@smokey Pretty much.
@pkra Ah, yeah, of course. Indeed.
Although Kindle's scrolling view is pretty solidly broken as implemented because it doesn't show a scrollbar under any circumstances. So it isn't something I can use even though I'm a fan of scrolled reading.
@pkra Personally, I think this only applies to scrolling text. If you're paginating, you should probably still be using first line indents. IMO.
@Aleen She's great!
@pkra Please do 😁
@vasta 🤞🏻
@eli Sounds like there is very little Web Mention spam happening at all.
@johnjohnston Thats' interesting to hear.
@tomasino And considering how 'effective' Daredevil is he's crippled at least a few people for life
@tomasino It is indeed.
@eli Yeah, definitely. Perhaps not coincidentally, my impression of the CSS WG in the W3C is that they are one of the least dysfunctional standardisation group around.
@kaa I also find text selection to be a huge pain even with keyboard shortcuts. I'd really like some level of support for an external pointer (like a trackpad) even if it were just for text selection.
@jonesbp Yeah, same!
@publius Now I'm wondering how much of SpaceX's success is just that Elon Musk got lucky and hired the right people (like Tom Mueller) at the start. And how many of the problems with his other endeavours are because he didn't get lucky with the founding employees?
@baldur Apple has put itself in an impossible position. It clearly sees (as MS and Google have already) that multi-paradigm apps, designed for both touch and pointer, are an economics-driven inevitability.
How it deals with that inevitability over the next few years will tell us a lot about how much it has changed since Steve Jobs' passing. Old Apple, when forced to do something like switch to Intel, didn't coast it but committed to the new paradigm and tried to become the best.
They not only made the best Intel laptops available but they made the best Windows laptops with Apple-provided dual-booting and drivers. If, as seems inevitable, apps that support both touch and pointer are the future of macOS & iOS, that should be mirrored in the OSes themselves.
iOS should be updated to support indirect pointers and macOS should be updated to support touch. And, before you point out that no OS that supports both does it well, consider that Apple doesn't have the liabilities that hold back MS's and Google's efforts.
MS's culture heavily prioritises backwards compatibility. Google is just plain bad at designing software interfaces (and I say this as a heavy Google ecosystem user). Do you really believe that Apple can't do better?.
The only real question is whether the new Apple is capable of the same paradigm shifts as the old. Steve Jobs was often described as mercurial and his Apple exhibited the flexibility that implied. I worry that Tim Cook's Apple has lost that capability.
@smokey Or, the developer took over an old app that was out of date and using old tools at the time.
Or, this was a hastily written HN comment and they meant to write 30 where they wrote 20.
@publius That sounds really cool. And it makes a lot of sense once you explain it like that.
@publius Even if you put aside the Space Shuttle argument, the economics are still completely unproven. Maybe it'll work out (if so, great) but success is far from being a certainty.
@tmj They do tend to think pretty far ahead. For all their faults, Apple definitely isn't reactionary and tend to think things through properly. The only question, really, is whether their priorities are still lining up with that of pro Mac users.
@JohnPhilpin Yes. Exactly. Constant outcome measurement often leads to what are effectively nothing more than superstitions.
@Alonealastalovedalongthe That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought to draw a line between this and Christopher Alexander's ideas.
@tmj Bringing over iOS apps to macOS hastens the demise of native apps as writing one app for both iOS and macOS will be much more compelling for Swift/Objective-C devs than just making a macOS app.
OTOH, if they wanted to react to Electron in a way that improved macOS as a desktop OS, they could have adopted a two-pronged strategy:
- Build a Electron-a-like for macOS out of WebKit and node that performs better, has improved accessibility, uses the built-in WebView, and has more hooks for native macOS behaviour.
- Improve Electron to have better accessibility and more native features.
Bringing iOS apps to macOS is only the right response to Electron if your primary focus is iOS and macOS is only a secondary concern.
(IMHO, and all that.)
@tmj It seems possible, though, that Marzipan apps will crowd native apps out even further and feel just about as native on macOS as Electron.
@paulcraig901 Same. It's kind of interesting, actually.
@paulcraig901 Yeah, took me by surprise as well.