedback, while enduring negative “press”, you’d better believe they will at least consider something like a telemetry tracker to tell them what the heck is going on. At least that way, they can find these problems and actually fix them, to preserve their reputation.

Here is the problem I see:

1. Users enjoy product for free.

2. Users pretty much never tell maintainers what is going wrong for them: no messages (much less proper bug reports), no contributions in any way!

3. Something invariably goes wrong for users that do the above.

4. Users immediately hit social media and try to tar the entire project, developer/company reputation, whatever. “Zero stars”, doesn’t work in their use case. You have surely seen these “reviews” before, and mindless tweets.

THIS is why I am torn on telemetry to some degree. IF you demand no auto-feedback in the name of privacy, THEN you should help out voluntarily OR not use free software! Yet software maintainers can’t count on this at all. They risk being hanged in the public square for every bug.

Of course derivative works are being produced!! Whether you blame Copilot or the developer using it, the result is something that required the original developer of the code in order to be constructed.

Have we reached the point where every “class X” must become “class X_GPL2_CopyrightJohnQSmith_AllRightsReserved” in every code base out there? Do we need to go from header comments at the top of a file to reminder comments at the end of every line?

This is kind of how I felt when originally using Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.; sure they have dozens of “privacy settings” but (1) I did not really want to spend hours checking all the boxes a certain way, (2) they could change at any time, e.g. some awful new setting would invariably appear, naturally with an equally-awful default value (from the user’s point of view), and (3) there is no guarantee these things are coded correctly.

For (3), there’s a pretty good chance just from code rot that your “settings” may not always work. Certainly not if some company’s entire business model seems to depend on the more anti-consumer values for “settings”, you can bet they will not heavily invest in testing their accuracy.

And the real problem for privacy-related settings is that if they ever fail to protect you, even being buggy for just a short period of time, your information is then out there. Leaked. Gone. Even if you close the barn door, the animals have left. It is the type of software that has to be working 100% of the time to really protect data.

So I don’t really want privacy “settings”, I want privacy, period. That should be the default and only behavior, where the user has the only keys.

What I don’t understand about most sites that do this is how QUICKLY they reach the “fuck you” state. It’s like a few clicks, or a few seconds, or whatever — nowhere near long enough to get any idea what the site is about, what it offers, whether it is valuable, etc. Therefore, what exactly is gained here? I just get annoyed and immediately leave.

Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and then you are immediately blocked by 8 security guards and interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you stay in the store?

Whenever some “reason” is given to make a major foundational break from X to Y, it almost certainly does not apply to 90% of the things in the bundle. Various apps, system frameworks, etc. do not need to be held to the same minimums for hardware; they just are.

We need to push for more modularity in the systems that serve as a foundation. Or, at least push for open-source or flexibility in the things that are not strictly foundational (and theoretically much more portable), such as bundled apps.

Suppose for example there is a nice improvement to some bundled app in the next OS; in all likelihood, that change could be back-ported to several older versions and be usable on almost any hardware. It won’t be, because it is bundled to something that wants to break everything.

With both Mac and now Windows supporting these mobile-forced-to-desktop apps, I worry a bit about the poor UIs in our future.

On the one hand, maybe tablets will improve a bit because mobile apps will have even more incentive to spruce up their large-screen experiences.

On the other hand, literally every app I have seen auto-ported to desktop in this way has been awkward at best. Usually at least a few standard platform things just don’t work, like universal keyboard navigation. Having mobile UIs appear unaltered on the desktop is just jarring, at the very least requiring unnecessary scrolling and controls that do not resemble anything else.

And I am not convinced that this will improve with time; on the Mac side some of these pseudo-apps have had years to get better but they are still packed full of UI quirks.

What’s interesting to me is that “old.reddit.com” continues to work on mobile in these cases. They must have found that users really don’t know about the original site, or that not enough care.

Still, if “old.reddit.com” ever goes away I will be 100% cured of Reddit. It is literally unusable in any other way and it would not be worth the frustration.

Somewhere along the line, we really lost it in software.

A few decades ago I paid about $1000 for a one MEGABYTE memory upgrade, and even that was needed only because a single graphics application at that time could clearly benefit from the extra RAM to do more things.

Now? I have 32 GIGABYTES of RAM, and we are celebrating that a chat client has now managed to find a way to use a slightly less absurd amount of memory, and has graciously returned some of our massive computing resources to us? This app barely does anything!! The apps that require all that power should at least be more useful...right?

As far as I can tell, every person on the planet is using more battery power and upgrading their machines more often just to make up for the laziness of software companies. In exchange for the ability of software teams to “easily” write one obnoxious cross-platform beast, we all get to burn through our CPUs and memory. These companies have more than enough money to invest in writing software for different platforms using the heavily-optimized system frameworks on those platforms.

In general, you have to see signs that everything is moving ahead (if not, you should leave):

- Your project should be moving ahead (e.g. not being torpedoed by internal politics or underfunded or losing key people, etc.).

- Your larger group should be moving ahead (e.g. they have a clear multi-year purpose, they seem to be acquiring new people or new responsibilities, they are praised in quarterly company meetings, etc.).

- Your career should be moving ahead (e.g. annual reviews should actually make sense, promotions and raises should be occurring when you do well, company should not be making excuses beyond your control like “no bonus for you because somebody 5 teams away screwed up again this year”, etc.).

- Your direct manager(s) in your team must be good, and be acting in your interest. If they are not, you will be affected more quickly than you may think and you are better off getting out. They need to know and care what you work on. They need to believe they need you. Everything else stems from this (e.g. annual secret meetings to decide who to promote may depend on that one manager to understand what you do, and defend you when no one else will; if they can’t, you’re screwed).

I think the saddest thing about “flat” designs is that technology is incredibly capable of delivering so much more. Sure, in 1988 we only had a few colors available in hardware so maybe a button had no choice but to be one boring solid color. In 2021, though?!? Ultra-high resolutions, massive color palettes, photo-realism has never been easier to achieve (even in 3D!!!), all this computing power, and then these overpaid “designers” give us: boring square buttons with one color with unreadable contrast. We deserve so much better from modern UIs.

UIs should not be so plain and spartan that they are literally unusable sometimes. Every Single Button should look like a button, with way more detail than UI buttons have ever had before (why not have a ridiculous number of colors in gradients to make buttons truly beautiful?). When something is highlighted, I want it to be obvious and, again, beautiful (why not glow with photo-realistic lighting effects, for example, since we clearly have the ability and can spare the processing power?).

I remember going on vacation away from my computer and discovering my own app failing to launch after a few days. I guess I had tended to rebuild and reinstall it so often that I never saw their signing expire before.

It is pure crap that Apple has any ability to prevent you from running software you created and installed yourself.

Although the Mac OS X “Blue Box” was ugly for a time, the virtualization approach worked and it also created a clear incentive for app developers to get their software updated to run better outside of that constraint.

If this “backwards compatibility” is important, fine: provide that compatibility on an older OS running in a layer. Free up the main OS to finally evolve.

I know that it used to matter which side you plugged the cable into (right-top is better) but I thought that was fixed in some 11.x update.

I think it’s strange that browsers, routinely displaying responsive design layouts, have never tried this for their own window chrome.

They keep trying to shoehorn all screen sizes and space savings into one layout, when the web itself does a wiser thing: it adapts and makes better use of space if available.

The window-snap layout menu is neat but I wonder why snapping features always seem to prefer screen halves/quarters. It is always more useful to me to have something like 1/3 or 2/3 and I think it should be there.

Also, there just isn’t anything attractive to me about the space-wasting layout of Ribbon in Explorer windows and I hope there are plans to fix it. (It’s still there in these screenshots.) It is easily one of the lowest content-to-chrome ratios I have seen.

While I generally do not like subscriptions, surely “sync” falls into the category of “well of course that is a subscription”?

Someone must maintain a server indefinitely for you to sync whenever you want. That is a continuous cost that also has a scale factor, e.g. based on number of users. Without revenue proportional to that cost (e.g. per user), how can it be expected to remain functional?

There’s really no other way to get an experience like a private pool away from home, for example. The surroundings can often be much more peaceful too, e.g. a house may be in a quiet street and not in the middle of downtown.

I remember how one person spent just a little time and uncovered one scam after another. It wasn’t even necessary to dig deep in every case (e.g. sometimes it was just “look at top grossing charts”). That is why almost any excuse Apple gives is just not good enough: clearly if Apple had even one person working on this full-time, they should have caught this. Who cares about fancy analysis tools or machine learning until they can catch the big, obvious stuff?

We also know from trial documents that they decided ~500ish people was enough to review the millions of apps and app revisions in existence. I don’t even have to do the math and I know that is nowhere near sufficient. Apple clearly is either clueless about this, or does not care, and either one of those is a huge problem. It also means that almost everything they claim about the security of the App Store itself is not true (rather, a substantial portion of the security comes from the OS and device, not necessarily the review).

Even when open source is “attributed”, that is usually done in the laziest and bare-minimum way possible (like being buried multiple levels deep in some “Acknowledgements” item, that simply displays a 45 page text document with unzoomable and unsearchable text that casually lists the dozens of open source libraries used).

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who really will do the bare minimum and take everything they possibly can from projects and give absolutely nothing back.

> ... obviously free apps are subsidised by paid apps ...

If they were so concerned about getting paid, they could easily have an arrangement where companies like Facebook actually have to pay proportional to their use/benefit, aligning incentives. Instead, companies making billions per year pay just $99/year, while developers with a lot less are literally paying a lot more. Obviously, that affects the ability to compete. Worse, the App Store’s economy is so warped that pricing cannot actually reflect true development costs. If Apple wanted to cover infrastructure costs so badly, why would they allow the market to twist to the point where developers cannot reasonably charge higher prices (of which Apple gets a cut)?

> Do you seriously think that Apple wouldn't prefer a world without scam apps ...

One of the trial discoveries was an E-mail from Schiller showing that, while he seemed concerned about such apps reaching the top in 2013, eight YEARS ago, it is still happening (see Washington Post article from just today[1]). A trillion dollar company that is still making money from scams eight YEARS later is showing that it does NOT care about scams. In this case, actions matter, not just words. Scams are stealing money from people, and Apple pockets 30%.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27413934

Yep. It is not surprising at all that the term “insulting” appears three times because that’s how it feels for so many reasons.

Remember:

- They pretend with a straight face like it was somehow impossible to sell software or reach customers before their magical store made it happen.

- They pretend like the current “search” feature of the App Store is not a sad reduction of what it used to be (or what it could be if a trillion dollar company put any effort into it at all).

- They pretend to have all these problems hosting apps that are somehow solved by fees, while completely ignoring all the free apps that clearly tax that same infrastructure.

- They conveniently ignore the absurd amount of money they must be making from scams that are constantly top-grossing to add insult to injury.

I could go on but there are entire blogs written about this by now.

This is just one case of the chain of “logic” so many people seem to make with software, for some reason:

- I got your code for free

- I set up Really Important Things using it

- I have contributed nothing to you, for years now

- I have also invested nothing in maintaining my Really Important Things (e.g. it is no one’s job at the company)

- How dare you change anything!!

And on Big Sur, the old Firefox menus were still using edge-to-edge rectangular selection but the system ones now use rounded-rectangles that appear to detach from the edges.

Apple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device.

There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to start something I want (like a timer) and notice some time later that I somehow accidentally stopped the timer by hitting my watch on something.

As far as 3rd parties, I have seen a general trend of apps gradually withdrawing their support for watchOS. There just aren’t that many useful things to do on a small surface. For apps suited to this (timers, reminders, etc.) it is fine.