stormbeta

And yet my Android apps have often stayed working long past when they stopped being supported, and rarely seem to suffer from the quantity of layout problems iOS does since Android has always had to deal with devices of variable sizes and ratios.

I'll grant the low end of Android apps is probably much worse than the low end of iOS apps, but I generally don't use those apps in the first place.

That's not actually an argument against saying the notch was a bad design decision. Just because people can tolerate it in order to get access to an iPhone with an OLED screen (or other X features) doesn't make it a feature that users see as a positive.

I've never seen anyone say they like the notch, only tolerate / ignore it.

Agreed. Many of the issues with Apple's software quality lately are fundamentals, not issues of scale. Stuff like this, the root password bug, the many issues with reliability in High Sierra, etc.

These things speak to organizational issues.

I think you have it backwards - this thread is full of people making excuses for Damore.

And yes, I've read it. Just because he wrote some sentences that claimed he's in favor of diversity doesn't magically change the content of the rest of the memo.

If he was truly arguing in good faith, he should've stuck to actual, demonstrable examples of issues or problems caused by the existing diversity practices. There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic:

> "Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.

The Terra Ignota series (Too Like the Lightning / Seven Surrenders, and Will to Battle which came out last year).

Not only is it very different in tone/style from most traditional SF I've read, it also doesn't restrict itself to just tech/physical science - it explores social and political science what-ifs too.

I'd be hard pressed to name any other book I've read in the last year (or more) that's had me pause so often just to think on the ideas presented.

I don't even understand what they're using all that money for. The recent site and app redesigns have been a huge downgrade in overall UX (to the point I uninstalled the app as nearly unusable), and the site is just as slow and buggy as it's ever been (except now it's hard to navigate to boot).

>Seems like a bad business move to me. The hard problem here was making micro-donations cost-effective, not creating a website where creators could host links to content.

Exactly - this undermines the entire point of Patreon's existence in the first place.

I've already removed most of my low dollar pledges, and will be watching the people I follow to see if they move to alternate platforms or have a direct donation link I can use.

I think it only matters for very large trees. I didn't notice much difference personally.

Yep - there's no obvious way to tell what accessories will work together anymore.

My Switch is another great example. It won't even charge with some of my adapters, and I had to get a C -> HDMI splitter that was designed specifically for the Switch, despite the fact that Nintendo isn't even using any proprietary protocols (just less common ones).

I refuse to work with people which such fragile egos, but I agree on the architecture.

Having a lot of individual pieces that connect using simple, straightforward interfaces is much more flexible and maintainable in the long run - it's the same reasoning that draws people to microservices.

Anyone who's even remotely surprised by this hasn't been paying attention. Thiel's politics are disgusting.

The closest thing I've seen that seem likes a real replacement is Bazel, but I haven't tried using it for anything but a couple toy projects yet. The concepts seem solid though, as expected from Google.

My main complaint about make is that relying on timestamps, while fast, is error-prone and doesn't work with idempotent commands that might refresh the timestamp without altering content.

Which I've always found hilarious since most forms of income make use of tax-paid services.

Agreed. Modern phones are so fragile as to make cases mandatory for anyone that doesn't just sit around all day, and bezel-less designs make it even worse while adding zero practical value.

You'd probably enjoy Greg Egan's work then.

I wish Google would make up their minds.

They kept pushing Hangouts, and right when it was actually somewhat usable and represented a unified interface to messaging, they started abandoning it and trying to fragment the functionality off into separate apps again.

I'll continue to use GV, but Google's track record of confusing moves in this space guarantees I will always keep it as a separate number. It's still very useful like that, since it allows me to text and call from any device or service.

Ditto. The idea of doing any kind of professional work in a shell via an iOS device doesn't make sense to me at all, and making the shell fancier wouldn't help.

Sure. But nobody who paid attention to how Trump has done business in the past actually believed a word of it. And now we're being proven right.

Not really. I stay with Dropbox because, as others have said, it just works, and it does so across pretty much every major platform, both desktop and mobile. Cloud storage is their core product, and it shows. And the pricing really isn't that different from other similar solutions from what I've seen.

The few times I tried to use Drive, it was considerably more hassle to work with (and slow), iCloud was right out because it's Apple-platforms only, and my experiences with OneNote's sync issues makes me wary of trying OneDrive. Haven't looked at Box since I was under the impression it was aimed at businesses/enterprise more than individuals.

Agreed. I tried iOS for six months this summer, and I found the overall UX very disappointing compared to modern Android at this point.

Some things are still better - unified music controls, backups, and night shift especially. And the hardware/firmware is undeniably fantastic.

But Apple's emphasis on poor contrast and lack of differentiation within the UI really hurts usability, and there's still a lot of unexpected behaviors, such as links opening with a web page telling me to install an app I already have.

Going to back to only having two real notification modes - noisy or silent - felt like a major step backwards as well.

But worst of all was the lack of consistency between apps. I get that some people think MD on Android leads to apps feeling too similar, but I prefer that. My phone isn't a piece of art, it's a functional communication device. I want my apps to use the same, practical design language that gets to the point and doesn't get in the way by trying to be "different".

Because it works, it works reliably, and it does so on all of my devices. That isn't the case with most of the competition that I've seen or tried.

I find the interface (both local and web) to be much nicer with DropBox as well, especially over things like Drive.

The price differences are relatively small, and I have no use for the Office suite.

Agreed - this kind of integration is part of what I like about Dropbox. I understand the original poster is upset the option didn't work, but he's also opted into the beta releases - is not finding issues like that kind of the point?

Even as someone who uses bluetooth headphones 100% of the time, I'm still pretty unhappy with this as they don't even support the industry standard for high quality bluetooth audio: apt-x (or if they did, I must've missed it somehow).

I spent several months with an iPhone 6 earlier this year, and I came down with the opposite view.

I found Apple's flat UI design to be very awkward, especially things like the decision to use text labels with hidden bounding boxes as "buttons".

Apps tended to have inconsistent UI language, and I frequently found myself surprised by UI interactions that weren't discoverable, like the speed setting in Pocket Casts. It was a flat element - if you tapped it, it would toggle between preset values, but if you long-pressed it, it would pop up a weird slider. But there's no feedback from the UI.

On Android, I find that UI elements are much more likely to provide visual feedback - tapping elements produces an animation, long-pressable elements show proggessive animation, etc. For example, the Pocket Casts app on Android's speed setting actively animates when touched, and pulls up a standard settings dialog with intuitive sliders and checkboxes.

And I can't tell you how many times I would attempt to open an app link only to have it open in a web browser with a giant banner telling me to install the app I already have.

I've switched entirely to Bluetooth headphones, but I'm with you - there are plenty of downsides to wireless headsets even with lossless audio protocols like aptx. And water resistance is still possible - my Z5C can be used in pouring rain and it still has a 3.5mm jack.

I'm also worried about the potential for consumer-hostile DRM on audio playback, especially since it looks like they're introducing their own proprietary wireless protocol.

Between the volatile battery life and Android OEMs almost entirely abandoning the non-phablet market, I'm about ready to move to iOS as well.

I still think Android's UX blows iOS out of the water these days, but the best UX in the world doesn't help me if the phone is dead, or too big to use one-handed on the go.

True, but there's a real problem with people and places using lights with far too high a temperature, and even when shopping for home LED lights it's surprisingly difficult to find low temperature lights that aren't low on lumens output.

Pretty much anything over 3000K looks horribly blue at night, and if it wasn't such a massive pain to find them I'd prefer <2000K.

While I definitely still have issues with Bluetooth keyboards and mice, I have three pairs of bluetooth headphones (two of which are BT4, one is BT3) and they work great.

The only real problem is switching between devices is still much more annoying than it should be (I ought to be able to just select the device from the drop-down on the desired device).

Colorado.

I'm still lost. Maybe I just have radically different friends than everyone else here, but if I really have some pressing need to know what they're doing on a given day, I just ask them. Nobody cares about the day-to-day minutia, and if it was interesting, stuff like FB or regular messages work just fine.

Like most social media apps, this just feels like a solution in search of a problem (except for sexting).