The beauty of these services is that I can toss a couple bucks a month to projects that I use. I don't want my name in credits, I don't want a dinner with the author, I don't want sneak preview access to whatever. I just want an easy way to support something that brings me value.
This is the last straw for me as well. I only used Google for search and never had an account anyway, so it's not even a hassle. Their results are slightly better than DuckDuckGo, but I'll take the productivity hit.
This is openly hostile to the foundation of the web. They aren't even bothering to pretend anymore.
Javascript required for text rendering is incredibly poor design. For those of us with limited connections, I turn off Javascript because I don't want to download 10MB of Javascript ad tech and frameworks. This is expensive and takes forever to load on satellite and rural connections.
Good design takes these basic common issues into account.
We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc…
This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity.
Beware: don't share dot files with the Files app. I tried to sync a git directory and now my Files app is filled with several hundred git object files (bf13ee59588b878f1d780c5cc8cd2e3410eaba, etc) that cannot be selected, moved, or deleted because they allegedly "do not exist" according to the error dialog.
That sucks. Do you know of any way to fix it, other than backing up the data in each app separately using means other than iTunes/iCloud backup, and then restoring the iPad to factory state, which would take hours?
What did you use to sync? I've been able to sync Git repositories in GoodReader and Working Copy, but I have found the Files app's SMB support, and integration with apps like Secure Shellfish, to be buggy and unreliable.
The device needs a factory reset. Deleting the Files app itself does nothing, even though this warns you that all associated data will be deleted. Which is unsurprising at this point. The latest OS updates feel like I'm a beta tester for Windows ME.
I had the equivalent model of these about ten years ago, no complaints. IEMs will have better sound quality than regular headphones. There was more cord noise, from what I remember, probably because they make everything else quieter so it's more noticeable.
On a side note, I didn't like the AirPods at all, and returned them. The sound quality is worse than the default iPhone corded earbuds, and they were frustrating if you wanted to frequently switch pairings between a phone and computer (like getting an incoming call and the bluetooth pairing takes 10-15 seconds to change over).
It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option.
I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services.
All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it.
If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.
That is definitely the most frustrating thing about all of this over the past few years. Even with a customised Windows 10 to get rid of the nonsense nobody wants and adding what is missing to even work on the damn thing it's still not as 'least worse' as macOS. It's almost like all commercial OS development moved towards STB's and mobile and nobody gives a crap anymore.
I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours.
Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable.
Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do.
Yes. Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time!
I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed).
Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!
What makes the MacOS UI so much better than say Gnome or Enlightenment? I personally can't stand most of the Mac UI experience, however, I am very curious what you (and others) love about it that cannot be replicated on a different OS?
I get it, for some people it doesn’t matter. There is zero difference between xfce (Gnome, Windows, etc) and MacOS.
But for some people, they have used MacOS since OS X 1.0 (or for me, System 7) and there is a particular "Mac" way of doing things. There are expectations and standards for how the system and user interface should work and respond.
Perhaps you could attribute this to baby duck syndrome. You could also attribute it to people having different mental models for the world, there are clean desks and messy desks, different cataloging systems. There is something for everybody. For people who like Macs, everything else seems like a clumsy intolerable mess.
There are themes and hacks to make systems "look" like MacOS, but they fall short of even remotely functioning like it.
Font rendering for one. It's really nice. IME, text quality on a Linux desktop varies even between applications, depending on what toolkit they happen to be using.
That might be true, some apps just don't follow standards well (on MacOS too btw, there are old and ugly UIs from third-party vendors all over the place).
But when you're living between a terminal, editor and browser, and fonts are perfect on these 3 (or whatever else you use)... it's hard to justify using a lesser and more expensive platform, just to correct the 1% of the time some app doesn't look great.
In fact, if we speak 'consistency' in a functional way — not disturbing the user's "flow" while working — I'd argue that bad or extremely limited UX the likes of Windows and now sadly MacOS too (by comparison, and because it got worse in the last five years) is a much bigger problem than font rendering, for most workflows.
Case in point if you really care you can fix font rendering for pretty much every app (and select aliasing parameters like strength and RGB ordering to conform to your external displays panel type and pixels 'pitch'; whereas MacOS or Windows will be hit-or-miss with some models and you just can't help it). Haven't needed to on Ubuntu or Fedora, but I know as of 2017 Arch let you apply general font rendering settings over GTK and Qt, and you can use terminals like urxvt to fully control such things.
I think MacOS fails very badly at basic window and file management. Finder is still broken. Not being able to preview an open application by hovering on its icon (as in Windows) is a big productivity bottleneck. Minimizing/maximizing is plain confusing - why does the window sometimes take up the whole screen and sometimes only fill up 1/2 the real estate?
SMS has always been unreliable. It has no place in modern communications.
No delivery confirmation: messages silently drop and the recipient is unaware you attempted to message them. There is no notification to you that your message failed to deliver.
Profoundly long delivery delays: messages sometimes get stuck and get delivered hours or days later. "Hey dude meet me out front" delivered 16 hours later, etc.
Length restrictions: some phones still do not handle long messages correctly. If the character limit is exceeded, messages are cut into unordered pieces, or the message is truncated and part of the message is simply deleted.
I'm not saying RCS is the answer, just pointing out that SMS is garbage.
Maybe some hardware/carrier configurations have less problems?
All I can say is, in the past 15+ years of SMS messaging, in the US, on every carrier, with devices ranging from the early Nokias to the latest iPhones, I have had reliability problems that are frequent enough for me to avoid SMS when possible.
It failed for over a month for me, but only in one direction, and I didn't know. Other party thought I was ignoring them. Lack of confirmation makes it 'worse than useless' in the failure case
For a markdown editor? I see most Patreons with tiers around $3/$5/$20, and those are actually complex/ambitious.